Let’s give credit where credit is due, most B2B organizations have made the transition from leading with products to being customer or market focused. Content is now shaped first with the needs of the target audience (industry, company and buyers).
Many companies make it a regular practice to research “hot topics” in the industry, the needs of those buyers and their channel preferences . Personas are shaped around the insights, and content and messaging are created to align with needs, then carefully aligned to the buyers’ journey.
So is that personalization?
What about the customer experience on the website? This is how Forbes describes website personalization.
Website personalization is the practice of creating a custom experience for site visitors based on who they are and what they want. Rather than providing a single experience for all site visitors, website personalization allows B2B businesses to create unique experiences for visitors based on factors like location, industry and even website behavior.
Ok, got it. Let’s add location, website behavior and personalized digital experiences, and we should be good. Does anyone see the problem here? Bueller, Bueller, anyone?
There is no “person” in any of this so-called “personalization.” There are personas, but they’re most likely role based. Web behaviors, yes important, but without understanding the motivations behind those actions, you only left to guess their intentions.
How do you begin to understand behaviors, motivations and preferences? Start with understanding audience personalities.
In almost every industry, there are only 1-2 dominant personalities. If you’re in the life sciences segment, there is a good chance you’ll over-index with “skeptics” and “status quo” seekers. Selling to a marketing audience? You’re going to find an overabundance of “influencers” and “champions.”
To truly create a world class customer experience, you have to be able to align to the preferences of your audience. Those preferences are not driven by a title or a role.
And it’s not just their preference for channel and content, but more importantly, how the content is packaged, how it’s messaged, and/or how it’s created.
Understanding your dominant audience provides the insight to set your marketing, digital and engagement strategy. It provides the level of insight necessary to take your existing activities and assets to the next level.
Webinars appeal to a certain audience, but only if the topic is research or data backed, and presented by a credible speaker. Animated videos are preferred by another audience type, as long as they are sharable and short.
Don’t rest on thinking you have the right content, at the right place (in the buying process), in the right channel. It’s not enough. Not all the buyers are the same, they all don’t take the same path, consume the same content, and/or prefer the same channel.
In fact, without really knowing their personal motivation and behaviors, most of this insight is based on previous experiences that happened randomly but is assumed to be true for all, and/or based on research with buyers who will say one thing, and then do another.
Deep down inside we know that to be true, because we know that buyers are people, and people are as unique as their personalities…just as no two buyer experiences are the same.
“Personalization” as it is defined for B2B today, is more about trying to get the tools to work better, than it is about improving customer experience. Technology is an enabler, but it is not personalization. Understanding what makes buyers human is. The process has to be flipped so that it starts with the goal of understanding buyers at a deeper level, do that, and the tools will begin to work better.
Is your ABM program not producing the results you hoped? Hear Scott describe how Personality Based Marketing (PBM) can improve ABM success during his session at the B2SMBI virtual conference. A replay of Scott’s presentation is available below:
For more information on Personality Based Marketing” download our e-book Carbon Quadrants.
The employee revolution we’re now experiencing has been coming for years.
The “canary in the coalmine” is, and has been Gallup’s Employee Engagement poll which has been flashing red since it’s start. The first year of the poll (2000) showed that only 26% of employees were actively engaged at work, while 18% were actively not engaged (e.g. they were basically looking for another job).
Today’s workforce is changing
At no point over the past 20 years, has engagement ever been higher than 35%. Given the opportunity that a tight labor market presents, and the impact of Covid on the workplace, it’s not surprising we are now seeing record quit rates.
But it’s not just quitting. The real insight is that talent is upgrading their work situation – better pay, more flexibility, and permanent remote working.
We recognized this trend in 2017 and realized that workers had changed their expectations, but companies had either neglected to recognize it, and/or resisted doing anything about it.
As a result, we seized the opportunity to create a new type of work environment built on satisfying those evolving expectations. Our model flipped the script to life-work balance and was built on 5 principles which we believe are what workers desire now – flexibility, trust, autonomy, purpose, and mastery.
It’s been five years since our founding, and we’ve learned a lot about managing the needs and desires of today’s workforce.
What does today’s workforce want?
Here’s what you need to know to make the change:
Rethink your management style – the first thing that managers need to do is change how they view their relationship with their employees. Ask yourself, “Would these people work for me if they didn’t have to? And then, “What would I do differently?” This is the new reality. With more jobs than people to fill them, you have to reset your management style.
Acknowledge their efforts – when was the last time you complimented anyone on your team? If you can’t answer that question by saying, “yesterday,” you’ve got some work to do.
Recognize and accommodate their needs – in this new environment, life comes first. You may have to work around school or practice schedules, without making people feel guilty. Most importantly, you may have to prioritize your employees’ needs over the clients, or at a minimum, find a happy balance. Accepting any request from the client blindly, without considering your team situation, will call into question your commitment to making real change.
Trust and autonomy– the new relationship between you and your employees will have to be built on trust. Treat employees as if they were professional athletes with contracts. They’re paid to perform, so let them. Be clear in your expectations, and assume the majority of the people want to do their best. This will also help to make you a better manager. Speaking of which, if you’re a micromanager or feel the need to control everything, this is going to be a difficult transition.
Give them space and opportunity to grow – related to above, you need to give employees the opportunity to grow. Many of the side giggers that work for us are doing so to develop new skills sets. For example, if you’re a copywriter, the tendency is to specialize that person to be a technical, digital, long form or short form writer. If they can write, why not be allowed to do any or all? If you want to retain your best talent, allow them to follow their passions even if it means they might leave. It offers the opportunity for “mastery” which, according to Daniel Pink in his book Drive, is key to engaging employees.
Lastly, understand that this is an exchange of value.
Employees will come and go, but what is of most importance is to realize that at the end of the day this is about the relationship. It’s not just about a salary, it’s also about an opportunity for employees to develop or refine skill sets, gain additional experience, and ultimately advance a career. We ask a lot of our employees let’s make sure we’re giving them equal value.
We founded the company on the idea that if we created an experience and environment that better engaged talent that they would be happier. If they were happier, they would produce better outputs and in return create happy clients. Our client retention rate and Glassdoor ratings tell us that we’re headed in the right direction.
But the one thing we know for certain (and we have the research) is that no two people work the same way. Flexibility isn’t something that is an option today, it’s a requirement. A recent poll by Future Forum of 10,000 employees found that 95% want flexibility hours.
Having a rigid, highly structured, single approach to how work gets done is now obsolete. It’s a “want to” versus a “have to” world. You want employees to work for you and what they want is greater flexibility, autonomy and respect. Give it to them.
Does the answer to improving B2B marketing success tie back to a problem discovered during World War II? Perhaps.
The B-17 plane was quick and inexpensive to build with a goal of “blackening the sky” over Europe. The problem with that strategy was because they were designed to be quickly built they ended up being easily shot down. In fact, soon after entering the war, the B17 was getting shot out of the sky faster than they could be built.
Recognizing that something had to be done to keep them in the air, the decision was made to assemble a group of engineers to study the returning planes, and assess where to add armour.
The team was about to submit their findings when Abraham Wald, a lead engineer on the project, pointed out that they were thinking about the problem the wrong way. Instead of putting armour on areas that were damaged by bullets, they should be thinking about adding armor to the areas where there were no bullet holes, because those areas were most vulnerable.
This phenomenon, known as “survivorship bias,” can be seen all over B2B marketing. Survival bias is a type of selection bias. It’s a logic error that occurs when focusing on things that survive rather than looking at things that didn’t. By selectively leaving data out of the analysis it can cause one to make the wrong conclusion, like putting armor on the bullet holes of returning planes.
In B2B marketing, there are signs of this bias in almost everything we do. We try to scale and “optimize” a 3% response rate or 10% open rate. Focusing on the “returning planes,” missing the opportunity to assess, and understand, how to improve on the 90%+ of our effort that didn’t return a result.
This myopic view on scaling the “3%” drives us to an endless cycle of investing in new technologies. Providing a momentary boost in performance which quickly dissipates. This stacking more tools on the “stack” has now put us at the top of the yield curve. Essentially, marketing tools are now being shot out of the sky faster than they can be built.
Scale has become the enemy of the good. Remember this for 2022. Volume will not necessarily get you to your goals. For example, according to Hubspot’s 2021 Industry Survey (over 100K companies) email performance dropped by 30% from the previous year, which was historically low. So what did companies do? They sent even more emails, increasing by over 120%. (I believe that is commonly referred to as the definition of insanity.)
For years, I searched for an answer for why marketing performance continued to be poor, despite advancement in new technologies. Stumbling upon survival and selection bias helped to explain some things but what I’ve concluded is that at the core, it’s a motivational issue. Confusing activity for performance is convenient. Searching for, assessing and acquiring new tools offers hope and can feel like you’re making progress.
It’s time to stop looking external for a solution and turn our efforts internally. The answer to improving performance lies in the insight from the missing data.
To win the war on poor performance will require a commitment to thinking differently, like Wald. Not everyone will be willing, or able, to make this journey, but as another WWII hero, Winston Churchill once said; “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Onward soldier!
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
CASE STUDY
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
