As we learned in our recent post, personalization —of content, calls to action (CTAs), and the user experience—is a powerful tool in the quest to capture high-value accounts. And personalization is necessary to fully support an account-based marketing (ABM) program—and beyond, to an account-based experiences (ABX).
But for personalization to work, you need the ability to
identify users from your target accounts
categorize users according to demographics, behavior, or other contexts
implement personalization consistently
implement personalization across multiple channels (e.g., your website, email, ad networks)
Fortunately, today’s website technology offers tools to accomplish these advanced functions and dynamically support your efforts to connect and engage with targeted visitors.
Rules, Rules, and More Rules
To increase the likelihood of matching the right content with the intended target audience, you need granular control over the rules and analytics that work behind the scenes on your website. At Refactored, we use Kentico—in part, because of its ability to support this level of personalization.
Kentico’s built-in Web Analytics module can track visited pages and identify frequent users. And the platform’s Visual Rule Designer lets you use the K# macro language to define advanced rules. (More about how those rules are used in the next sections.)
It All Comes Back to Personas
At Refactored, we talk about personas a lot. That’s because well-developed personas are a key to getting your message through to your target accounts. It makes sense that personalization should start with the development of personas.
In Kentico’s Personas module, the system assigns visitors to one of your defined personas according to visitor interactions and how they trigger rules that you create. You decide which content is shared with each persona; in Kentico, you can manage settings and control content directed at each persona group.
Kentico personas are fully integrated with the platform’s Email Marketing and Marketing Automation modules, simplifying the process of applying personalization across multiple channels.
Once you’ve defined your personas in Kentico, you can use the platform’s Segmentation module to categorize personas into defined customer segments. Like personas, these segments are determined by visitor actions and rules that you create, based on demographics, context, and behavior.
For example, you might base a segment on geographic location, job title, industry, number of interactions with your site, or downloaded collateral. Like personas, you can leverage customer segments across other Kentico tools, such as Email Marketing, A/B and MVT Testing, Marketing Automation, or Lead Scoring.
Take the Lead
Another important capability that supports Personalization in Kentico is Lead Scoring. You can set up your own scoring system—again, combining demographics and behavioral rules.
Assign positive or negative points to each rule. For example, downloading a certain white paper might earn a visitor 10 points, whereas unsubscribing from a newsletter subtracts 5 points.
Whenever a rule is met, the system assigns the specified points.
You define point thresholds that assign visitors to various lead categories.
You can decide whether and when points expire, and you can automatically send information for top leads to sales or export it to a CRM like Salesforce.com.
And of course, you can use scores to support personalization.
Putting It All Together
In tandem with Personas, Segmentation, and Lead Scoring—and, again, via web analysis of visitor behavior, demographics, context, and how they interact with the rules that you’ve defined—the Kentico Content Personalization module enables you to deliver targeted, customized content to certain site visitors.
What form does that customization take? It’s really up to you. You could—
deliver banners that include industry-specific graphics;
include the logo for a visitor’s company;
insert the company name into text;
deliver different sets of downloadable content, based on the visitor’s job title; or
change or add panels or calls to action, according to how often the user has visited a certain page.
To learn how personalization creates a connection to your visitors, watch the personalization video in our blog here.
Outside of your website, you can retarget the visitor through personalized ads that point back to a customized landing page that includes direct contact info and a message from the account’s assigned sales rep. Or you could provide a sign-up for a nurture email campaign or targeted demo.
Tech to Support Your Team’s Collaborative Efforts
As you can probably guess, defining rules, developing personas, creating custom content…it can all add up to a fairly significant effort in terms of time and resources—for developers, marketing, and sales.
Based on the rising popularity of ABM (and the costs that most ABM software programs are able to command), the ROI is worth that effort. The right tech tools, applied within a well-defined ABM strategy, can enable a sophisticated approach to customer engagement—and ultimately help speed up sales and bring in higher-dollar sales.