Latest Software Marketing Trends: This Time It’s AI Personalised!

With so much noise in the B2B marketing software space, it’s hard for brands to truly determine who-does-what and what’s-good-for-my-company. Why? Because so many vendors preach ‘personalisation’ – but few make good on it in their own marketing.

I’ve been attending a number of marketing events this year such as eCommerce Expo/ Technology For Marketing/AdTech London and as anticipated, something of any eye opener. It was clear that many vendors were touting the importance of personalisation and AI – from a number of different perspectives. But in a race to stay competitive, the great irony is that many of them fall back on appearing, well, somewhat generic. Personalisation has been positioned as the new holy grail of marketing however there are a wide variety of different approaches.

Standing Out

There are stacks of fantastic platform providers out there – but In a bid to try to appeal to a bigger audience across multiple channels they are becoming a bit too generic.

Automation software is a crowded space. So why don’t more marketing tech businesses do more to differentiate themselves? One of the major stumbling blocks is cross pollination. The B2B software space isn’t as clearly defined in the way that, say, the hardware space is, making it more difficult for brand marketers to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each product. 

While there are some niche services like HeyOrca, Buffer, and Hootsuite which specialise in doing one thing really well (social media management in these cases), there are also full service marketing automation platforms like Nosto, Marketo, and Hubspot who do pretty much everything. However, just as likely are companies that started out doing one thing, but now offer other bolt-on services. For example, platforms that began life as email marketing solutions, like Adestra and Campaign Monitor, are now providing personalisation for websites too.

What happened? Market forces, user feedback, a need to scale – or all of the above, probably. But due to the way they market themselves losing sight of their individuality does nothing to convince marketers that each vendor’s platform is as dynamic as it claims to be.

Prioritising Personalisation

The thing is, brands are crying out for increasingly sophisticated ways to get their customers’ attention; be it through email, social media, programmatic advertising – the whole shebang and more. But research shows that less than 10% of retailers believe they are highly effective at personalisation, and nearly one-third report having limited or no capability to support these efforts. So the demand and opportunity for vendors to upsell is there – another reason why they spread themselves thinly.

Similarly, the biggest challenges in term of personalisation are gaining insight quickly enough, having enough data, and dealing with inaccurate data. 

However relying on data alone as a personalisation strategy is short-sighted. To be effective, data needs interpretation; it needs context.  It’s the ‘back-end’ essentially. It needs to be considered in the context of an over arching strategy. To truly hit the personalisation mark, it must be combined with an understanding of human behaviour, context and motivations. 

Only when data and insight are combined with this level of human understanding can we achieve true personalisation by being useful to an individual at the zero moment of truth.

Moving Beyond Personas

However, a lot of marketers still rely on legacy campaigns or default ways working – what worked in the past – simply because they’re often easier to execute and glean some half-decent ROI from (perfect for when deadlines are tight and budgets are stretched). But they don’t help to stimulate new growth.

At the recent networking event, I spoke to a number of marketing automation vendors. And to be honest, most of them agreed that persona-based personalisation has reached a tipping point. It simply doesn’t work to continually put customers into neat little categories and try to sell them the same thing with little variation.

Customers – both brands and end users – are smarter than that. They ‘get’ when they’re being sold to. They don’t like it. They do their research, they actively look for information across multiple touchpoints. Which is why it surprised me to learn that apparently, 83% of marketers say creating personalised content is their biggest challenge. And while, yes, we are talking about blogs (!) other forms of content matter too: whitepapers, case studies, videos, interactive content – these (and more) can be personalised too: and automated in some cases. 

Consider chatbots: pre-programmed virtual assistants created to act as a first line of enquiry for customer services; or to help onboard new customers to a process – in real time. With access to the right data, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis, these nifty pieces of AI can offer a personalised customer experience. An on-brand dialogue. 

Similarly, there are solutions which companies like Exponea, Elastic Path, Dynamic Yield, Catalina Marketing and Altaire have developed which use real-time machine learning algorithms to profile individuals based on what they’re buying, and what others are buying at that exact minute, hour, day, or week to suggest other items they might be interested in. Using data in context in tandem with personalised content means the customers’ needs are better understood – increasing the chances of a faster, better considered purchase.

Define, Test and Refine

Ultimately, for any product or service to thrive in the B2B world, the way they communicate needs to stand out. In order to prove their business or software solution can effectively offer personalisation, customer targeting, and real time optimisation to brands; they too must put these into practice. It’s too easy to rely on generic messaging or to keep playing on fear and immediacy. 

Speaking to Karl Littleboy from BBD he added “ To deliver a truly personal experience, we have to apply a level of behavioural understanding—to place that data in context. For us at BBD, that means defining, launching, analysing and continually refining our understanding of the customer, and their purchase journey, that’s how we create relevance to our customers ”.

Personalisation starts with knowing who the customer is; how to gather and how to interpret data; and how speak to different roles in a business – project managers, finance directors, marketing directors, technical directors, and CEOs.  More effort needs to be spent on understanding their audience and looking beyond existing their core customer base. Just as important as in B2C world their brand needs a clear and unique personality to stand out in an ever more increasingly crowded marketplace. They need to continually test to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s how they’ll discover new ways to effectively communicate and set themselves apart.

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Daniel