Although websites have been at the center of the customer journey for years, most businesses continue to struggle to leverage this essential tool to deliver a fully personalized customer experience. This presents a challenge for both customers and marketers alike, preventing each from accomplishing their goals and witnessing the type of results they strive to achieve.
For customers, lack of website personalization serves as another roadblock keeping them from finding a solution to their pain points. When the content they need to make a decision is hidden and difficult to find, they have no other choice but to fend for themselves to try to find the answers they need –– which is the last thing they want to do when they’re already unsure of what they are searching for in the first place. To make matters worse, this sense of frustration often leads customers to choose the solution that’s readily available, even if it’s not necessarily the right option (or the best).
While practices such as segmentation open the door for marketers to deliver personalized content through tactics like email and landing pages, the complexity and static nature of a website makes it nearly impossible for marketers to utilize this tool in the same way. This obstacle prevents marketers from fully benefiting from one of their most powerful marketing tools and, as a result, prevents them from engaging, educating, and converting new customers.
However, this challenge usually doesn’t stem from marketers’ lack of awareness or desire to transform their websites into robust demand generation and selling tools. Instead, this problem is typically the result of limited knowledge and tools to accomplish this goal.
Thankfully, the right resources and strategy make it possible for marketers to transform their website to serve as a key component of a personalized marketing journey. So, if website personalization is a goal for your organization, keep reading to learn what key components you need to get you on the right path toward delivering a tailored experience that engages, nurtures, and converts prospective customers.
Use Marketing Automation to Map Your Content and Drive Engagement
Personalize the Web Experience Through Data Collection
While customer personas can provide a great foundation for helping us understand our customers’ preferences, they only begin to offer us a glimpse into the ideal customer journey. In today’s world, tools such as Google Analytics provide a more in-depth view at the behavior of our customers, enabling us to track how they interact with our website and which elements of it capture their attention.
When it comes to website personalization, these insights are invaluable because they provide us a roadmap of how we can leverage this tool to attract, engage, and convert our audience. Further, the more you drill down and look at data such as age, location, occupation, the more you deepen your understanding of what truly speaks to each individual customer based on their overall characteristics.
Making data collection a priority will ensure you have the information you need to optimize your website to match the buyer journey your customers expect.
Deliver Targeted, Personalized Content to Increase Engagement
Content is king, especially in the world of B2B marketing, which is why it’s an important piece of creating a unique and tailored website experience. Your website should serve as a tool to deliver content that addresses your customers’ greatest concerns and speaks to how you are the most equipped to solve them.
Knowing what type of content to deliver stems back to using data collection to get to know your customers. Analyzing your data for patterns in areas such as keyword searches and page views can give you a better idea of what content to feature on your website and where. Furthermore, this information can provide insight that will empower you to speak the same language as your consumers, so you can create content that accurately reflects their pain points and interests and motivates engagement.
Connect the Dots With an Omnichannel Approach
Even if your website is fully optimized to match the needs and interests of your consumer, you can’t expect every visitor to immediately convert. Instead, you have to look at your website as one of many connected pieces in the customer journey.
Your website is not only intended as a tool to help you deliver targeted content that nurtures your customers and informs them about what you do; it should also be designed to help you collect valuable insights that will inform other marketing efforts such as email, PPC and events. Therefore, it’s good practice to use customer behavior insights to inform the rest of your marketing strategy and ensure that your audience is receiving that same type of cohesive tailored customer experience wherever they go.