Your brand isn’t just about your company’s identity anymore. It’s about your buyer’s journey.

Marketers get excited about building brands – and for good reason. Your brand in many ways is your company’s heart and soul. 

But a powerful brand identity alone won’t guarantee success in today’s market. Today’s buyers crave personalization. And, if you’re not personalizing your brand experience in every buyer interaction, any initial engagement will quickly fade.

To reduce your “brand bounce rate,” here are three areas to prioritize.

Your Website: A Personalized Welcome Mat

Think of your website as the first handshake with a potential customer. A generic brand-focused website won’t work anymore. Craft and tailor messaging to individual buyer goals and roles. 

Your buyers want to experience your website as if it was created just for them. It makes them more likely to engage and start a conversation.

Build your website so that visitors get content personalized to their goals, roles, and market segments in just one click. 

Your Content: Personalize Your Storytelling 

If content is king, personalized content reigns supreme. Every piece you create should resonate with the buyer’s journey. Ask yourself: “Does this content speak directly to a specific goal, role, or market segment and their unique challenges?”  

A recent article, aptly titled “A Content Tsunami,” shows that while 91% of companies are increasing content investments, only 30% have a defined buyer journey that motivates this content. The result is that large amounts of content are being produced that do not engage but overwhelm buyers.

Rather than organize content by types (e.g., blogs, case studies, ebooks), organize content from the top to the bottom of the funnel to personalize for specific buyer goals, roles, and market segments.  

Individualized Engagement: Personalized Demand Generation

Traditional marketing focuses on campaigns – digital ads, outbound emails, events, SEO campaigns – to drive awareness and then engagements. Campaigns are siloed, targeted at specific buyer, segment, or behavioral demographics and measured for engagement into a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that can be converted into a sales qualified lead (SQL).  

In a personalized marketing approach, campaigns are interdependent with engagement across campaigns, and personalized to each buyer’s intent and activities.

—

This is the first installment in our series on modern marketing. We will cover 5 key practices to move from an impersonal, “marketing-first” strategy to a “buyer-journey-first” approach.

Personalization is now the cornerstone of a successful brand experience. And buyers will engage with the B2B vendors that can cut through the noise to speak to them individually and personalize value.