Marketing automation leader Marketo cites research claiming highly personalized mobile and web experiences can lead to a 30% increase in conversion rates and up to a 270% increase in content consumption. Marketo simplifies the approach into 3 big W’s.

Who—Who will you personalize for?
What—What will you personalize?
Where—Where will you present personalized content?

Personalization in business-to-business (B2B) marketing can be applied based on:

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—How can you target and personalize for specific companies or existing customers?
Persona-based—How might you target specific buyer personas by title, job functions, needs and pain points?
Location—Can you target businesses based on location?
Behavior—The holy grail of personalization targets buyers based on behavior and data drawn from analytics across their journey.

Let’s say you’ve made major strides and you’re tapping into a marketing stack that enables you to execute real-time personalization across the customer experience like a 21st century titan of communications.

But wait. All is not yet good because delivering hyper-personalized messages only works when it’s persuasive. When it compels action. You need to be able to summon “persuasive content” up and down the funnel, across every touchpoint, in the precise moment it’s most relevant.

You need to understand and apply brain science to create consistently persuasive content.

Brain science, in brief

Let’s look at the fundamentals of persuasion.

Awaken the old brain

There’s a great big part of the brain, the neocortex, that’s labeled the “new brain.” It’s analytical. A white paper may turn it on, but decisions don’t happen here. Decision-making takes place in a smaller, different part of the brain. Brainy folks call it the limbic system; marketers call it the “old brain.” This component of the brain is dominated by a survival instinct. It fires neurons that do decide to buy—or not.

To generate demand, you need to awaken the old brain. You need to sound an alarm that says, “Status quo is no longer safe.”

Turn on the beta switch

Here are some realities of what’s going on in your customer’s brain:

Reticular Activator (RA)—This part of your brain is forever on the lookout for things that are either familiar and/or problematic.
Alpha Mode—A hypnotic state of the brain habitually performs tasks without any conscious thought.
Beta Mode—This is the brain’s active state of engagement. The person consciously notices content as it’s on the lookout new ideas and solutions.

Order here

Interrupt, engage, educate and offer

Persuasive content turns on the beta mode. Here’s a look at a four-step process that explains how it’s done:

Interrupt—People listen for the “What’s in it for me?” message. Attention is earned when the brain bites at something it considers valuable. Your headline will often be what does or doesn’t awake a receptive beta pattern.
Engage—You achieve engagement when the prospect detects helpful information will follow.
Educate—Most marketers play the “sales” card as soon as a prospect is engaged (or even before). Persuasive marketers tend not to. They favor the idea of delivering specific information (a.k.a. content marketing) focused on helping make prospects more informed and better buyers.
Offer—Ultimately, the marketer needs to provide a reason to act now—even if the action isn’t about purchasing.

Profiles of personalized marketing

Starbucks

Starbucks engages customers with its mobile app My Starbucks Rewards™️ Program, which leverages purchase history, location data, and more. According to GlobalWebIndex, the introduction of the rewards system saw Starbucks’ revenue soaring to $2.56 billion, while the mobile app has generated around 6 million sales per month (around 22% of all US sales).

Spotify

Spotify has mastered the fine art of content recommendations. Users are sent personalized playlists based on listening history and concert notices about bands they’ve engaged with.

Netflix

Netflix combines behavioral attributes with predictive learning to present subscribers content recommendations. More than 75 percent of its website activity is driven by their personalization engine.

Let’s start smart

The best way to start down the path of personalized marketing is to get clear about where you are today with your technology, processes, and capabilities. It’s a journey, but it’s a worthwhile one. Let’s talk about it.