Is Your 1-2-1 Marketing Stunting Your Growth?
Despite the plethora of tools and strategies, 1-2-1 marketing is not achieving the required results. Time to look at the sources of the problems and seek a new approach.
Time to break the mould to unlock personalised content to boost B2B sales
1-2-1 marketing has been at the heart and mind of marketers the world over to perfect personal engagement as part of the modern B2B purchase process. Consequently digital content is fundamental to how leading enterprises attract, engage, convert and understand their customers in this operational process and there is a lot of it. Yet, despite the plethora of marketing technologies that are about to handle the management of digital marketing, it is not achieving the required results and there remains an underlying mismatch and mistrust of where the right content can be placed at the right time, in-front of the right customer.
Some companies are now breaking the mould of traditional 1-2-1 marketing as it was, to get closer to their potential customers in a different way to provide a better personal experience with the right, relevant content and win sales, quicker, more efficiently with bigger ROI.
Many of the problems that have hindered success have emanated from complexities of departmental or system process rules, regulations and technologies in organisation and product or service propositions and multiple target industries. However it seems other pain points that can stifle the purchasing journey.
1) In B2B, too often audiences are ‘persona’ driven, resulting in messages and content being targeted to particular segments rather than being specifically adapted to particular preferences or personal interest, and everybody is different, right? And have different needs and preferences? Lack of customisation and adaptation of content at the right time could mean the difference between sales or not.
2) The 1:1 personal experience was never thought of as a scalable, global construct. It was more of a specified group of messages or communications that took a longer time for the sales journey and more money, therefore true 1:1 personal experience was not easy to command.
3) What of the quality? Too often the same communications got repeated to the same audiences. Too little was known of ‘Lucy’, who was a key decision maker and buyer, what her preferences were and what intentions she had of buying and when? Also when was there a need to hand over in the sales and marketing process? There was always a hold up moving from one department to another, company complexities requiring extra time, money and resources.
4) Many B2B companies feel the pain of not seeing enough sales through their existing efforts and are looking for future proof concepts to guide the next generation of tools. The use of Artificial Intelligence and Customer intelligence will form the heart of the new technologies as they break into the B2B environment. Automated tagging of content allied to a person’s personal preferences are going to rocket the nurturing process to reduce cost and time of sales journey significantly.
In order to establish a new breed of targeted marketing, companies like Idio are linking up with the likes of Adobe to change the basics of 1-2-1 marketing to provide the right solution to actively engage with target audiences in a more exclusive way. It uses a mix of highly predictive customer intelligence and personalised, contextual content adapted to a target’s personal preferences. Its enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) platform automates the process of classifying content, building first party intent data at an individual profile level, and executes next-best-content predictions which can be utilized within Adobe. As a result, digital content yet again fulfils its role as ‘king’ and can be used and adapted according to the buyer need. Organisational and channel complexities are removed through central management and targeting and tagging becomes more effective on a global scale
Customisation of content at this level provides exactly what the new B2B buyer requires at the right stage of their buying cycle to remain fully engaged to boost more sales.
So why not break the mould of 1-2-1 marketing? Can you afford not to?