If you have a complex sales process like most B2B companies do, it makes sense for you to consider personalizing your website content based on where in the sales process the customer is currently. This help the customer along the complex journey from hearing about you to understanding fully how you can help them the best.
Even if your sales has had the first contact with the customer, it's still likely that the customer visits your website multiple times to learn about your offering and company. It's worthwhile to optimize your content for each stage in the customer journey instead of showing the same customer a lead generation form that they already filled ─ this is just wasted website real estate. Personalizing the content in each stage drives a lot of additional business value, for example more leads, shorter sales cycles, higher retention, more customer referrals.
Optimizing top of the funnel content with personalization
Like most successful businesses today, your content startegy might include driving awareness using top of the funnel content. Blog-based content is a great way to introduce the customer to the problem they are having and how you might be solving it for them.
If the customer enters your blog through a certain channel, you can personalize your content based on that channel using website personalization software such as Markettailor. You can also use sales pipeline CRM to create multiple custom sales pipelines and get a clear view of your entire sales cycle. Depending on the channel, the customer might care about very different things in the content. For example, readers coming from Reddit or Hacker News might be more technically inclined so it's ok to include keywords and examples in your content that are more technical. Read more about how to personalize content based on the marketing channel.
If the website visitor enters your website through a particular blog post ─ say a blog post on "How to nurture pipeline leads leads with personalized content" ─ it indicates interest about those particular topics and keywords. You can personalize the rest of your website based on the knowledge that the customer might be interested in nurturing pipeline leads, even if you serve multiple use cases such as lead generation and customer retention 😉
Optimizing middle of the funnel content with personalization
When the customer converts in your lead generation form and ends up in your CRM, the customer starts evaluating you and your competition to consider what is the best option for them.
At this point in the customer journey, it stops making sense to show the customer the same lead generation form on the website, because you already have their contact details. Instead, you can personalize the website content for them that highlights how your product is different and better than the competitor's product, and what key factors the customer should consider when making their decision. You can go as far as showing the customer's dedicated salesperson on the website and say "I you have any more questions, Jill is here to answer any questions".
Optimizing bottom of the funnel content with personalization
When the lead eventually converts to a paying customer, the role of content shifts to be more focused on customer success. Again, it makes sense to stop showing lead generation forms on the website when the customer is already your customer.
You can highlight interesting use cases when the customer visits your website and drive higher product adoption that way. If you're launching new advanced features that you wouldn't mention to new users yet, you can highlight those to the customers that have been with you for a while and have already gained value from your product.
You can also drive additional business value by highlighting referral campaigns to existing customers. This way you can quickly start generating referral revenue especially if you highlight your referral campaign to your most devoted customers.
Conclusion
It's important to consider optimizing your content along the whole customer journey using personalization. For a business, it can generate more leads, lead to shorter sales cycles, achieve higher customer retention, and create more customer referrals. For a customer, personalization helps them understand faster why they need your product, why they should choose your product, and how they maximize value generation from your product.
