To differentiate in the crowded B2B marketscape, marketers are leaning more heavily on content marketing techniques. In fact, content marketing is now the 3rd largest marketing spend, behind advertising and events. There’s a lot of content marketing noise for buyers to wade through, which is why so many marketing teams are looking for ways to make content more relevant for their audiences throughout their buyer journeys.
One key strategy that B2B marketers are exploring is personalization. Marketers increase buyer engagement and conversion by making content more relevant via personalization. Many factors can be used to personalize, including vertical industry, functional role, language, age, and other demographic factors.
Which personalization strategies work most effectively? Based on components of a job seekers database insights derived from several years of surveying buyers of information technology solutions, IDC finds that they can all be effective – if used to solve the right communication problem. Not every personalization tool is effective for meeting all personalization challenges.
Marketers must use several strategies simultaneously to truly personalize content and campaigns.
WHAT TO SAY:
Personalize by industry, functional role, and buying role to ensure the right value proposition gets to the right person on the buying team. These are the most commonly used B2B audience segmentation strategies. IDC finds that 91% of tech marketing companies segment communication by functional roles (e.g. technical buyers vs. line-of-business buyers) and 88% use vertical industry. These factors are very useful to match a buyer’s problem with the solution you provide. But they are not as useful for meeting other communication objectives.