According to research firm Forrester, over the past three years, the total number of interactions that buyers require in order to make purchase decisions has increased by 59 percent. This alone suggests a growing complexity in the ways marketers must reach prospects.
Among this complexity is the eventual shift from one-to-many marketing tactics to more personalized efforts to move high-value prospects—B2B buyers making purchases worth tens of thousands of dollars or more—effectively through the sales funnel.
Sell More By Creating More Meaningful Connections
While mass marketing can deliver prospects to the top of the sales funnel by building brand awareness and thought leadership, more personalized marketing directed to a smaller group of segmented buyers will help drive them farther down the pipeline.
By narrowing the audience, it’s possible to be better attuned to individualized pain points, buying motivations, and hesitations—much more so than when using a broader approach. This enables every interaction and each piece of content to be precisely on point with buyers’ needs.
The first step in this process is to create and apply a buyer persona.
More personalized and intimate interactions create familiarity and trust, qualities essential to buyers making high-stakes purchasing decisions. Through such interactions, vendors are showing buyers they know who they really are and can confidently provide what they need.
Establishing Personalized Digital Engagement
While real-life, one-on-one conversations are the pinnacle of personal interaction, they most often do not occur until much further in the marketing and sales process. In the meantime, here are some things marketers can do to make their digital interactions more targeted and personal:
- Create content geared specifically toward the audience segment where your ideal buyer exists. Then market the content in more personal ways, such as through highly personalized email messages that explain why the content is important reading for them.
- Involve prospects in content creation, such as by inviting them to participate in a research survey or share their thoughts in the comments section of a blog post with relevance to their industry.
- Present smaller-audience webinars tailored to prospects’ specific interests or challenges. Make the event as interactive as possible so attendees can ask questions and share their thoughts.
- Construct landing or website pages geared to audience segments. For example, the website of a vendor in the AEC industry would first ask if the visitor is a building owner, an architect, or a general contractor, with accessible content being specific to that role.
- Don’t overlook social media—use it to regularly post content of relevance to your audience and personally engage with prospects. For tips on adding impact to social media efforts, go here.
Mass marketing continues to be a viable means for reaching a wider audience, especially when the top objectives are building brand awareness and visibility. However, once in the sales funnel, more personalized and intimate marketing strategies are needed to build the foundational relationships necessary for making purchase decisions. Also, don’t forget that within these more personalized efforts, authenticity is key. It’s the job of the marketer to make every digital interaction feel as intimate and personal as a face-to-face meeting or phone call.
When one considers the high dollar value of typical B2B purchases, allocating greater marketing resources to more effectively reach fewer, but higher qualified, prospects in this manner at the right time in the funnel is a sound business approach.
If you’re looking for assistance in personalizing your content or developing buyer journeys, contact us today.