Imagine you're a small business owner looking for a subscription management system.
You visit a potential vendor’s website and find that the landing page quickly displays products and services applicable to your industry, along with content and messages that speak directly to your company’s challenges.
But it doesn’t stop there. Next, you're offered the chance to schedule a product demonstration, attend webinars, or even read white papers or case studies from other customers who have benefited from the vendor's system.
You realize that this vendor understands your business and can provide the solutions you need — so you sign up.
Visitors to your website can experience the same thing, too.
By tailoring your content to the needs of your potential customers, you can increase the likelihood that they'll convert into quality leads and eventually become new customers.
In fact, companies that excel at personalization make 40% more money than companies that do an average job of it.
But personalizing B2B content for potential leads can be challenging for the following reasons:
Join us as we explore the everyday challenges of content personalization and how to personalize your content to boost your lead generation efforts.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Personalized content is any type of content tailored to an individual's specific needs and interests. It could be a message, advertisement, image, video, or article that directly addresses a particular audience based on past interactions or behaviors. Its primary goal is often to generate leads.
Examples of personalized content include:
"You want to go where everybody knows your name," goes the theme song to the ‘80s sitcom Cheers.
And that's true for customers as well. They like to feel special, valued, and appreciated — personalized content helps fulfill those needs.
According to McKinsey, 71% of customers now expect personalized company interactions, and 76% are frustrated without them.
It's no wonder that personalized content plays an essential role in B2B account targeting. When done right, personalized content generates leads by demonstrating that you understand your customers' needs and interests.
Put simply, it creates a sense of trust and credibility and signals your willingness to build a long-lasting relationship with them.
What’s more, personalized content is more likely to keep customers engaged for longer periods of time, which increases their chances of making multiple purchases.
But more on that and other perks below.
For many companies, generating new leads and developing lead generation strategies are major pain points, as they often need clarification on whether, when, and how to reach out to potential customers effectively.
Personalization offers an effective solution by employing a targeted approach that enables businesses to quickly identify the needs of their prospects and consequently create relevant and targeted offerings.
Personalizing marketing messages enables companies to:
Content marketing and lead generation strategies go hand in hand with personalized content. Creating tailor-made, targeted content that resonates with your ideal customers leads to higher engagement, generating high-quality leads and boosting conversion rates.
The more engaged prospects are, the easier it’s for your salespeople to follow up and lead them to convert.
Consumers can be easily distracted by the seemingly countless options digital marketing puts in front of them daily. This makes it difficult for businesses to make potential customers sit up and take notice.
To engage with a brand, prospects and customers need to feel that connection and trust — it’s essential that the experiences offered are personalized to speak directly to them.
Recent research from Salesforce revealed that 80% of customers say the experiences provided by a brand matter as much to them as its products and services.
To create meaningful engagement with prospective buyers, you must use tailored messaging and content to build a sense of connection and provide them with offers and call-to-actions (CTA) designed explicitly for their individual needs.
Personalization is a lead generation strategy proven to be incredibly effective for increasing customer loyalty over time. According to the McKinsey research mentioned earlier, 78% of customers are more likely to keep buying from brands that personalize the customer experience.
By crafting unique experiences that match the needs of each individual customer, companies can show that their customers are truly valued — which often leads to repeat business and brand loyalty.
Moreover, personalization creates a unified customer experience that can powerfully impact how prospects and customers view your brand. And this in turn increases loyalty and lifetime value.
Personalized content directly affects lead scoring. By creating content tailored to individual prospects' interests and needs, businesses can increase key marketing metrics (such as clickthrough rates, opens, and others) and therefore improve their chances at conversion.
Improved engagement and conversion help businesses score leads more accurately because they have more data to work with. As lead scoring improves, so does engagement, creating a continuous positive feedback loop.
If you want to create loyal fans eager to spread the word about your brand, deliver tailored experiences that engage customers on a personal level.
According to Invespcro, 64% of marketing executives see word-of-mouth as the most effective form of marketing. Moreover, McKinsey found that 78% of people will enthusiastically recommend brands or services they love if they receive a personalized experience.
When a customer recommends a brand to their peers via referrals, it creates a circle of trust that can go a long way towards generating qualified leads.
This trust serves as social proof for potential customers, further driving interest in the brand and reinforcing its credibility among potential buyers.
Creating content that speaks to each customer is difficult. Privacy concerns, scalability, and keeping data streams integrated all create unique challenges in your personalized content lead generation strategies.
Personalization can be a powerful tool for businesses, but it comes with a responsibility to protect consumer privacy.
According to the 2022 Gartner Customer Service and Support Survey, 71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to have considerable personal information during an interaction. However, the same survey revealed an inherent tension between personalization and privacy.
Customer concerns underscore the importance of developing a comprehensive understanding of customer privacy laws so your business can build trust with customers and deliver relevant experiences while still staying on the right side of the law.
It's a tightrope to walk, as businesses must ensure that customer data is secure and protected while still leveraging it for personalization. You can delight customers with targeted emails, but you also want to reassure them that their data is safe.
If you're making prospects feel special one day and treating them like a stranger the next, you're not giving them a personalized experience — you're giving them attachment issues.
The reality is that many companies struggle to keep their customer experiences consistent across multiple channels.
Why? Three reasons:
Customer behaviors are not defined by a single channel. They are a collection of experiences, behaviors, and preferences across channels. Search engine, social media, website, and entertainment channel behavior can vary significantly for the same customer.
To create personalized experiences that speak to each customer’s individual needs, you need to unify your customer data. You need a single source of truth for everything related to your customers — from purchase history to their preferences and behaviors.
That's no easy task with customer data scattered across different systems and departments, like your digital marketing and sales teams.
To gain insights for lead generation, you need to personalize your content. You need to centralize data (via a CRM system, customer data platform, or lead generation software).
Centralization makes it easier to segment your customers and target them with personalized content that speaks directly to their needs.
Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers' behavior is crucial for businesses, and the best way to do this is by utilizing customer data from multiple channels.
By collecting, organizing, and analyzing these various data sources — such as website analytics or customer service reports — you can accurately picture their preferences and habits.
Here's a case study to give you a more concrete idea of how content personalization can generate leads for your business.
When Apptega, a SaaS company, decided to revamp its website, it chose HubSpot's CMS Hub for two main reasons. First, it offered a straightforward content creation experience that was easy for their marketing team to use.
Second, integrating with the rest of HubSpot’s CRM platform would help Apptega understand the entire customer experience. With its new website, Apptega took advantage of web personalization for lead generation and saw a 200% increase in demo requests year over year.
By leveraging personalized content, Apptega was able to quickly leverage website optimization for search and attract more leads than ever before. Thanks to CMS Hub and its automation tools, Apptega made website updates in minutes, allowing them to grow faster.
There are different ways to personalize your content, but each should have a specific goal that aligns with the customer journey. Moreover, the content format should be tailored to the customer’s preferred communication channels.
Here are the different content formats and how you can use them to personalize the customer experience:
Creating personalized content is key to successful lead generation and customer retention. But content personalization requires careful planning and execution.
You need to take the time to understand your customer’s needs, gather the right data from multiple channels, and use the right content formats.
Using the right types of lead generation software and systems matters.
By using a CMS (content management system) that can centralize customer data and a WYSIWYG editor to help you craft personalized website experiences that resonate with each customer, you can gather data-driven insights and create an effective content personalization strategy.
Lead generation software will help you drive more leads, increase customer engagement, and ultimately improve your business results.
Transform your lead generation process with the HubSpot and Enlyft integration. Enlyft provides insights for targeted lead generation campaigns, while HubSpot automates lead management and marketing.
Enlyft gives you a great way to start with ideal customers upfront in your outreach, rather than spending precious marketing outreach dollars to net a handful of leads. It uses powerful AI to discover and qualify your best-fit customers at scale. It can be used one on one for greatly improved sales prospecting – or at scale with HubSpot and other solutions for marketing campaigns that move the needle faster.
If you want to see up close how Enlyft and HubSpot are better together, get in touch for a demo!
Byline: Autumn Witter
Autumn, a graduate of the illustrious Howard University, is an Associate Marketing Manager and SEO Strategist on HubSpot's Link Building team. When she's not talking about link building or SEO, you can find her in the recording studio making R&B hits, traveling, or studying for law school. Keep up with Autumn on Instagram or LinkedIn.