Personalize It, Please

For many people, the lure of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn is the opportunity to express their individuality and creativity. The same holds true for all the social media tools emerging on the Web, from the avatars of Second Life to the mindless chatter of Twitter. People are drawn to the opportunity to personalize their online appearance and experience, and the bigger the crowd, the more people long to stand out.

This motivation should not be lost on B2B marketers. As customers—especially younger ones—come to expect rich and personalized online experiences in their leisure hours, they will expect it of their services and solutions providers as well. Findings from ITSMA’s recent survey, How Customers Choose, demonstrate that personalization is a factor in the degree to which customers value the emerging digital media offerings from their B2B providers. Though many of these tools are crude and experience and expertise in deploying some of them are limited, marketers who don’t personalize their marketing will miss out on an opportunity to reach customers more directly—and with lower costs—than more traditional marketing vehicles offer.

How Personalization Plays into Loyalty

Perhaps the clearest evidence of customers’ hunger for more personalized information from providers is their clear rejection of traditional, undifferentiated one-to-many communications. Of the 346 technology buyers surveyed by ITSMA, 83% said they no longer read unsolicited e-mail. Okay, so maybe that’s not very surprising. But here’s where personalization plays into the picture: Asked if they would read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to their businesses, such as success stories, research reports, and Webinar invitations, 75% said they would.

Now, here’s the interesting (and in some ways scary) part: Asked if they would pay attention to these marketing materials even if they were from solution providers they had not previously done business with, a whopping 92% said they’d take a look. Think you can take your loyal customers for granted by giving them generic marketing campaigns? Think again.

Of course, this means marketing must work harder than ever to maintain customer loyalty. And the more personalized that content is, the better—especially when it comes to digital content. When we asked respondents to rate the value of digital supplier-sponsored programs, they ranked them as follows, from most valuable to least valuable:

• Dedicated client extranets
• Social networking
• Blogging

Of the three, extranets clearly have the best possibilities for personalization, given the nascent state of social networking technology and the one-to-many positioning of most corporate blogs. But that said, digital personalization technologies have not yet developed to their full potential, and exposure to them is relatively low. (For example, 74% of respondents participate in executive-level business events, whereas only 16% have their own provider-supplied extranets.) In part, that’s because providers aren’t up to speed on the technology. Indeed, in a recent survey by McKinsey, only 36% of 410 respondents from provider companies said they were using digital tools or techniques as part of their sales management or advertising marketing programs. And 41% said they had insufficient internal capabilities to handle digital marketing programs.

This should not be construed as a lack of interest on the part of marketers in taking their digital marketing to a higher level. A recent survey by analyst company Aberdeen Group found that 64% of nearly 300 respondents plan to deliver personalized content and products to specific market segments.

Evolving Beyond Email

Today, email is the dominant channel for delivering personalized digital marketing strategies, mostly because it’s relatively simple to automate the campaigns. But personalized Websites (a.k.a. microsites) and customized landing pages for customers—both of which have much more potential to build and maintain customer relationships—are gaining momentum. They are held back by the relative lack of tools for automating the process, though such tools are becoming available.

Building in-depth user profiles is critically important to building a valuable microsite or relevant landing page. These profiles should include such information as pages visited, past purchases, sales relationships, and service interactions. But marketers need to remember that it’s as important to get content to visitors based on what they do when they get to the site as it is to track their past history. Their goals for their next visit may have little or nothing to do with the information they sought the last time around. For example, a visitor might be seeking information on computer printers during one visit and networking services the next time. Filling the screen with suggested links to printers during the second visit won’t make the experience seem more personal.

Automated personalization has a long way to go: Just 17% of the Aberdeen respondents are able to change Website content dynamically in response to the real-time actions of a visitor. And there are security and privacy concerns; 39% of the Aberdeen respondents cited them as a roadblock. But an effective response to those concerns is to give customers more control over their profile—the kind of personalization they enjoy on Facebook and LinkedIn.

It’s important to begin experimenting with online personalization, because one day, online interactions are going to approach the kind of intimacy and value of in-person executive meetings—at a fraction of the cost. But even today, customers are increasingly looking to the Web to make their purchasing decisions, and when they do, you need to make sure they find exactly what they are looking for.

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ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. We work with the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA annual program clients include business leaders such as AT&T, Cisco, Deloitte, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. Our comprehensive research, consulting, and training on topics including ITSMA Account-Based Marketing℠, Brand Positioning, and Solutions Development provide the insight and experience companies need to improve business results. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.