How to Use Personalization in Lead Generation
In today’s crowded and fast-paced B2B digital marketing landscape, your business needs personalization in lead generation. Personalization allows you to reach the right target buyers at the right time in their purchase journeys, and it ensures the content and messages you share grab their attention and resonate with their needs.
But with personalization quickly becoming table-stakes in most B2B marketing strategies, how can you make your efforts stand out?
In this article, we’ll go step-by-step through the process for implementing personalized lead generation in ways that are meaningful and impactful for your potential customers. By following the strategies covered in the sections that follow, you’ll be better prepared to stay on the pulse of customer needs and preferences, deliver lead-gen outreach that resonates, and reliably convert leads to drive growth.
Quick Takeaways:
- Three-quarters of buyers now expect personalization in brand interactions and become disappointed when they don’t find it.
- Not all leads are the same. Audience segmentation allows you to deliver content and messages that are relevant and engaging to each specific audience segment you serve.
- Data is the key to unlocking sophisticated insights about your audiences so you can optimize their experience and continually refine your strategies.
- Remarketing creates additional opportunities to drive leads back to your website by delivering ads aligned with their previous browsing behaviors.
- ABM personalization tactics can now be executed at several levels and by any company.
Why is Personalization so Important to Lead Generation?
Customers want personalization at every stage of their purchase journey—including the very beginning, when they’re engaging with your lead-gen content. In order to capture the attention of your target audiences and make them feel connected to your brand from the start, you need to deliver content that is aligned with their preferences and needs.
According to McKinsey, more than 70% of consumers now not only expect personalized experiences with brands, they become disappointed when they don’t receive them.
When you miss the mark by personalizing ineffectively or fail to do it at all, you put yourself at risk of being skipped over even by your highest-fit potential customers, who will almost certainly choose to go with a competitor that’s more in tune with their expectations.
In a crowded B2B marketplace where one-size-fits-all marketing messages fall flat or get ignored, more personalized content cuts through the noise and shows consumers you understand and care about what they need. This builds trust and demonstrates that your brand can deliver the right solutions.
In practice, the power of personalization lies in its ability to resonate on a human level. When your audience feels that your message speaks directly to them, they are more likely to engage, respond, and consider your offerings seriously.
Personalization isn’t just about inserting a recipient’s name in an email. It’s about tailoring your approach to align with their unique preferences, challenges, and goals. By using personalization in lead generation content and outreach, you create an impactful experience that lays the foundation for a strong customer relationship going forward.
In the next section, we’ll look at 5 powerful ways you can implement personalized lead-gen to generate more leads and convert them at a higher rate.
5 Ways to Personalize Your Lead-Gen Outreach
Segment Your Audiences
Effective personalization starts with understanding your audiences—plural. Not all leads are created equal, and treating them as such can lead to missed opportunities. Start by segmenting your leads based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and pain points.
Customer segmentation enables you to craft messages that resonate with each group’s specific needs. Whether you’re targeting C-suite executives at large enterprises or individual entrepreneurs, tailoring your content to suit their unique context will make your outreach more compelling.
Target Your Content
Once you’ve segmented your audiences, the next step is to create content that speaks directly to their concerns. Develop a range of content assets, such as blog posts, videos, and case studies, that address the pain points and challenges faced by each segment.
This content should provide valuable insights, solutions, and relevant examples that showcase your expertise. By offering actionable information, you position your brand as a trusted advisor, making leads more likely to consider your offerings as solutions to their problems.
Remember: Content is the primary representative of your brand throughout the lead generation process, when buyers are doing their own research and not reaching out directly to brands.
They interact with more than 13 content assets during this time, so developing content that resonates with your buyers is well worth the investment.
Leverage Prospect Data
Customer or prospect data is the key to unlocking the understanding of customer audiences you need to personalize content and outreach effectively.
There are four primary types of prospect data you want to collect and analyze:
- Identity Data: Includes personal details such as name, email, address, and demographics and is used for creating customer profiles, contact lists, and targeting strategies
- Engagement Data: Tracks customer interactions like website visits, social media likes, and email opens to offer insight into their level of interest and engagement with your brand
- Behavioral Data: Observes customer actions such as product purchases, browsing history, and click-through rates to identify customer preferences and buying behaviors
- Attitudinal Data: Gathered from surveys, reviews, and feedback to gain firsthand insight into customer motivations and perceptions
Systematically collecting these types of data on your audiences and using analytics tools to analyze them in meaningful ways gives you the ability to develop accurate and hyper-targeted lead generation content that resonates with target buyers. Marketing automation tools are essential to achieve this.
When you do, you’ll see higher engagement at the top of the funnel and be able to convert at a higher rate further down the pipeline.
Use Remarketing Ads
Remarketing is a powerful technique to re-engage leads who have shown interest but haven’t taken the desired action yet. Set up remarketing ads that display tailored content based on the pages they’ve visited or actions they’ve taken on your website.
For instance, if a lead has browsed specific products, show them ads featuring those products along with personalized incentives. This reminder can reignite their interest and move them closer to conversion.
Remarketing is essential for capturing leads in today’s B2B buying environment, where buyers require several touches before they officially convert to a lead in your pipeline.
Implement ABM Practices
Account-based marketing (ABM) is an incredibly effective strategy for B2B lead generation. It involves creating personalized campaigns for individual high-value accounts. ABM focuses on deeply understanding the pain points and goals of each target account and tailoring your outreach to address their specific needs.
This approach showcases your commitment to solving their unique challenges, increasing the likelihood of generating high-quality leads and forging strong business relationships.
And while ABM may have once been reserved for high-budget enterprises with high-ticket clients, today technology allows it to be executed at several levels and by any business.
There are three primary levels of ABM you can implement:
- Programmatic ABM: One-to-many engagement, heavily uses automation to personalize
- ABM Lite: One-to-few engagement, uses a combination of automation and human outreach
- Strategic ABM: High-touch one-to-one engagement executed by human sales reps
While ROI does increase with higher levels of ABM implementation, all three approaches are effective and can help you add more personalization to your lead generation strategy and outreach.
Final Thoughts: How Personalized Lead-Gen Will Help You Grow
Today’s B2B customers don’t want to be just another number in your pipeline. Instead, they want to know that you understand their unique needs and preferences and care about serving them well.
Personalization in lead generation demonstrates from the start that your brand can and will meet these expectations. It enables you to engage in meaningful interactions with your leads early in their buyer journey and help them see why your business and solutions are the best choice for them. By using the strategies and best practices we covered in this article, you can make personalization a central part of your lead-gen efforts going forward.
As you do this, remember: Personalization is a journey, not a destination. Aim to continuously refine and optimize your approach based on data-driven insights and feedback. As you build stronger connections with your leads through personalization, learn from data-driven insights to create even better experiences for them in the future.
Over to You
At RevBoss, we can help you execute highly personalized outbound marketing campaigns to identify your best-fit leads and reliably convert them to your sales pipeline. Our outbound email software and lead-gen services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations.
Schedule a quick call with us and find out how we can help you win more clients.