Using website personalization for effective account-based marketing

B2B businesses are always striving to create better customer experiences — one of the most efficient ways to do that is with account-based marketing (ABM). 

ABM targets customers’ specific needs and preferences. Rather than treating entire markets as single entities, and relying on generic marketing messages, it focuses on the organizations and individuals within them. And, with that in mind, the effectiveness of an ABM strategy relies on making the most of your time and resources by working to identify accounts that are more likely to convert.

Personalization can help you do just that.

But applying personalization to the vast amounts of data needed for effective ABM can be challenging — and means that marketers must leverage technology tools to make the process easier. Fortunately, with the benefit of artificial intelligence (AI) content solutions, there’s now no reason your business can’t implement a personalized ABM strategy at scale, tailoring your content and messaging specifically for each account to ensure that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

Not sure where to start?

In this blog post, we'll explore the basics of ABM personalization, and its key benefits. We'll also provide tips for getting started with your own ABM personalization strategy.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing is a strategic approach to B2B marketing that focuses on key accounts rather than mass targeting.

In an ABM strategy, each account is treated as a market in its own right, with its own unique needs and objectives. This approach allows businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to specific accounts, increasing the likelihood of success.

ABM typically involves three key elements: account selection, account insights, and account activation.

1. Account selection: To select the right accounts, businesses need to identify their ideal customer profile and then use data analysis to identify which companies match it. 

2. Account insights: Once the right accounts have been selected, businesses need to generate insights about each account in order to create customized messages and content. 

3. Account activation: Finally, businesses need to activate their contacts within each account by nurturing leads and driving conversions.

While ABM requires a more customized approach than traditional marketing techniques, it can be an extremely effective way to grow your business. By taking the time to understand the specific needs of your target customers, you’ll be able to create a highly targeted marketing campaign that is more likely to deliver on its objectives.

ABM personalization

In account-based marketing, personalization is key. By tailoring your messages and content to fit your target accounts' specific needs and interests, you can significantly increase the likelihood of conversion.

There are a number of ways to personalize your ABM efforts, but some of the most effective include segmenting your audience, tailoring your content, and using dynamic content.

• Audience segmentation: Audience segmentation allows you to target specific accounts with highly relevant messages — an approach can be especially effective if you have a large number of target accounts. By segmenting your audience, you can ensure that each account receives content that is specifically tailored to relevant needs and interests.

• Tailored content: Tailoring your content is another great way to personalize your account-based marketing efforts, and will involve creating personalized content for each target account. This can be anything from tailored collateral to personalized email campaigns. The goal is to create content that resonates with each account and helps the account holder see the value in doing business with you.

• Dynamic content: Finally, dynamic content is an excellent way to ensure that your account-based marketing efforts are always relevant and up to date. Dynamic content is simply content that changes based on certain conditions or triggers.

Getting started with ABM

What works for one account may not work for another, so it's important to tailor your approach to ABM personalization accordingly. There are a few simple ways to get started. 

1. Have the right data strategy

Any successful marketing technique is only as good as the data on which it's based. This is especially true when it comes to account-based marketing.

In order to create a personalized ABM strategy that will effectively engage your target accounts, you need to have the right intent data in place. Intent data is information specifically about the research behavior of your targets, what topics they’re interested in, what they’re looking for online, and so on. 

Intent data should include information about both the companies you're targeting and the individuals within those companies.

2. Choose the right tech stack

Technology plays a critical role in account-based marketing personalization strategies. The right technology stack can help you segment for target accounts, track engagement, and measure success.

There are a few different factors to consider when building out a content personalization tech stack, including your budget, the size of your target market, time to market, scalability, the level of personalization you need, integration with customer relationship management (CRM), and so on.

Regardless of all these factors, you’re going to need two critical pieces of marketing technology. The first is a tool that uncovers the B2B intent data that you need, and the second being a platform that delivers personalization as a service, and that will help automate the assignment of the right content to the right targets.

3. Align the sales and marketing teams

Aligning your sales and marketing teams is the third step of an effective account-based marketing personalization strategy. This step is essential because it ensures that both teams are working together toward the common goal of acquiring and retaining customers.

By aligning their marketing and sales teams, businesses typically develop a more holistic approach to customer engagement, which can, in turn, improve customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.

Even better, this alignment can help businesses reduce or even eliminate knowledge silos within the organization, which would otherwise lead to inefficiencies and a lack of coordination.

4. Segment your target accounts

To personalize your account-based marketing approach, you’ll need to segment your target accounts into different groups. Doing so will allow you to tailor your messaging and outreach to each group's specific needs and interests — not only making your marketing more effective but helping you to identify high-value accounts.

5. Understand your customer journeys

The fifth step of the effective account-based marketing personalization strategy is to determine the best content and messaging for each stage of the customer journey.

To do this, you need to first understand how your customers interact with your brand online: what they search for, what content they consume, what actions they take, and so on.

Once you have this information, you can map out the customer journey and create targeted content that meets their needs at each stage.

6. Create use cases and hypotheses

Use cases and hypotheses are essential for any account-based marketing effort. By creating use cases, you’ll be able to identify what success looks like for your target accounts, which will, in turn, help you create personalized campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your target contacts.

Hypotheses can also be helpful in testing different approaches to see what works best for your specific situation.

7. Develop personalized content

Having segmented your target accounts, you can develop targeted content that speaks directly to each group's pain points. This could include sections on the website, blog posts, ebooks, white papers, and more.

8. Measure your results

Finally, don't forget to measure your results so you can see how effective your personalized ABM approach is. This will help you fine-tune your efforts and continue to improve your results over time.

Three account-based marketing personalization tactics

1. Headline personalization

Landing pages are your customers’ first impression of your website. As such, it’s a good idea to optimize them. However, on sites without personalization, every visitor sees the same headline and message. 

Personalization gives your landing page a competitive advantage by dynamically adapting the headline for individual visitors. The more personal the connection between a headline message and your target accounts, the more likely it is to generate conversions.

You can use personalization technology to tailor the headline messages, using different firmographic variables (such as industry, location, revenue, company size, and so on) as a way to change content for different visitors. 

2. Social proof personalization

As competition for attention increases in a crowded digital landscape, companies need new ways to stand out from the crowd and convince potential customers to convert.  Social proofs on your website or ecommerce store, such as customer testimonials, product reviews, and logos, add instant credibility to that promise of value. 

You can personalize the social proofs for each target account by using relevant logos, reviews, and testimonials to match not only customer wants and needs, but market variables such as industry, company size, location, and so on.

For example, visitors from the gaming industry could be shown company logos and testimonials from gaming companies. Meanwhile, visitors from other industries see social proofs related to their industry and its specific use cases.

3. Case study personalization

The amount of options available to a given ecommerce customer at any given time means that it’s vital to personalize not only your content but the stories you tell about your brand. With that in mind, it’s worth personalizing the featured case studies and success stories that you feature on your website. 

When you personalize featured case studies and success stories, you’re making it clear that you care about visitors’ interests and needs — which will help build trust with your audience and increase the likelihood that they’ll return to learn more from you.

You can personalize featured blog posts for every visitor based on specific attributes, such as previous browsing behavior, location, and buying intent, or firmographic data.

As the account-based marketing movement continues to grow, B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver more personalized and targeted content to their target accounts. However, only a few are able to achieve account-based marketing personalization at scale.

Boost your account-based marketing strategy with Contentful 

To truly personalize your ABM communications, you need a tool that can give you a detailed insight into each account, and another tool that creates personalized experiences. This is where Contentful comes in — along with our native personalization tool, Contentful Personalization. 

Seamlessly integrated within the Contentful Platform, Contentful Personalization empowers brands of every size to strengthen ABM strategies with AI-powered, personalized digital experiences. To explore some of the personalization benefits, check out our AI Suggestions feature, or get in touch with our sales team to discuss details.

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