How to Engage B2B Buyers with Personalization
Believe it or not, B2B buyers are not all about business — for them, the buying experience is also personal. According to Salesforce research, 84% of buyers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is “very important to winning their business.” Sales reps, then, must find a way to engage B2B buyers at volume while also tailoring communications to each individual.
In the sections that follow, we’ll walk through five proven strategies for personalizing the sales process to engage B2B buyers effectively, make them feel valued, and accelerate their journey down the pipeline toward purchase.
Quick Takeaways
- Effective personalization starts with knowing your ICPs and buyer personas.
- Personalize the use of high-value content for buyer engagement with tactics like SEO, targeted email campaigns, direct outreach, and targeted webinars.
- Automation enables personalization at scale. Improved user experience and more relevant communications are the top-rated automation benefits by marketers.
- Account-based marketing (ABM) is a powerful way to target your highest-potential buyers with hyper-personalized approaches. ABM earns significantly higher average contract values than traditional marketing and sales.
Know and Target Your ICPs
Your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are your resource for understanding which organizations are best-fit for the solutions you provide. Many B2B organizations have more than one ICP, and the companies that fall within each have different motivations and needs. It’s critical to understand each of these buyers and target your sales communications accordingly.
This starts with collecting quality lead data at the time of lead conversion, then scoring and segmenting each lead into buyer groups that have similar traits and needs. When this is done effectively, you can easily implement targeted tactics like ad programs or email marketing to reach and engage buyers in each group.
Humanize Marketing and Sales Interactions
Beyond ideal customer profiles are buyer personas that describe individual decision makers within those organizations — their position titles, level of experience, professional pain points and motivations, and needs they need fulfilled.
Knowing these personas and how to best communicate with the people who fall into each is a key part of engaging B2B buyers in a personalized way. For example, you shouldn’t market a product to the head of IT the same way you would market it to the CMO — even if they’re from the same organization considering your product.
In every communication from marketing content to company-specific sales pitches, be sure to include personalized messaging to resonate with each member of the purchase decision group.
Leverage High-Value Content
Content is a central part of the B2B buyer journey — on average, they interact with 13 pieces of content between initial engagement and the time they make a purchase decision, and 8 of them are typically vendor-created.
High-value content is not only a way to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise in your industry, but a strong understanding of your B2B buyers’ needs. Ways to personalize your buyer engagement with content include:
- SEO — Optimizing content to appear at the top of search engine results pages
- Targeted Email Campaigns — Including highly relevant content in emails targeted to particular buyers and buyer groups
- Direct Outreach — Reaching out directly to individual prospects to share content about topics they care about, or that helps them solve problems and accomplish tasks
- Webinars — Creating and sharing webinars that cover important topics for buyers
Use Automation Tools
The high levels of sales and marketing automation possible today make it possible to engage B2B buyers at volume without sacrificing personalization or the quality of the buyer experience. In fact, 60% of B2B marketers rated “improved user experience and communications relevance” the top benefit of automation.
Here a few ways how:
- Data collection — Collect data about B2B buyers’ interests, behaviors, and preferences. This data can be used to personalize communications and offers.
- Data analysis and segmentation — Segment customers and prospects based on their behaviors, preferences, or other characteristics so you can tailor messages to each segment.
- Personalized messaging — Deliver personalized messaging to customers and prospects based on their previous interactions with a brand (ex: targeted ads based on web browsing data)
- Timing and frequency — Help marketers send messages at the right time and frequency to maximize engagement (i.e. a certain time of day, or amount of days after an interaction)
- A/B Testing — Test different versions of messages to see which ones most effectively engage B2B buyers in different groups
Launch an ABM Strategy
Account-based marketing (ABM) takes a hyper-personalized approach to targeting the highest potential prospects for your business. Companies that execute ABM strategies earn a staggering 171% higher average contract value than those who use traditional marketing and sales only.
You can leverage ABM in addition to your regular marketing and sales strategy to better engage B2B buyers with especially high fit for your solutions or who have potential to convert at a large contract value.
Over to You
The ability to engage B2B buyers effectively using personalization starts with a well-executed, targeted prospecting and lead-gen strategy.
If you’re looking to take a more personalized and effective approach to prospect engagement, RevBoss can help. Our outbound email software and lead generation 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.