Before you invest in Marketing Automation and Personalization: Know your Customers (2/4)

SERIES INTRO: If you want to successfully implement new platforms for marketing automation, personalization, and measurement —you need to know your audience in greater detail, you need to create more granular content structured for use, and you need a team that has the right skills and process to continuously measure and optimize. I’ve got some great advice for you to get everything in place.

Articles in this series

🔻Please read Part 1 for a complete introduction.

• Part 1: Introduction, basic benefits of Marketing Automation and Personalization platforms, and creating a Digital Experience Framework to assess your current state.
• Part 2: Do you know your CUSTOMERS and their needs?
• Part 3: Do you have the right site STRUCTURE and CONTENT?
• Part 4: Are you ready for CONTINUOUS OPTIMIZATION? Do you have the right roles and process to make the most of marketing technology?

How to better identify your customers, their needs, and what they are likely to do on your site

Your first job: make sure you have very granular personas, and a strong understanding of what each kind of person needs to accomplish. A strong understanding of what people know and don’t know, and what it takes to get them to buy from you.

Working with consumers is easier. For B2C products, it’s easier, because for most decisions there’s just one person to convince — but knowing your customers by persona is still a big challenge.

So this post focuses more on B2B sales. The biggest issue when trying to understand B2B sales is knowing that the authority to make a decision to buy your product or service involves a team of people — and each of the members of that team have a different role to play, and different content needs and expectations. In 2015, CEB research found that on average 5.4 people are formally involved in a B2B purchase, regardless of the size of the company, type of business, product sold, and price of the deal. This research also made that case that before a business engages you seriously (as in, gives you their name) the selection team could already be 60% along the way to making a decision.

Also, don’t think your experience is just about the buying cycle. But as important as it is to be there for the customers who are actively shopping, for many business decisions, even before the buying journey begins in the traditional sense, you have the opportunity to be more meaningful to your customers — get involved sooner, help with their engineering/system problems, or with making their business case — and bring thought leadership with an industry/application focus. Consider that your product might be part of a next-generation prototype and might be reviewed and even integration tested a year or more before even the traditional “buying journey.”

So, the exact point on the journey where you help them in real life isn’t important — what’s important is that each person who visits has a different role to play in the selection process. Every decision-making stakeholder has a job as a member of their purchasing team is to use their specific expertise to analyze products and solutions and make a recommendation from their perspective. If you don’t understand what each is looking for, how can you make sure they put your business at the top of the list?

So, if you’re still working around the idea of one “customer” persona, it’s time to do 2 things:

• First, get a lot more granular about all the profiles of who are really interacting with your brand, and
• Second, break down each person’s needs into elements that can be used for automation and personalization.

Here’s how to create more granular roles within an end-user business

The real significance of your digital platforms is to help drive the consensus sale when your sales people aren’t active in the process. It starts with thinking about all the different types of people who interact with your site.

For example, say you manufacture parts that have have many different industrial uses. Not only are people buying replacements (or changing to your brand), you have potential OEM customers who are looking to select a new supplier for their own product, like an engine, or production machine. The new product decision isn’t taken lightly — it becomes an integral part of their own solution, or runs a system that should never have downtime. It can take months or years to make a decision to buy your product.

Step One: Break down all the people and roles.

Here are some example personas a B2B manufacturer might be considering, and what they might need to learn most about your business and products:

• Platform director: major responsibility for an entire line of business, wants to know your business has low risk and adds value, focuses on strategic direction
• Manufacturing director: responsible for assembly and operations, coordinates complex issues, wants products that don’t add complexity
• Engineer (many types such as chemical, electrical, hydraulic): may have several assisting in the technical selection of your product, directly responsible for seeing if product can perform to specifications and integrates with all sorts of other products/equipment/machinery
• Designer/Fabricator: understands how product fits into assembly, may be coordinating prototypes for next-generation products
• Operations/Maintenance: responsible for implications of process and assembly
• Procurement officer: assists in vendor qualification and selection process, helps drive selection process, obtains consensus, assists contractual/legal purchasing decisions
• Sales/Marketing: helps in understanding value in a new solution
• Testing specialists: may technically understand how to put a product through its paces

No matter what you sell, the team making the decision will consist of many different roles, and the more you understand their needs, the more you can ensure their experience on your site will be successful.

So, make sure you are considering many types of visitors to your site.

Step Two: Reworking these audience role profiles (personas) to identify content they want, and trackable interactions you expect they will take

With working personas in place, you want to rethink how their needs can be turned into trackable content and interactions. Essentially, you’re preparing yourself to create the formulas and workflows that are used in marketing automation and personalization platforms to your B2B audiences. Reworking personas has two parts:

First, turn the person’s information needs into specific examples of content, offers, and experiences. List out what the person likes, what they don’t like, write up examples of the kind of information they are looking for.

Back to some of the personas above, and examples of what they might look for on your site — you can see how they are looking for very different things:

• Platform director: wants to see if you have a range of products that might work together better for their OEM solution or if you’ve created products specifically for their industrial needs
• Electrical engineer: will want a great deal of all technical specifications, test data, understand customizability, and possibly detailed schematics
• Maintenance manager: will want to know the types of accessories, consumables and repair parts available, and detailed instructions.

Second, align these persona expectations with data elements from their profiles/user accounts, from business transactions, where they are located, other demographics, and from their click history, from what terms they might search on, from major content you have on site today.

Think of it this way: if you were playing “guess the person’s role in 20 questions” and you could ask about human characteristics, content/information and click actions, what would you ask about this person?

Some simple examples:

• If a particular anonymous user has visited 2+ times in a week, sets very specific catalog filters while drilling into a product category, and reviews technical specs of several products, they are likely an engineer.
• If a person who is signed up to a general email newsletter follows an industry-labeled link for details on a new retrofit/changeover program, and their browser shows as Canada, you could reasonably assume they are in that industry, involved at a higher level in purchase decisions (perhaps a platform director), and you can offer the specific program (and contact person) for that country.

SUMMARY: You need to know your customers better. Take your customers, break them down further, think about what they want to do, think about what they want to see, think about the data and actions that can happen on your digital platforms that would signal that each type of person.

Read part 3: User-focused Content and Structure

🔗 Develop content and structure that people want, content that is also measurable and trackable by the system.

⭐️ Mike Osswald is VP, Experience Innovation at Hanson Inc., an Ohio-based digital agency that creates meaningful experiences enabled by technology. Contact us if you’ll like to talk further — we’d love to be a part of the conversation.