Real-Time Personalization is Simpler than You d Think

Transcription

1 Real-Time Personalization is Simpler than You d Think

2 If you re in marketing, you ve probably heard a lot about personalization lately. Given the rising expectations of customers, the difficulty of marketing to anonymous prospects, and the need to create campaigns that are heard above the noise, real-time personalization tools have a lot of appeal. But many marketers think personalization is too complicated to implement, or is too time-consuming to maintain. Before we explain why personalization is easier to implement and run than you think, let s take a moment to define it. Personalization is a combination of two things: 1. Identifying a person s relevant attributes (intent, potential, behavior, profile and/or firmographics) 2. Customizing his or her online experience by presenting only the most relevant content, calls-to-action (CTAs) and/or visuals. So how can this help you, as a marketer? Whether you re a B2B marketer or a consumer marketer, you ll create more meaningful interactions with prospects (even anonymous ones) by serving them the right content at the right time. You ll also educate and nurture topof-funnel prospects, driving them further into the sales cycle. Finally, by leveraging content that you already have and using it to create a personalized experience for your prospects, you ll optimize your budget and lower your cost-per-lead. If getting started with real-time personalization seems complicated, relax. You ll start by simply defining your three W s the Who, What, and Where. Ice Cream

3 your content based on the customer journey, geo-location (you can personalize right down to the zip code), product interest, price sensitivity, and buying history. The Who in personalization is your target audience, which is defined by a combination of attributes. If you re a B2B marketer, you ll focus more on firmographics (company name, vertical, size, and revenue) and digital behavior. If you re a consumer marketer, you ll personalize Don t worry if you can t identify every type of audience that visits your site. Focus instead on a few important Who s for instance, CTOs of software companies or CEOs of healthcare companies. Once you ve determined a few Who s the ones that really matter you re ready for the next step. Your Who can also include your audience s stage in the sales journey. Take the four main stages of the Customer Decision Journey (CDJ): Awareness, Interest, Evaluation and Commitment, and define your segment by the stage your audience is in. Don t go overboard with finetuning. For example, your Who might be hot prospects anyone in your audience who is in the Evaluation stage of the sales journey. WHO

4 Now that you know who you are targeting, it s time to decide what content to personalize. If you re worried about creating enough personalized content for your real-time campaigns, stop worrying you can personalize the content you already have. Real-time personalization can leverage existing content, personalizing your calls-to-action, user experience, images, and product offers. In our experience, most companies have more than enough content to get started. Content can include case studies, blog posts, ebooks, videos, callsto-actions, images, and more. It s a question of which piece fits which target audience, or which phase of the Customer Decision Journey they re in. Even if you don t have a piece of content created specifically for a certain target audience, you can develop multiple calls-to-actions for a single piece of content, designed to attract various specific audiences. For example, the CEO of a software company might see a particular CTA at the bottom of your homepage, while the CEO of a healthcare company might see a different CTA at the bottom of the same homepage. You can even combine content, CTAs, and images together for a more personalized user experience. (That s what we did with Panaya, a software vendor that provides ERP testing and upgrade automation more on that later in this ebook). You ll want to engage prospects with content differently, depending on the type of prospects you are marketing to. For B2B prospects, for instance, you ll want to deliver content relevant to the lead s particular vertical, organization, or location. If you re marketing to consumers, on the other hand, you ll want to offer personalized web experiences based on product offers, location, or price sensitivity. Either way, your prospects receive the most relevant content possible. Again, you do not have to personalize all of your content at once. Take a few pieces of existing content and personalize them to target high-yield prospects. If you re using Marketo s content recommendation engine, you ll know exactly which content is the most relevant for each of your target segments. Using predictive analytics and machine-learning, the handsfree engine automatically maps, discovers, and serves content on your website to the prospects who respond to it best. You ll deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time a automatically.

5 WHERE After you ve determined who and what to personalize, you have several options of where to reach prospects with a personalized approach. We recommend starting with website and channels. Your website is the most important channel for real-time personalization, because these prospects are engaged, attentive, and interested in learning more about your solution. Unfortunately for marketers, over 98% of first-time visitors to your website are anonymous. Real-time personalization allows you to engage those anonymous first-time visitors to your website by identifying their company, industry, location, and digital behavior.

6 Next, Panaya decided that it wanted to expand its market, targeting organizations that used Oracle s ERP. Their new Who was the Oracle market. They ran a real-time personalization campaign that changed the messaging, CTAs, and logos (aka the What ) on its homepage (the Where ). To give you an idea of how the Who, What, and Where combines, here s a real life example of personalization in action. When software vendor Panaya implemented real-time personalization, their original Who was the SAP market. Their What, as you can see from the screenshot below, was a combination of CTAs, videos, and logos on their homepage the homepage was the Where. Here is what Panaya s homepage looked like when a prospect from an organization using Oracle came to the website. Notice the messaging, videos, and logos all are personalized to target Oracle users. The result? Panaya saw an increase in content consumption of 113%, simply by defining the three W s, and letting realtime personalization do the heavy lifting.

7 Making real-time personalization tools a part of your marketing strategy doesn t require painful implementation, time-consuming maintenance, or an arsenal of brand new content. Because these tools are built to operate and optimize automatically, personalized marketing is only a matter of Who, What, and Where.

8 VP of Product Marketing, Real-Time Personalization Mike is VP of Product Marketing, Real-Time Personalization at Marketo. As co-founder of Insightera, his extensive background in business development and online marketing enabled him to drive sales operations and global business initiatives. Before co-founding Insightera, Mike served as Business Development Manager in the RAD-Bynet group. Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete. Marketo provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, the Marketo solution includes a complete suite of applications that help organizations acquire new customers more efficiently, maximize customer loyalty and lifetime value, improve sales effectiveness, and provide analytical insight into marketing s contribution to revenue growth. Marketo s applications are known for their breakthrough ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation, a thriving network of more than 200 LaunchPoint ecosystem partners and over 40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Contact Marketo: MKTO sales@marketo.com blog.marketo.com