B2B Personalization Efforts Are Incomplete

Personalization has become increasingly important in customer buying journeys, yet an increasing number of companies are failing to use personalization throughout the customer post-sale journey, according to Forrester Research’s “The State of B2B Personalization, 2024” report.

“B2B organizations must prioritize full-life-cycle personalization across persona-based experiences by investing in a comprehensive data strategy across the organization to effectively align personalization with buyer and customer expectations,” Forrester says.

And generative artificial intelligence, which is being touted as a way to help marketing in many ways, could actually make full-life-cycle personalization even worse, according to the research firm. Full-life-cycle personalization is already lacking, it says.

Nearly all (92 percent) of the respondents in the previous year’s “State of Digital Marketing” report said they were using personalization for B2B marketing activities. However, the use of personalization was inconsistent, running very high during the commit and personalization phases of the journey but falling off during the post-sale phase.

B2B prospects and customers should have personalization throughout their buying journeys, Forrester recommends. “Effective B2B personalization requires designing and delivering experiences based on buying group dynamics and account attributes.”

The effectiveness of B2B personalization differs depending on the dynamics of the buyer or customer group, the needs and preferences of the individual, and the specific interaction, according to the research firm.

According to the “2024 Forrester Buyer Journey Survey,” nearly all (95 percent) younger purchase influencers and only slightly fewer (83 percent) older purchase influencers are using or plan to use genAI in the purchasing process, but relevant personalization needs to be delivered through the entire buying journey.

“B2B organizations have much work to do to catch up to their audiences’ expectations for full-life-cycle personalization fueled by the right amount of just-right content,” Forrester says. “Over half of vendor content is currently missing the mark.”

No Single Approach Dominates

Companies use a combination of zero-, first-, second-, and third-party personalization tools, with second-party (66 percent) and first-party (64 percent) being the most popular. With the sunsetting of cookies and consumer pushback against them, third-party tools are now used by only 35 percent of respondents. Slightly fewer (34 percent) use zero-party tools.

“This opens opportunities to leverage zero-party data and third-party data to fuel personalization efforts by illuminating account-level interactions and keyword research topics,” Forrester recommends.

The technology that companies use for B2B personalization are varied as well, with most using multiple solutions.

The most popular (cited by 36 percent) by far is personalization built into content management and delivery systems. Segment-based targeting (30 percent), behavior-based personalization (30 percent), and custom content creation based on audience data (27 percent) are popular as well.

However, companies have to carefully weigh the amount of content they provide to prospects and customers. Half of the companies surveyed said vendors provide them with too much material, while a little more (53 percent) said that much of the material they do receive is worthless.

Forrester also urges companies to use genAI in the buying process to obtain relevant information and make recommendations, something that 91 percent of them are already doing or planning to do. Nearly four-fifths (78 percent) of decision makers who plan to use AI within the next year and who have the support of executives expect genAI to have an impact on consumer interactions within the next two years. Nearly half (42 percent) said using genAI-enhanced experiences to personalize customer interactions is one of their most important use cases for rolling out the technology within the next year.

Forrester also recommends that B2B companies provide behavior-based, group-aware personalization, with two-thirds of the people involved in purchases saying that they made purchases after group or interdepartmental meetings.