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YOUR GUIDE TO PERSONALIZED B2B MARKETING THAT GETS MIND-BLOWING RESULTS

BY SHELLY LUCAS

MISS ION POSSIBLE

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In the pages that follow,

you’ll read about the unique

challenges of personalized

B2B marketing and the

importance of using the

right data to customize

content. You’ll find clear

steps for making your

database personalization-

ready as well as a reliable

method for ensuring your

highest-return projects

get tackled first. Finally,

you’ll read use case

examples of how customer

insights can be leveraged

across channels to

personalize content.

INTRODUCTION Personalization is hot – but it’s hard.

A DIFFICULT MISSION FOR B2B Yes, really. B2Bers have it tougher than

their B2C counterparts.

CONTENT NATION Think your personalization is good?

Your customers don’t agree.

HANGING FROM HIGH PLACES Don’t risk a bad content experience.

Fix your data. Now.

PERSONALIZATION PROTOCOL Prioritize your efforts so high-return

projects get first dibs.

RESCUING THE UNKNOWN Anonymous visitors deserve

personalization, too.

USE CASE: PERSONALIZ ING THE S ITE EXPERIENCE

Exposed! Dun & Bradstreet reveals its secrets for digital success.

MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE Set the scope. Use the right data.

Mission accomplished!

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

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76% of B2B marketers say their organization expects to increase the use of personalization over the next 12 months. Content Marketing’s Evolution: The Age of Hyper-Personalization and Automation,

Demand Metric and Seismic, March 2016‘‘

‘‘Business-to-business (B2B) marketers who strive to “personalize” content today are doing more than dropping a prospect’s first name into a promotional email. They’re on a serious quest to deliver a relevant message, at an optimal time, through a preferred channel and device. It’s the mantra on the lips of nearly every marketer. But as we all know, it’s a Herculean feat to pull off – especially with a half-hidden customer calling the shots.

Anyone who attempts personalized B2B marketing is pestered by a niggling problem. It requires us to get everything “right,” but what’s “right” is relative to the individual business buyer in question. So if you’re looking for one “right” way to execute it, good luck. You’re more likely to find a serialized narrative thread for the Mission: Impossible film franchise.

Luckily, B2B marketers are a plucky bunch with flexible notions of what’s possible. As one of these gutsy adventurers, you’re doing everything you can to meet your buyers’ expectations of a consumer-like experience. Every day, you plow through torrents of data, across multiple systems and tools – all while trying to get a grip on buyer intent. And by the time you’ve sorted through piles of personas, assorted buyer stages, distribution choices and messaging matrices, it feels about 12 hours past Miller time.

We get it. You’re not working this hard just to be on trend. Your motivation runs far deeper than that. You’re in hot pursuit of hard ROI. When customized marketing works, it checks the box. Practitioners have linked personalization to impressive returns, as much as five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and sales lifts of 10% or more.

These returns are tantalizing enough to to instigate a “personalize-everything” undertaking. (Queue Lalo Schifrin’s music score from Mission Impossible here.) A commendable aspiration, for sure. But given your current challenges, attempting the whole shebang is futile, if not self-destructive.

If you’re not confused

about how to “do”

personalization, you’re not

paying attention.

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Your Mission: If You Choose to Accept It

As a B2B marketer, your mission is to pare down your personalization efforts – narrowing the scope to what’s smart, doable and measurable. You need to start small with customization, making smart decisions on when to dial it up and dial it down. It’s imperative to master this before fully integrated customer data becomes commonly accessible. When even deeper, more holistic and diverse data becomes available – and ready for exhaustive analysis – it will be all too easy to grow overwhelmed. The marketers who will score personalized victories won’t be the ones swallowed up by too many options, frantically running around, accomplishing nothing. They’ll be calm and focused, drawing on past successes, ready to dive in and mobilize strategic maneuvers.

Will you be among these do-your-own-stunts super jocks?

Of course, there’s a caveat. Data limitations restrict what marketers can do well today (more about this later). But it’s not a showstopper. Actually, everyone can benefit from adding strategic guardrails for personalization. First, build a solid foundation of high-quality customer data. Next, set clear guidelines on how much to tackle and when. This way, you’ll be less likely to go customization-crazy when you gain easy access to more customer data and even smarter ways to easily figure out what it all means.

Are you beginning to see how your personalization mission is possible? Good. Read on. Your bottom line will thank you for it.

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‘‘

‘‘

Wind up a snowball and toss it into an inferno. See what chance it has.

Before you can personalize, you have to know the person you’re talking to – and much more than just a name. You wouldn’t think this would be out of the question. After all, B2B marketers possess more prospect and customer data than ever before, right? But here’s the clincher: Much of it is siloed, unreliable and often unstandardized. This creates a marketing predicament – obliging you to piece together and validate buyer identity, and then analyze the relevant data associated with that individual.

It would be easier to restore a pile of Picassos after a gaggle of first graders went scissor-happy on them (and hid the pieces).

B2B marketers are dealing with a multi-layered buyer who cruises around online, using various devices. One marketing team captures data on that buyer through email nurture; another group gathers data via digital advertising; yet another analyzes visitor activity on the company website. Plus there’s all the information gathered by the events team and the sales force. Each of these groups is probably using a different marketing technology.

Meanwhile, your marketing mandate is to deliver a “seamless, personalized omnichannel experience.” (Color me cynical, but I’m pretty sure rubber cement isn’t going to help with that.)

A Difficult Mission for B2B

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We can’t afford to let the possibilities paralyze us. The data- and content-driven digital age moves fast, and we must learn how to deftly navigate through oceans of information to learn more about our customers. And we’re not going to do that by sticking to our daily routines. Clearly, you can’t transform your marketing organization alone. But you can catalyze your team, setting the stage – and the tone – for holistic change. This can be achieved by practicing a few bold leadership habits.

Content Nation

The rise of the connected customer is forcing marketing to evolve from delivering outbound campaigns to managing personalized experiences that engage the customer from day one and guide them through a seamless journey with the brand. ‘‘

‘‘

Scott McCorkle, CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

When it comes to customizing your marketing, you have it a little rougher than your business-to-consumer (B2C) counterparts. B2B buyers don’t convert as fast, which means you need to maintain continuous engagement with them over a longer period – up to 18 months, according to some experts. The B2B “buying committee” adds another personalization wrinkle. With an average of 5.4 people involved in every B2B purchase, marketers feel pressured to appeal to more than just the check-signers.

So as a B2B marketer, how much do you really know about buyers? And how are you actually using data to personalize your marketing?

And that appeal isn’t won easily. Light consumer methods of persuasion don’t score lasting points with the B2B crowd. Few are willing to risk their professional credibility on an unwise purchase. Brands hoping to make a vendor shortlist must convince business buyers they’re sufficiently knowledgeable, not only about the solutions they’re selling, but also the challenges being faced by individual companies and their industries as a whole.

Most Effective Uses of Marketing Data According to US B2B Marketers, April 2016

62%Campaign targeting

Content personalization

Sales attributed to marketingCustomer journey analyticsAccount-based marketing

Predictive analyticsMarket research

51%43%

42%31%31%

22%

% of respondents

Source: Openprise, “The State of B2B Marketing Data Management: 2016Benchmark Research Report” conducted by Ascend2, June 14, 2016

Personalized content is a high priority among data-driven B2B marketers. It’s also identified as the second most effective use of B2B marketing data, according to Ascend2 research. However, the data that most marketers use for personalization is painfully basic; 80% of marketers worldwide rely on rudimentary demographics and purchase history.

www.emarketer.com

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Let’s assume the basic data points you’re using are actually accurate. Are you getting enough information to create engaging content for targeted segments? Maybe. But if we’re talking about segment of one, no way. You’d need much deeper, better-integrated and more up-to-date insight to check all the “right” boxes (message, time, channel and device).

Using basic data to customize your marketing isn’t, in itself, necessarily alarming. To underscore a point made earlier, it’s wise to intensify your personalization for some initiatives and tone it down for others. (Hopefully, you’re using more data points to target a few higher-value prospects and customers, but more on this later.)

What is alarming, though, is the broad gap between how marketers and customers assess the effectiveness of personalized content. Forrester Research finds 66% of marketers rate their personalization efforts as “very good” or “excellent.” However, only 31% of customers say companies consistently deliver a personalized, cross-channel experience.

If these results are any indication, much of your “excellent” efforts are basically wasted, presumably because recipients don’t perceive them as customized or consistent enough. Add to this the troubling stat that less than 20% of the people marketers typically reach are potential customers, and two more challenges emerge: A lack of strategic profiling (identifying key characteristics of ideal customers) and intelligent targeting (selecting companies that fit the ideal profiles).

It’s distressing to think you may be churning out “personalized” content with ill-formed, ineffectual messages. At worst, they strike business buyers as irrelevant and invasive – which spells bad news for your brand.

But take heart. In capable hands, B2B personalized marketing can be saved.

Your mission begins here.

MARKETERS

rate their personalization efforts at “very good”

or “excellent”

companies are consistentlydelivering personalization, cross channel experience

GAPS IN DELIVERING PERSONALIZATION

CUSTOMERS

66% 31%

Source: “The Contextual Marketing Imperative,” Forrester Research/SAP, 2015

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It only takes one “bad” or dissatisfying experience for four out of five buyers to bail on your business. When it comes to disappointing buyer moments, mucked-up personalization certainly qualifies. Why, then, are you most likely settling for so little customer data when so much is at stake? Maybe you aren’t seeking firmer data ground because you don’t believe the additional support of more relevant data fields is needed. It’s possible you’re still personalizing for traditional segments, as opposed to individual accounts or leads.

Recent research backs up this theory. Even with the rising popularity of account-based marketing (ABM), most B2Bers are still marketing to groups, with the most prevalent content personalization types being segment- and persona-specific.

Source: Adapted from “Content Personalization: Content Marketing’s Evolution: The Age of Hyper-Personalization and Automation,” Demand Metric, March 2016.

Hanging From High Places

Types of Content Personalization in Use

68%

Segment specific

Persona specific

Stage specific

Account specific

Lead specific

61%

33%

54%37%

‘‘

‘‘ ‘‘Think you know enough

in your mission?

Get a grip.to succeed

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There may be another reason why you aren’t going deeper with customer data – you aren’t able to get to it. The technological and territorial barriers may be too great. According to the C-level 2016 Marketing Study by Black Ink ROI, there is no data source category to which marketing has complete access.

Technically, marketers may be surrounded by tons of buyer data, but much of it is siloed in disparate systems, scattered among an average of 17 or more tools. This makes it pretty difficult to perform advanced analytics, which you need to personalize your marketing.

Even if companies were able to integrate all customer data across systems throughout the enterprise, the records may not match up neatly. Unless your company has clean data and has implemented a master data management (MDM) program with standard definitions for foundational data elements (customers, vendors, products, services, etc.), the relationships among these data elements may not be clear.

50%50%

50%50%50%50%

50%50%50%50%

Top Marketing Analytics/Reporting Data

Complete Access to Data

What is the rank order of the most important data sources to deliver marketing

analytics vs. the degree in which you have complete access to the data today?

68%

33%

59%

25%

49%

39%

65%

21%

59%

14%

25%

15%

64%

32%

56%

25%

62%

36%

50%

PRODUCT/SERVICE USAGE DATA

COMPETITIVE DATA SATISFACTION DATA FUNCTIONAL SALES DATA

CUSTOMER DEMOGRAPHICS/ PSYCHOGRAPHIC

DATA

PRE-SALE CUSTOMER SHOPPING/

RESEARCH BEHAVIOR DATA

CROSS-CHANNEL PROMOTIONAL DATA

PRODUCT TRANSACTION DATA

FINANCIAL DATA COUPON/WARRANTY/ PRODUCT

REGISTRATION DATA

Source: 2016 Black Ink ROI C-level Marketing Study

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Another strike against personalized marketing: Dun & Bradstreet research reveals companies’ B2B records aren’t in the best shape.

Without clean, well-governed and expertly stewarded data, a critical data point (e.g., a prospect’s professional role) may not be connected to the core company record. The upshot: a promotional series (five emails) for an e-book called “How to Write Killer E-Newsletters” hits the CMO’s inbox – all five times.

Is this e-book about e-newsletters the “personalized” content you would take to a sales meeting with a CMO? Imagine breezing into the executive office and launching into a 10-minute spiel about how to write amazing email subject lines. Yeah. You might be enamored with your content, but when you place it in the wrong hands, it’s not likely to be received with gleeful couch bouncing.

Lesson learned. You may believe you know the buyer you’re tailoring your content for, but bad data may be leading you on a sinuous trail to nowhere – while damaging your brand’s credibility with buyers. This is obviously a nightmare when you’re marketing to an individual, which is costly, complex and time-consuming. But it’s equally unacceptable when marketing to groups, as you may be depending on buyer data to help you accurately profile, segment and personalize. If your customized content isn’t relevant, it won’t be read, let alone shared.

59% lack bandwidth, ‘‘ ‘‘ Of those marketers not pursuing personalization,

59% say they lack technology,

and 53% lack the data needed for it. Content Marketing’s Evolution: The Age of Hyper-Personalization

and Automation,” Demand Metric and Seismic, March 2016

Source: B2B Marketing Data Report 2016, Dun & Bradstreet

77% lack industry information.87%

85%

of B2B records lack revenue information.

lack company size by employee number.

Personalization Protocol

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1. Prioritize the right improvements. Weigh the business impact of each enhancement against its time and financial investments.

2. Calculate your budget. Data quality is never a one-and-done project. Factor in ongoing cleansing and management.

3. Consult an expert. A cleansing tool can’t tell you what you need to do with your data to achieve your marketing goals.

4. Design your data renovation. Architect your data improvements, drawing on priorities and filters, not a pile of wish lists.

5. Identify points of convergence. Close the data loop among technologies in your marketing stack (marketing automation, CRM, ad tech, etc.).

6. Adopt data governance and champion a culture of data stewardship. Data quality isn’t just for IT. It’s everyone’s job.

7. Audit what’s on hand. Is the data you have strong and deep enough to support your always-on, highly personalized marketing?

8. Expect surprises. Despite careful planning, bad data will continue to crop up if validation routines, integrity rules and MDM aren’t followed.

9. Make sure your database is user-friendly. Does your database efficiently serve up accurate answers and insights?

10. Measure the impact. How have your database enhancements improved marketing’s bottom-line contribution to the business?

Adapted from “Marketing Data Renovators Guide: 10 Steps to Prime Your B2B Database for Analytics” by Dun & Bradstreet.

If your customer and prospect data isn’t in good shape, tailoring your content – and prioritizing what you personalize – becomes impossible, before you even get started.

Your personalization initiative can’t get off the ground until you make the appropriate database preparations.

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‘‘

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Difficult is still doable. Prioritize based on the payoff.

Once your database is prepared, you’re ready to design your personalized marketing spectrum, identifying where to dial up and dial down your customization efforts. Imagine this spectrum as a version of ITSMA’s ABM pyramid, which illustrates the scale of investment and returns for different levels of ABM execution. For the purposes of personalized marketing, it would look something like this.

For a deeper definition of these personalization methods, it’s useful to build on ITSMA’s ABM framework.

Strategic personalization (one to one) requires fully customized marketing plans. This approach requires the highest resource investment, but also generates the highest ROI. For this method, marketers create buyer-specific value propositions and thought leadership, perhaps customized for each of the key B2B decisions makers in one company’s buying committee. New solution development may also be an outcome of this customization process.

Personalization lite (one to few) focuses on small groups of buyers that share similar business attributes, challenges and initiatives. The customization for this approach is tailored to appeal to both personas and specific buyer’s stages. These considerations should be top-of-mind when deciding which business issues and value propositions to highlight. Technology becomes more important here, for gathering buyer insight, campaign execution and performance measurement.

Programmatic personalization (one to many) focuses on segments, relying heavily on technology and automation to deliver targeted advertising and nurturing programs. The personalization effort required here is relatively low.

Your highest value buyers are the best candidates for strategic personalization. Usually, B2B marketers define these prospects as those who are most likely to 1) convert and 2) spend a lot of money. Remember, however, that everyone else in your industry is most likely going after these big spenders. That said, your competitors might not be using strategic personalization.

STRATEGIC PERSONALIZATION

ONE TO ONE

ONE TO FEW

INVES

TMEN

T & R

OI P

ER A

CCOUNT

HIGH

LOW

ONE TO MANY

PERSONALIZATIONLITE

PROGRAMMATIC PERSONALIZATION

Degrees of Personalized Marketing

Graphic adapted from ITSMA 2016.

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‘‘ ‘‘Digital ghosts are everywhere.

Your challenge:

to surface real opportunities.

Still, to make sure you’re identifying the right buyers to receive your best personalized marketing, it’s worth revisiting what a “high-value buyer” looks like relative to your goals.

– Do you want to increase your market share? The buyers to target may not be the highest-end customers. – Want to boost revenue per customer? Rule out high-value prospects outside of your primary market.

As you evaluate your prospects and customers, go beyond the basic criteria to ensure you place them in the appropriate personalization bucket.

So far, we’ve been emphasizing the importance of knowing buyers well before you customize your marketing for them. But it also pays to personalize for “anonymous” prospects. Consider, for example, your company’s website visitors – 98% of whom are “anonymous.”

You will be able to pull many of these data points already. For the yawning data gaps that you can’t fill, reach out to a trusted data vendor for help.

Basic Buyer Information Company location(s) Number of employees Contact information Title/functionIndustry

Other Considerations Propensity to buy (predictive analytics) Cross-sell/adjacent space opportunity Buyer interest, engagement and accessibility How well your offering fits the buyer’s needs Level of difficulty to winCompany vitality and performance

Rescuing the Unknown

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While you may not know these visitors’ names or email addresses, you can nevertheless learn valuable information about them, such as:

– Company name (via IP addresses, cookies, mobile device IDs)

– Business attributes (location, industry, employees, etc.)

– Professional persona

– Number of previous visits

– Time spent on the site

– Return visits

– Pages viewed

– Search terms used

– Referral source

From this data, you can gauge the visitor’s interest and engagement with your brand. You can potentially customize online content for these unidentified visitors based on their geographical location and previous on-site behavior (including search). In addition, if and when these individuals register to download an e-book or happen to click on an email from your company, their anonymous digital engagement history can be added to their record in your marketing automation system.

Even if website visitors never identify themselves, you can still serve up content they’re likely to find interesting based on previous visit activity. In addition, you can analyze past activity to determine which persona they most resonate with and use this information to surface a home page tailored to that persona on their next visit.

Dun & Bradstreet personalizes its site experience using deterministic (verified) data from its own Web Visitor ID product, along with behavioral data from Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. Currently, D&B has 12 different versions of the dnb.com home page, each personalized at a persona level.

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Here at D&B, we identify unknown site visitors using their IP address, mobile device ID or cookie data; from there, we match the visitors to their correlating D&B D-U-N-S® Number (universal business identifier), which retrieves 20+ associated business attributes from the D&B database.

Using these associated fields, we can gain more holistic insights about our website traffic. Analyzing this data, we can determine:

– The top visiting industries to our website

– The most frequent company visitors

– Visitors by specific business size range (number of employees)

– Visitors within a specific commercial revenue range

– The number of Fortune 1000 commercial visitors

These insights can very helpful in pinpointing unaddressed markets and/or opportunities for personalized content.

Dun & Bradstreet Use Case — Personalizing the Site Experience

Do any fit your high-value account criteria?

Include in strategic personalization program

LINK TO PERSONAPersonalize home page

and display offers on and off owned digital property

Determine cross-sell, upsell or service

and support need

Add a vertical specific layer to customization

High engagement via online and offline activity

Follow up on trigger event

Prioritize follow up

Current customer?

Not ready to buy?

Low or no engagement

Other manufacturing companies in personalization lite bucket?

Continue to monitor for trigger events and emerging trends

MAYBE NOYES

YES

YES

NO

NO

INFORMED SALES OUTREACH

ROLL INTO APPROPRIATE NURTURE PROGRAM

LEAD SCORING

GETTING PERSONAL WITH ANONYMOUS VISITORS

WEBSITE TRAFFIC SPIKE

TRIGGER EVENT

TRACK ONLINE CONTENT CONSUMPTION

TRIGGER EVENT

TRAFFIC SEGMENTATIONMatch IP addresses to D&B Duns Numbers

COMPANY 1 COMPANY 3COMPANY 2

40% of monthly visits = manufacturing companies

INSIGHT

© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2016. All rights reserved.

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Making the Impossible Possible In its purist sense, personalized marketing caters to individual buyers in real time. Today, marketing to each and every customer and prospect as a segment of one is impossible. Yet, instead of narrowing the scope of your personalization efforts and concentrating on doing it right, many of us settle for delivering random (and largely irrelevant) acts of customization.

When it comes to personalized marketing, you can’t leapfrog your way to success. Before you can create engaging, tailor-made content, you must improve the quality, depth and breadth of your customer data. If you’re looking for a villain in a personalization mission, bad data is it. Fragmented user profiles and incomplete data are holding back the personalization efforts of 96% of marketers.

Once you have built and secured a strong data foundation, you can concentrate on prioritizing and personalizing what matters most. Not only will this stop unnecessary bleeding of resources, but it’ll also pull in the highest revenue, protecting your bottom line.

Doing this is difficult. But it’s not impossible. And, with brand affinity and long-term customer relationships hanging in the balance, it’s a mission you must accept.

About the Author:Shelly Lucas Content Marketing Director Dun & Bradstreet

Shelly Lucas (@pisarose) has 15+ years of experience delivering value and results through B2B social networking, public relations, corporate communications, analyst relations and marketing programs for organizations ranging from global Fortune 200 companies to small, not-for-profit businesses. Shelly holds a B.A. in English from Central College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Literary Theory from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

ABOUT DUN & BRADSTREET

Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB) grows the most valuable relationships in business. By uncovering truth and meaning from data, we connect customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most, and have since 1841. Nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, and companies of every size around the world, rely on our data, insights and analytics. For more about Dun & Bradstreet, visit DNB.com.

© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2016. All rights reserved. (DB-4705 3/16) www.dnb.com