Personalization and collaboration
Trends and tactics for tailoring the client experience
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While 60% of marketers in our survey believe they are highly proficient or expert in personalizing thought leadership, less than a third (28%) use these personalization skills to tailor content for individual accounts. Instead, most marketers (56%) typically implement one-to-few personalization, tailoring thought leadership campaigns for small groups or clusters of accounts with similar business attributes or imperatives.
Frank Smietana, Head of Strategic Content & Insights, State Street Alpha, Charles River Development, says: “We’re very specific about [client] issues and problems, which builds authenticity and credibility.”
But it’s not easy to dig deep. Natasha Thornton, Account Based Marketing, Financial Services, IBM, says: “I personally feel there's tremendous opportunity in taking that one step further in terms of personalization, but not without significant investment.”
Other marketers, like Ben Evetts, Head of Brand, Thought Leadership and Content, Cigna, feel B2B marketing has a long way to go before it reaches B2C levels of sophistication. “As soon as I start engaging with B2B tools, I feel like we've regressed 20 years,” he says.
Leaders are more likely than laggards to personalize thought leadership campaigns for individual accounts (36% compared with 18%, respectively)—perhaps not surprising, given just 36% of laggards believe they have strong proficiency in asset personalization/customization compared with three in five leaders.
The top elements that marketers personalize include solutions (54%), calls to action (42%), expert contributors (38%), and introductions (36%). However, leaders are more likely than all other respondents to customize the datasets they use to back up thought leadership. By customizing the data—e.g. using sector- or role-specific statistics instead of aggregate data—leaders are able to create more relevant and therefore impactful content.
In-person events top the list of formats that generate the highest engagement, followed by presentations, videos, and interactive tools.
Marketers placed audiobooks, text-based formats (e.g. reports), and podcasts at the bottom of the list.
However, it’s important to note that the level of engagement you want depends on your objectives for thought leadership. For example, a podcast created for a one-to-many campaign may not garner thousands of listens, but if a target persona engages with the podcast for 30 minutes, that’s a strong intent signal.
Shimona Chadha, Vertical Marketing Head (Americas), HCLTech, says: “It's OK if we don't create lots of new content; we’re more interested in seeing how what we have is performing. The buzzword for us is activation. How do you activate your dark funnel?”
Dark social is an effective way to promote thought leadership. Messaging apps expand the reach and engagement significantly.
The dark funnel is the part of the sales funnel that is not tracked by analytics platforms. Peeyush Dubey, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Tech Mahindra, believes the dark funnel is also one of the most effective channels for promoting thought leadership. “Messaging apps [like WhatsApp] expand the reach and engagement significantly.”
Thought leadership has long been a valuable executive engagement tactic—especially when positioned as a collaborative exercise.
Co-creating or collaborating on thought leadership can mean anything from getting input from a client on a topic idea (all good thought leadership addresses client challenges) to conducting interviews with clients and ultimately discussing insights alongside them at events.
The vast majority (90%) of leaders believe co-creating thought leadership with clients and partners improves the strength of their relationship, and a further 38% have used thought leadership to collaborate with clients in the past 12 months.
Co-creation with clients is paramount.
In contrast, just half of laggards agree that co-creation improved the strength of the relationship, and a mere 19% use thought leadership to collaborate with clients in the past year.
The benefits of collaboration go beyond strengthening the relationship with clients. Serge Perignon, Global Head, Thought Leadership Institute, Tata Consultancy Services, says: “By partnering with other people who look at the world differently, you have a richer outcome and there’s a huge relationship component. It makes our ideas better and it creates trust.”
Nearly three-quarters (71%) of marketers agree their client relationship managers are hesitant to approach clients with opportunities for co-creation unless they’ve done it before.
Marketers must do more to communicate with sales the value of collaborating with clients. Developing sales enablement toolkits can give relationship managers the confidence to reach out, and it’s clear that those firms which do so, see an uptick in crucial metrics. “We make a point of not simply giving sales teams the research results but talking through the go-to-market approach,” says Terry Rand, Global Head of Growth Industry Marketing, LinkedIn. “It's important to make sure we bring them on the journey with us; this helps the narrative resonate and allows them to ask questions. For us, it’s all about partnership.”
