A decade ago, the technological means to personalize marketing was a competitive edge enjoyed only by the businesses that could afford both the software that collected the data and the experts who could analyze the data. Today, software that collects and analyzes customer data is affordable for just about every business. All this data makes personalization easy, so easy that it is no longer a differentiator but a baseline expectation of customers everywhere.

You’re probably already using tools that collect data. The next step is using it to personalize your marketing messages. When your marketing messages are personalized, you’ll see improved marketing ROI and lead conversion. You’ll stop wasting time chasing the wrong leads, while the right leads will become loyal customers. That loyalty comes from the timely, relevant content you deliver at every point along the customer journey.

Understanding Your Customers

The data collected by your website analytics platform, your social media accounts, and your CRM can help you understand who your customers are and what their customer journeys look like. That data can also help you segment your email lists so the right content gets to the right customers. We have an article on that topic that you can read here: Understanding Your Target Audience Through Data.

Which Data Helps in Content Creation?

There are three types of data that will help you personalize your marketing: behavioral, demographic, and psychographic. Bring these together and you’ll have a pretty good picture of who your customers are, how they interact with your brand, and what they want.

Behavioral data tells you who is looking at which webpages, when, and for how long.

Demographic data provides information about individual buyers such as age, occupation, income, and location.

Psychographic data is helpful in creating ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. It goes deeper than demographic data to provide insights on a customer’s values, interests, and buying habits.

Firmographic data is particularly useful to B2B businesses, providing insight into the businesses of the buyers visiting your website or meeting with your salespeople. This covers the size of the organization, revenue statistics, location, market share, and also the values and culture of the business. Firmographic data helps you decide if a business is one you can have a fruitful relationship with.

Content Marketing

Data can help you understand your customers and what they want. Once you’ve done that, you can use that information to tailor content for them. The data informs your ideal customer profiles and customer journeys. It also helps you understand your customers’ pain points at each stage of the journey. Put it all together and you’ll be able to create content that answers key questions at each stage of the customer journey, moving leads quickly and confidently through the sales funnel.

Getting the right educational content in front of the right customer at the right time is just as important to B2B sales as it is to B2C. Blogs, landing pages, white papers, testimonials, and ebooks, created with real customer problems in mind, provide evidence for stakeholders to consider as they decide which supplier is best for their business.

CRM Gives You Personalization at Scale

The best marketing addresses the needs and doubts of the customer. Data is a big piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only one. Your marketing strategy must also take into account customer feedback from different sources such as social media and customer surveys as well as any interactions your sales team has with leads. To bring these disparate sources together in one place, you need a customer relationship management system (CRM). A CRM integrates all of your systems and creates a single source of truth for sales and marketing, ensuring that you don’t miss out on a crucial data point when designing a marketing strategy, a marketing campaign, or individual pieces of content.

With all of your data and customer notes in one place, you can then create segmented lists that deliver different content to different groups of customers. From there, create workflows that deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. That’s how to do personalization at scale that is more than just greeting a customer by name in an email. When you get the right content to the right person at the right moment in their customer journey, they’ll feel like you’re doing all that work just for them. The secret is that it’s not all that much work if you know how to get the most out of your CRM.