Optimizing your marketing for better conversions

Today’s marketing landscape has evolved to a point where every marketer has umpteen number of tools at their disposal and irrespective of the size of the organization, there is a decent tech stack that can help them generate demand. On the other hand, the customer is spoilt for choices. With a vast number of organizations trying to get them to engage and push them into a buyer’s journey, audience fatigue is causing far fewer conversions today. Irrespective of what the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’, says, customers want tailored experiences and do not respond to organizations that are groping in the dark. It is safe to say that ‘personalized experiences at scale’ is no longer some jargon thrown around at conferences and is an essential component of marketing efforts across all your paid, owned, and earned channels.

Here are a few ways in which you can build a marketing unit that effectively personalizes at scale and as a direct by-product, yields better conversions:

Build campaigns, not ads – At the risk of sounding like an ad for a weight loss program – are you tired of pumping a considerable amount of your budget on ads across social, search and display? Do you consider paid media activities to be a top of the funnel activity that brings in leads through increased impressions? Do you constantly see an abnormally high number of impressions and views but your funnel looks extremely skinny as you move along? The problem might be that you are looking at your paid activities as individual channels that work in isolation and have invariably built a model that is focussed on optimizing metrics for each of those specific channels. A smart marketer knows that all your channels – search, email, social, syndication, programmatic, etc. – are different cogs of the wheel that need to work in sync if the clock has to get ticking.

If you have built a campaign logic design based on your understanding of the buyer’s journey and profile, it’s a good start. But simply moving around offers in a ‘somewhat fixed’ logic map and optimizing based on A/B tests is not going to bring in the leads that sales want. You need to look at the market dynamics, sales objectives, competitor activities, product updates, and account behavior to build marketing plays that can then be converted into separate campaigns. For example, here are some key marketing plays that you could consider:

-         Going after a competitor install base

-         A cross-sell campaign to existing customers

-         Lead progression campaign for prospects that showed intent

-         New market penetration

-         A joint campaign with your business partner

-         Leads that went cold after an initial discussion with sales

-         Behaviour-based campaigns (depending on web activity)

When you start your media budget and resources allocation with a marketing play as a starting point, you have much more clarity on what you are trying to achieve and can run a tighter campaign that yields better results. You would of course optimize this further based on the campaign response you are seeing, but by starting with a clear set of market plays at the start of the quarter and building mini and micro campaigns around them will decrease your overall cost per lead and ensure you are passing on quality leads to the sales team.

 Identifying purchase intent signals and account-based marketing – If the inside sales guy had a dollar every time he heard an ‘I was just looking’, he would have enough cash in hand to start his own company. With advancements in intent-based targeting across search, display and social, your paid media team should have a good grasp on who falls in the target audience list and who doesn’t. However, most of the algorithms built for intent-based marketing are content or interest-based and it might be a challenge to weed out the learner from the buyer. Having a good pulse of the market comes in handy when you are trying to identify key accounts that are in the buying cycle. Apart from the sales team providing inputs on which accounts you should be going after, analysts provide a great deal of information around what is actually happening in the space you are operating in, what your large accounts are looking for and when they placed an inquiry around a solution that you offer. Imagine customizing and building content that resonates with the issues that your prospect put forth to the analyst and then targeting them with an outcome + capabilities messaging across different channels - THAT is being in the right place at the right time. There are multiple avenues that you can identify purchase intent signals but event attendee lists are by far the best. Think about it for a minute, if there is a particular account that is visiting key events and is looking at multiple competitors (and you) over a given time frame, they are looking to either understand best practices or looking to replace their existing solution with something that fits their needs and strategy. You might not want to send ‘Dave from event data’ to spam after all.

Once you have identified purchase intent, the next key step is for you to build out a comprehensive account strategy that entails targeting your key decision and their influencers with custom content. With the leading players in ABM offering state of the art account detection solutions, your team will have to do the due diligence in visualizing and building an effective account journey model that not just delivers custom content but delivers consistency in messaging across all the channels. Be warned that building a truly successful account journey model requires considerable effort investment in personalizing that ‘single key message’ across your paid, owned, and earned channels.

For additional information on ABM, do read my article on the topic here.

Invest in web personalization: not just the tools, but the time as well. Your web property/ campaign landing page is the first stop the prospect makes after clicking on your ad and if the experience is not personalized, you can rest assured that your cost per lead just increased by a few dollars. Today, there are myriad ways in which your campaign landing page can be personalized: account-based, geo-based, vertical based, lead score based, role-based, etc. but, to effectively build content that is truly tailored and engaging, you need to really spend time understanding your buyer and their digital habits. Market insights are great, but have you really spent time with your sales team to understand the real motivation for a prospect to consider your solution? Have you spoken to analysts to understand what your competition is doing? Have you built content not just for the key decision maker but also the key influencers? Have you created variations in your content based on user behavior? Have you built templates for every use case scenario that can be deployed in a matter of minutes based on market intel? AI can only help you as much as an algorithm can, but to truly offer a personalized web experience, your team needs to put in the time.

When you are looking for a web personalization solution though, ensure you are comfortable with the answers to these three key questions:

-         The amount of data that a B2B marketer has access to and that is being generated these days is not even funny. However, there is a very real possibility of multiple data silos within your technology stacks. You need a solution that provides a single, unified view of the customer.

-         To be agile and respond to market and buyer signals, you need a solution that is user-friendly and can be used by marketers with a fairly good understanding of how CMS works. The last thing you need is a solution that relies heavily on developers and complex workflows that increases time to market.

-         Pick a solution that is best for your org. With a host of permutations and combinations, picking a winning variation in the face of a constantly changing customer base is essential.

Pro tip: Most orgs are built in a fashion where the product marketing or content team is disconnected with the functionalities of the web personalization software and the web developers or the CMS team are usually disconnected with the buyer’s journey and are merely going through the motions of IP address, account, and cookie detection. I have had instances where the web developer came up with smart ideas, during daily stand-ups, which the content marketer could not entirely visualize while creating their content calendar. Get your teams aligned with the end goal once your operating plan is ‘fairly fixed’ and have them work backward, together. You will be surprised by the uptick in your web engagement once you fix the softer side of web personalization.