Gartner research of technology and service providers (TSPs) indicates that marketers in “growth” organizations are personalizing webpages and emails for target accounts significantly more than those in “no growth” organizations. Growth is defined by the TSPs’ projected change in revenue for fiscal year 2019 versus 2018.  Specifically, 54% of growth companies personalize webpages for target accounts versus 36% of no-growth companies.

Building Blocks for Personalization

However, to deliver website personalization for anonymous buyers,  you will need some key building blocks including account profile data, content assets and personalization engine technology.  In addition, your website will need to identify the company name of the visitor by using reverse IP lookup technology. Once you have these elements in place, how do you deliver relevant experiences if you have very little data about your target accounts and their buying process for selecting a solution?  For example, does the IT organization lead the evaluation process or does the business team control the agenda?

Augment Your Account Profile Data 

In my research note “Personalize Account-Based Marketing Experiences With Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles”, I describe best practices to help marketers use psychographic data from Gartner’s enterprise technology adoption profiles to enhance their understanding of the organization’s mindset and decision-making processes for buying solutions.  Some TSPs use a combination of firmographic (e.g., company size, location, industry) and technographic (current tech stack) data to personalize the website experience. However, these data types do not capture the organization’s buying personality including who controls the evaluation process and their ability to embrace new ideas. By augmenting the account profile with psychographic data, marketers can present relevant content assets such as case studies, thought leadership research or ROI calculators to match the content and evaluation preferences of the buying team.

What is Your Approach

How do you approach the personalization of experiences for your demand generation or ABM programs?  What types of customer data do you use to enrich your account profiles?  Please comment and let me know your thoughts.