B2B Marketing: Using behavioral data to create a customer-centric website
“DLT is a value-added reseller. We work with the public sector, pairing some of the leading technologies and software solutions in the industry and helping to deliver those into the public sector,” said Tom Mahoney, Director, Marketing Operations, DLT.
The company helps to eliminate the obstacles to getting cutting-edge products and services into the hands of the government employees who need to be using it.
In the spirit of eliminating obstacles, DLT decided to do just that with its own customer experience by optimizing the company’s website and content.
When looking at the website, Mahoney said he and his team asked themselves, “Was it performing for us, was it delivering the message we wanted to deliver and was it easy to use?”
Mahoney pointed out that if the website isn’t working for you as a marketer, then it is definitely not going to work for your customers.
“We couldn’t even find or access the type of content that we wanted to be seeing, and we had built it,” he said. “We had to take stock of that, step back and ask ourselves what the website is meant to do and how can we make the experience a little more optimal?”
That led to a project where the team brought content personalization to the forefront of the website, so that as they learned more about the customer, the content they saw was more relevant.
“We brought that customer a little bit closer to the solution, and the solution a little bit closer to the government,” he said.
Capitalize on every opportunity and asset
“We were going to be undergoing a website transition anyway, because we had undergone a branding redesign in 2015. So we knew we were going to have to update the website,” Tom said.
He and his team decided to optimize the website during the transition to be a little more modern and sophisticated experience.
“When you’re working with some of the leading technology and software providers in the world, you want your website to reflect that,” he said. “It was time to stop and make an investment and make sure the website was optimized for that experience.”
A boon to the project was that the team had 25 years of experience and content to pull from.
“[We had] hundreds of different assets that were already created and tailored by our partners for the end sector,” he said.
Read digital body language
The only issue, Tom added, was pairing the right piece with the right prospect at the right time. That issue is solved with time — as a person visits or interacts with DLT, their profile grows and those correct choices can be made.
“As we learn more about you and we understand a little bit about where you’re coming from, how you access our website and whether or not you’re a known contact in our database … we’re able to make intelligent guesses about what type of content you’re looking for,” he said.
By using data to make their experience richer, the interaction between DLT and a prospect becomes much more high value.
“We’re always asking the customer to give us a little bit more information about themselves, and the exchange for that is that we have to make it more personal to them; we have to give them something that’s of value to them,” Mahoney said.
If marketers can do a better job of supplying that experience early on, more trust will be built up. With that trust, customers will be more likely to engage with content, and eventually — your product.
“We’re going get so much more interaction with them in that limited time window that we have. We’re going to be able to convert them a little bit more efficiently,” he said.
At the end of the process, that hypothesis was proven true, with website conversions going up 42%.
“It wasn’t new content, it wasn’t new visitors,” he said. “It was just a new way of presenting that content to the visitor that was more aligned to their profile.”
Take incremental steps towards relevancy
Tom advised that marketers need to take these steps toward relevancy and “make a decision to change and test, and try something new.”
This effort was in no means done overnight, he said, and “you actually have to take the time to look at what you’ve got, benchmark your data, and make strategic choices about what’s one change you’re going to make to try to improve your experience. Then take the next step after that.”
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Categories: B2B Marketing B2B marketing, brand strategy, DLT, marketing solutions, processes, Thomas Mahoney
