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Personalized marketing aims to understand and optimally serve individual customer needs. To ensure that your B2B communication is not perceived as advertising and is simply ignored, it needs the right content.

Natural spam filter: the brain

Like a well-set email account, our brain sorts out incoming messages: Bulk emails with content that misses personal need or interest end up directly in the spam folder - target missed. What do these recurring, broadly worded advertisements have in common? They are annoying!

At least as long as we are not explicitly interested in these topics.

This is exactly the crucial point: The human brain is able to scan incoming information for keywords. If these are irrelevant, the message is lost in the general murmur of news.

Efficient marketing therefore requires certain stimuli in order to attract attention in the first place.

Personalized marketing through marketing automation

You can put it to the test yourself: How do you react when you are addressed personally and, above all, correctly and provided with information that you are really interested in? You feel valued and spontaneously develop a certain sympathy for the sender.

The probability that you will consciously take note of this message increases significantly - because it is interesting to you and because a tailor-made e-mail that pleasantly stands out from the general flood of information gives you a feeling of control and security: Addressing you by your first name and appropriate content triggers a sense of well-being - after all, you know what it's all about.

Even if these processes take place unconsciously, they still develop an enormous effect - and shape the recipient's conviction. The personalization of such marketing messages reduces the feeling of helplessness, of being exposed to this flood of information.

For example, if you are shown exactly the content you were looking for on a website, you will perceive it differently than the many other messages that are broadly and anonymously distributed.

Responsible for this human phenomenon is the Reticular Activating System (RAS) in the brain, which carefully filters information: If this information is in direct contact with us, we take it in better - this hurdle must therefore be taken in a targeted manner in personalized marketing.

Source: Customer Journey according to Aioma

Personalized marketing through marketing automation

Personalization has become a marketing trend in its own right for a reason - but what exactly is hiding behind it?

Ultimately, it's about creating a special experience for the potential customer: He should feel accepted with his concerns and problems when he is offered content personally - and that in an individually sent email.

Of course, this is wishful thinking, but with marketing automation you come very close to it: On the one hand, it supports the personalization of content, on the other hand, it allows the well-timed sending of newsletters.

Marketing Automation is an indispensable tool in Personalized Marketing that significantly improves the customer experience - without any additional effort on the part of your employees.

But there are some prerequisites to be met first in order to optimize your customers' satisfaction.

For personalized marketing you need

  • detailed and appropriate personas,

  • Content that is truly relevant to your customers,

  • the perfect time to address them, and

  • the communication channel that your persona prefers to use

The target group: Knowing personas

The blanket target group definition was replaced by the persona concept some time ago - for personalised marketing it is indispensable. Only in this way can the characteristics of potential customers be precisely worked out and conclusions drawn about their probable needs and expected behaviour.

These findings, in turn, form the reliable basis for precisely tailored marketing - from the adaptation of the website to the multi-level mail campaign.

But the once defined personas are only the beginning: Not only the consistent evaluation of the campaign results, but every click, every page view and every single download will provide you with new and above all finer information, which you can use to optimize your personas and to develop new automatisms.

Source: Customer Profile from Pedalix Software

Content: Only relevance counts

If you know your personas exactly, it is best to put yourself in their shoes: What information is interesting at what time?

Even during content creation, which is the basis for personalized marketing, you should therefore keep the defined personas in mind - their characteristics reliably provide you with the decisive impulses.

Create rich text, audio, video, and other formats to feed the marketing automation solution with the right content

The decisive factor here is the added value with which you convince your potential customers of your company's expertise - and this can take the form of an email, a social media post or lead magnet as well as a dynamic website.

Source: Preview of a LinkedIn post with the Pedalix software

Timing: Analyzing needs precisely

The need for information changes in the course of the customer journey - this is exactly what personalized marketing should pick up on.

The stated goal is that the measures support the conversion of an anonymous user into a well-known and loyal customer.

You can only achieve this if you offer the user information at the optimal time - and the appropriate information at that.

When a user first comes across your homepage, he is looking for a solution to his problem or his need.

In this case, completely different incentives are recommended than they would be for an existing customer who is looking for news from you.

This is where a marketing automation solution comes into its own: It helps you differentiate, classifies the user profile and its stage in the customer journey, and thus ensures that the appropriate content is presented - personalized, of course.

Well-timed communication should also be understood as a process: After all, successful conversion is not a conclusion, but only heralds the next stage.

In this way, you can build up stable and extremely valuable customer relationships step by step and thus open up new sales potential.

Source: Customer Journey Reporting from Pedalix Software

The Channel: Customers set the rules

The possibilities for personalized communication are extremely diverse. Today, communication channels beyond the company's own website include not only newsletters, but above all social media channels.

 

Source: Personalized Newsletter from Pedalix Software

However, it is always decisive on which channels your target customer prefers to obtain information - after all, your personalised marketing should also be perceived and received.

As a company, you should offer selected communication channels, provide them with content on a regular basis and, above all, maintain them carefully.

It makes sense to tailor personalized marketing to several channels - here, too, marketing automation supports you effectively: once the content is in place, it can be intelligently linked for the various communication channels and placed at the appropriate time.

Conclusion

Personalized marketing takes into account a human need: We absorb content much better as soon as we are personally addressed with content that is interesting to us.

What seems so complicated at first glance can be mastered excellently with marketing automation: You put yourself in a position not only to address your potential customers with the correct name at the right time, but also to accompany and guide them on their customer journey with the content placed.

In this way, you gradually create the level at which lucrative business can be realized - and all automatically.

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