We’ve reached a new era of personalized customer experiences. Personalization is now integral to the customer journey. It’s a key driver of brand loyalty, and 96% of marketers believe that personalization helps to advance customer relationships, according to an Evergage study.

Personalization provides:

  • A measurable lift in business results for 88% of companies.
  • Increased conversion rates (63%).
  • Improved overall customer experience (61%).
  • Increased visitor engagement (57%).

One of the biggest challenges brands face is using their customer intent data to make their marketing more targeted and relevant. The problem is that data can come across cold an impersonal—a bunch of numbers that barely relate to real-time sales and marketing activities. It’s why, according to Aberdeen’s CX Executive’s Agenda for 2019 study, only 27% of companies reported that they are fully satisfied with their ability to deliver truly personalized customer experiences using data collected across digital channels.

But working with intent data can help you hyper-personalize the customer experience by capturing the online research behavior of actual buyers based on their actual purchasing journeys. It gives you an in-depth way to predict who is in the market and what their purchase intent is with 91% accuracy.

This post will discuss how your organization can ramp up its personalization strategies to improve CX and increase revenue and conversions.

Account Based Marketing

One of the benefits of an account based marketing (ABM) program is that it stops you from pursuing every lead that comes into your CRM. However, you can still include too many accounts and contacts in your strategy and fail to identify the appropriate total addressable market (TAM) size without the right data guiding your efforts.

Intent data provides a solid foundation for your ABM strategy so you can narrow your focus and better define your ideal target accounts. It helps you personalize your customer profile for ideal demographics, firmographics, and contact titles so that you can eliminate accounts that don’t fit and set the right path.

The key is to obtain an accurate list of accounts that match your target profile, have an intent to purchase your product, and are active in your market. Then, your sales and marketing team can work together to actively pursue these customers knowing who they are and what they want. It should help guide your market segmentation, positioning, campaign strategies, and more.

Targeted Ads

On average, it costs a B2B company $68 to attract a target account website, according to our Media Audits. The reality is that while your cost per click (CPC) may just be a few dollars, few of the visitors you attract to your site through paid search end up becoming customers. Basically, you’re wasting money on clicks that go nowhere.

However, with intent data, you can create targeted ads that directly go after target accounts that show purchase intent for what you sell. It means you only pay to reach an individual who is actively searching for what you’re selling. Intent targeted ads work by using a programmatic display directed solely to targeted device IDs. In this way, you can effectively block unqualified individuals, which isn’t possible with paid search.

The results speak for themselves. According to our Media Audits, intent targeted ads cost just $17 per target account web visit. That’s three times cheaper for personalized targeting.

Demand Generation Campaigns

According to a study by ANNUITAS, 60% of B2B marketing organizations execute at least 11 campaigns a year. Typically, these campaigns run for a couple of weeks or months and only end when it’s time to launch the next campaign.

The problem is that this assumes buyers start and stop their journey in a tactical fashion. Instead, buyers continually move through the cycle, and so demand generation campaigns should be developed strategically with an “always on” idea. The goal should be to create campaigns that are mapped to the buyer’s purchase path.

Through digital channels, apps, social media, SMS, and the IoT, there are endless ways to personalize campaigns for the customer journey. By paying attention to intent data, you can create an optimal purchase path for each customer that’s relevant at every point in the customer journey.

Content Marketing

Your organization probably uses a lot of time, effort, and money to create blog posts, write eBooks, generate white papers, and more. The problem is that 91% of content goes unnoticed. What’s the point of creating content that no one is ever going to see?

If you learn to create content based on a deep understanding of the behavior of your target audience, then you can reduce your content marketing waste. Intent data takes away the guesswork about how your prospects and customers think and feel. It gives you specific insight into how your prospects interact with competitors and industry news, so you know what content they enjoy consuming.

Using this information, you can:

  • Better syndicate content from sites with more authority.
  • Build relationships with key influencers for guest posting.
  • Analyze the competition to see where your target audience is consuming content.
  • Focus on content and sites that reach your target audience.

With intent data, you can personalize content based on what buyers look for during different phases of their active research. For example, in the beginning, you can help them understand what’s possible, and in the middle, create content that demonstrates what’s next.

A Personalized Journey

B2B organizations need to stop focusing on how to reach the most customers and start focusing on how to better meet those customers that matter most. It requires an entirely new approach to the customer journey that personalizes the contact, ads, campaigns, and content they’ll encounter in every interaction with your business. By using intent data, you can make the necessary changes to personalize how your business connects with your customers.