Session Getting the right personalisation strategy, to ensure a great customer experience but avoiding any privacy pitfalls, is vital to virtually any digital marketing initiative. For account-based marketing (ABM), it is even more important.
As a Lead Forensics article puts it, “great ABM content that will help you win clients is content that is relevant, timely, and highly personal.” This involves a lot of groundwork, but it can be worthwhile – indeed, the difference between success and failure. Look at outreach before content; if you have a team of buyers to attract, then explore all the channels available to you, from social media, to forums, to offline.
A webinar from HGS Digital late last year, ‘Take Personalisation to the Next Level with Hyper-Personalisation’, outlined a more mature pathway. This moves from ad hoc marketing, to aligning their content to customer journey mapping ready to scale, to becoming unified and data-driven through customer data platforms (CDPs) connecting martech, back office, and personalisation applications together.
As Gregg Shupe of Progress, who co-hosted the HGS Digital webinar, put it for MarketingTech in July, getting back to basics is crucial. “Marketing organisations have been chasing personalisation for many years,” he wrote. “Few have uncovered the secrets to better customer engagement, yet most still struggle with the basics.
“The need to get back to the basics of personalisation – the right data, content and applications – is paramount as the expectations set by customers is ever increasing.”
With the ideas in place, there are two concerns which need to be overcome. The first, which relates to personalisation in general, revolves around privacy. How far can you go with your initiatives without being creepy? Dipayan Ghosh, a privacy expert at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School, told the Financial Times in October that the ‘trade-off between privacy and personalisation [was] start and explicit.’
The good news, however, is that if your intentions are honourable – and this needs to be particularly emphasised given the various breaches we have seen – then prospects and customers are willing to make a trade. According to research from Formation.ai earlier this year, almost four in five (79%) consumers polled admitted the more personalisation tactics a brand uses, the more loyal they are to that brand. Yet a similar number (77%) argued businesses were not doing enough to earn that loyalty.
But for ABM and prospect-based marketing in particular, there is another problem. If you are targeting marketers and technology providers, then they will already have walls put up and will know all the tactics. As Turtl, an enterprise content automation platform, notes, you need to put yourself in your clients’ shoes. Unless your campaigns and content are perfectly tailored to address them and their challenges, you won’t get their attention.
An article from Kit McKay, content writer at Turtl, outlines some ideas to help get that attention. Creating and measuring personalised content marketing requires a progressive approach. “Content personalisation is not a static strategy,” McKay wrote. “It’s all based on how well you know someone, which will naturally increase every time they interact with you. This is why you need to measure personalised content internally, not externally.
“Armed with this data, you can make sure the next piece of content is even more tailored than what came before,” McKay added. “You do this progressively with every piece of content and you should see continuously improving engagement from that person up to the point where they become a customer.”
It is a long road to success in many cases – particularly as in the era of Covid-19, and in-person events being kyboshed, one avenue can not be pursued. But as Turtl notes, in an upcoming webinar, whether the goal is to grow revenues, drive spend efficiency, or reduce customer acquisition cost and churn, ABMers today really can’t afford not to get personal.
DMWF Powered by MarketingTech is hosting an exclusive webinar on October 14 where Neha Rajesh, of Temenos, Kathryn Williams of Punch!, and Karla Rivershaw of Turtl, will discuss the power of ABM personalisation, noting why and how to personalise at scale. Attendees will explore these themes and learn:
- The case for personalisation: why and how it works and how ABM teams are using personalisation to scale their impact
- How to tackle the challenges to successful personalisation at scale
- How to prove the value of ABM investments to the business
You can find out more about the webinar and register for it here.
Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash
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Personalisation is good so far personal data is not misused for exploiting weaknesses of prospective consumer. It should not become weapon of math destruction.
Thank you for this amazing article.