Welcome back to our series on 2024 marketing trends impacting B2B marketers. If you’ve missed any of our previous installments, no worries. Insights are waiting for you:
But now it’s time to get personal. Fear not, there’s no uncomfortable ice breakers or mandatory fun in this article. We’re talking about the evolving expectations of users to have more individualized experiences from brands!
Trend #4: Personalized Content is Here to Stay
So many brands are still treating customers like, “I don’t know about you” while customers shout, “don’t lie to me I know you do!”
To an extent, we get it—personalized content experiences used to feel CREEPY, but for the most part people have grown comfortable with the fact that in our pockets is a tiny supercomputer that knows our every thought and expect our online experiences to be about us and made for us.
In fact, according to the Fifth Edition of Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 73% of customers expect businesses to anticipate their needs and 61% of consumers are comfortable with companies using relevant personal information in a transparent and beneficial manner – up from 52% in only two short years.
What’s driving this desire and comfort level for customers to seek personalized experiences? We think it’s because they are seeing value when it’s deployed correctly and transparently.
With the shift towards more first-party data collection and adoption of machine learning and generative AI personalizing content for known users, the foundation is being set for brands to deliver highly personalized experiences at scale to their users.
The companies that implement personalization well? They’ll be rewarded in ROI!
- McKinsey’s Next In Personalization report states that “Companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.”
- Accenture found that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
And sure, most brands are checking some of the boxes on personalization. But very few have them all covered and optimized.
Your Personalization Checklist
Is it everything? No, but it’s a great starting rubric if you’re getting ready to start measuring your implementation of personalized content in a meaningful way.
- Personalized Emails: And no, we don’t mean using a merge field, we mean using the data you collect about your customers to shape the content of the communications you send them.
- Dynamic Website Content: Using a user’s session and historic behavior to personalized landing pages, product recommendations and navigational options. Take this a step further by offering users customized experiences within the logged-in version of your experience that displays back to them helpful facets of their data to make engaging with your brand that much easier.
- Targeted Advertising: Leveraging hyper-segmentation to deliver the most relevant ad campaigns to users based on interests, current experiences (hello geo-targeted messaging) and past engagements with your brand.
- Individualized Product Recommendations: If you know what your customers buy, you should be able to determine what they are likely to buy in the future. Make that transaction easier for them by providing those recommendations.
- Personalized Video Content: While still a relatively new technology, there are tools available today for creating unique videos for each customer—tailored to their specific needs. Whether used as a sales tool, or a step in building the customer loyalty loop—this technology allows marketers to take one of the highest engaging mediums and make it that much more effective.
- Interactive Content: Allowing users to define their needs to get personalized recommendations without having to engage a salesperson or wade through pages and pages of product reference.
Transparency truth: Personalization at scale is a technology and content investment, but when implemented well—it pays off.
Explore the Rest of the Trends
Trend #1: Obviously It’s AI, Right? Obviously.
Trend #2: It’s the First-Party Data Party!
Trend #3: Video: It’s Still Totally Dominating.
Trend #5: More Marketing Forecasting, Please!
We love music here at Simantel, so you might notice some pop song lyrics sprinkled throughout the report. Did you catch the one in this trend? It’s 22 by Taylor Swift.
