The Internet of (B2B) Me.

Most marketers today have heard of the buzzwords: Internet of Everything (IoE) – creating value through the connection of people, processes, data and things and Account Based Marketing (ABM) – a business marketing strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. Bringing both these worlds together, I present to you the Internet of Me.

When we browse websites today either as consumers or businesses, we want to see things relevant to us. Things that make sense to us, things that were made just for us. A world where I am the centre piece and everything is about me – An Internet of Me. However, many websites currently show the same experience to everyone.

A/B testing versus Website Personalisation

A successful ABM program will ensure that email, ads, live chat, sales enablement, and other channels are able to leverage lead and customer data to deeply personalize the way they engage.

Website personalisation is defined as providing the right content to the user at the right time based on their behaviour and where they are in the customer journey. Personalisation is a data-driven approach and marketers constantly use data to determine its effectiveness. Still, personalisation is inherently different from the tried-and-true optimization strategy most digital marketers are familiar with – A/B testing.

In A/B testing, performance of a certain element on the webpage is tested for a set of users. Did a button with a particular Call to action (CTA) text provide better click through rates as compared to another CTA text? The testing is done on a live set of users either through a random split or based on certain data from previous account sources or actions. Eventually, the marketer hopes to nail the right CTA text that performs the best and implement it across the website.

Website personalisation is different. It’s the entire experience. It’s about creating a holistic experience that allows your website to be customized to a visitor based on their past interactions, stage in the customer journey, source of traffic, etc. An A/B test is carried out for a single page element and personalisation generally spans various pages of the site and multiple elements.

Marrying up ABM with website personalisation brings us to an idea where targeted users/accounts have completely different web experiences on the same site depending on their personas, or which demand stage they belong to, or what sort of content have they interacted with in the past. We want them to move on in this journey, to progress and find more and more relevant content that triggers them to come back and consume more.

Website Personalisation for B2B Marketing

At Green Hat we are exploring how more and more personalisation can be implemented across our B2B client websites.  We want to maximize all the sources bringing people onto the site. Identify as much about the user as we can (without the user having to tell us things like which company they work for, their location or even their job role) and then personalize the website via images, content, CTAs and even the auto response from a chat bot.

For Mimecast, we did just that. We built a microsite for an ABE based campaign. Users arrive at the website via various display ads. These users are then identified using B2B lead data enrichment tools like Clearbit. We then start to personalise the content journey for the website visitor based on what we know about their industry, role, location and even which stage of the customer journey they are in.

The website personalizes images based on the identified industry, uses the company name, logo and even fires up a custom chat bot that picks up the right conversation with the user. All of these precious pieces of info are then synced with the CRM to ensure the user sees more relevant content next time the user visits the website.

A more detailed case study is coming soon with stats and figures on how successful this campaign has been. At Green Hat we are really excited to be working on pioneering the execution of hyper personalisation from concept to implementation. If you have any questions about Account Based Marketing and hyper personalisation, please contact us.