In today’s B2B world, the “one size fits all” approach to digital marketing is well and truly dead. As we progress through 2016, B2B buyers expect the same ease, convenience, and personalization they get from consumer digital brands such as Netflix and Amazon. But for a multinational corporation, it’s nearly impossible to tailor the experience for every customer. That’s where Sitefinity development shines, providing a competitive advantage by allowing companies to offer highly targeted web experiences without overburdening their marketing or IT departments.
The Personalization Paradox in B2B
The “Personalization Paradox” is the challenge of making content more relevant and scaling the amount of content across geographies, languages, and business lines. For a long time, to achieve high personalization, marketers had to create multiple page versions, and developers had to use complex logic to display them to the right users.
The next-generation Digital Experience Platform (DXP), Sitefinity, solves the paradox with data-driven automation. It lets companies move from simply addressing users as “Hello, [Name]” to a dynamic system where the whole website,e including its layout, content, and calls-to-action, is dynamically displayed based on user actions.
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Data-Driven Audience Segmentation
Personalization begins with knowing who you’re talking to. Sitefinity provides powerful audience segmentation features that enable you to segment your audience based on “explicit” and “implicit” data.
- Explicit Data: This data is explicitly supplied by the user, such as their industry, job title, or country.
- Implicit Data: This is the tricky part. Sitefinity monitors actions the user takes – which whitepapers they click, which products they spend time viewing, and what keywords they use to access the site.
With expert Sitefinity development, these data points are fed into personas. A “C-Suite Executive” persona, for example, would see different information on the homepage than a “Technical Lead” persona. This means that each member of a B2B buying committee will see the information that they need to.
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Sitefinity Insight: The AI Edge
The key to Sitefinity’s scalability is Sitefinity Insight. It’s a built-in analytics and optimization platform that monitors the entire customer journey across various channels. It gives you insight not only into what has happened but also into what is likely to happen next through machine learning.
Through historical conversion data, Sitefinity Insight can determine what content “moves” a visitor towards a conversion. It can automatically perform A/B testing on targeted segments to see which version of the landing page is most effective. For a B2B company, this means your personalization is constantly evolving. You are not only predicting what your customers will like; you are working with a platform that learns from their actions and uses that data to scale its performance.
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Content Reuse and the “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” (COPE) Model
A major challenge to scaling personalization is the amount of content needed. If you have five personas and three phases of the buyer journey, you need to create 15 versions of your content.
This is where Sitefinity’s advanced content modeling and “Content Blocks” come into play. Developers can build blocks of content that are labeled with metadata. These blocks can be managed through the “Personalization Engine” in marketers’ hands. For instance, you can have a single zone on the homepage called “Promotion” that automatically displays one of five adverts based on who is viewing the site. Such a modular design, integral to expert Sitefinity development, makes it easy for a small team to create a dynamic, contextual environment across hundreds of pages.
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Managing Global Scale with Multisite Capabilities
When it comes to “at scale” for many B2B companies, that means managing multiple web properties across tens of countries in various languages. Sitefinity has a “Multisite” architecture that enables you to manage all your websites from a single location.
Personalization rules can be applied across sites or can be specific to a market. A personalization strategy that is successful in the US market can be copied, translated, and adapted for the European market. This allows for brand consistency while still giving local context, which is vital in building trust in an international B2B environment.
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Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT
In the past, personalization projects have stalled because the marketing team had the ideas, but the IT team couldn’t execute them. Sitefinity aims to enable “citizen developers”: marketers who can drag-and-drop their way through creating a personalization path without needing to understand code.
By eliminating the IT backlog, your team can test more often. You can create a campaign targeted at a particular industry event in the morning and see how it performed in the afternoon. This is the world of a large-scale business.
Conclusion: Personalization as a Competitive Moat
In 2016, personalization is no longer a “nice to have”, but a must-have. B2B customers are busy and overwhelmed. If you can deliver to them what they want, you remove barriers to sale and enhance the brand relationship.
With targeted Sitefinity development, your enterprise can leverage AI, modular content, and analytics to ensure each visitor feels your website was made for them. It is the perfect weapon for transforming an ordinary website into a profitable, personalized moneymaker.
