Chapter 1

1. We Crave a Personalized Experience

Do you remember the way we used to consume music?

When I was twelve years old, if I had a crush on a girl, I would put together a mixtape for her. While they’re a little dated today, mixtapes are a perfect example of a personalized experience. In fact, sometimes they were maybe a little too personalized. I remember obsessing over which twelve or so songs would go on each side.

Making a mixtape was a big undertaking. Unless you had endless amounts of free time, you couldn’t just churn out a new one each day. That’s what made them such perfect tokens of affection for our crushes. When you made a mixtape for someone, you were telling that person how important they were to you.

Our listening habits—how we experience and consume music—have changed a lot since then. Now, we live in an age where we can find whatever music we’re looking for in an instant, and that music can be tailored to our mood, the time of day, or our recent browsing habits. As mentioned, we used to be limited to about twenty-four songs per mixtape. Now I can make playlists on Spotify (or sub your preferred service) with as many tracks as I want.

My son Ethan, for instance, has a playlist called “The #1 Playlist of All Time,” which, last time I checked, has over 584 songs on it. While the twenty-four songs I selected for my mixtapes were set once I recorded them, Ethan’s playlist is fluid. Sometimes he’ll add some tracks, and sometimes he’ll delete some. It all depends on the experience he’s looking for in that moment.

This extreme personalization comes in handy when, for instance, my son and I are on the road headed to a hockey tournament. He’ll open Spotify, assume the role of DJ, and start selecting whatever tracks he feels suit our mood. On the way to the tournament, he’ll select upbeat music that hypes him up for the game. On the way home, he’s all about finding tracks that will help us wind down. The beauty of Spotify is that he doesn’t need to know the specific songs he’s interested in ahead of time; he can simply pull up the “mood” section, specify what he’s looking for, and Spotify takes care of the rest.

In fact, Spotify has become so sophisticated that it now creates daily playlists for its users that match their usual activities and habits. If you always listen to funk and soul at 10 a.m., for instance, Spotify knows this, and they’ll curate a new playlist of funk and soul jams for your mid-morning break.

Imagine if we could have created the same level of personalization—on a daily basis—for our crushes when we made them mixtapes back in the day. We’d never lose out to the competition again (granted we also didn’t have Tinder/Bumble). Back then, though, putting together a mixtape was impressive enough. Today, especially in the consumer world, expectations for a personalized experience are much, much higher.

Leading Your Audience through the Buyer Journey

Every year, Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins comes up with a report on top internet trends. In her 2018 report, Meeker examined personalization, specifically through the lens of Spotify and how it drives customer satisfaction. Over a three-year period (2014–2017), a couple of stats grew dramatically and caught my attention. Spotify’s daily engagement went up from 37 percent to 44 percent. Interesting, I thought, but why? Here’s the part that really caught me: In 2014, people were listening to an average of 68 unique artists per month. By 2017, the number grew to 112 different artists every month.4 I mean, music hasn’t gotten better in recent years (debatable, but for another book).

As B2B marketers, what can we learn from the huge amount of growth Spotify has been able to achieve? Simply put, Spotify has taken personalization to the next level. Rather than just taking user data and using that to play the same music they know their listeners love ad nauseam, they use that data to introduce their listeners to new ideas.

In the content game, this is how we have to start thinking about our role as marketers. Often, we find ourselves in the position of selling an idea that our target buyers just aren’t ready to discover yet. I can’t tell you how often I hear marketers say things like, “I just can’t get them to consume the content I need them to.” That doesn’t mean we can’t get them there, of course, but it does mean we have to be strategic in how we go about it. Spotify offers an excellent blueprint for guiding your audience through the buyer’s journey.

Spotify calls this their “Made For You” feature. Think of it this way. There are (hopefully) thousands of people loving this book. And if every one of us reached into our pocket, pulled out our phone, and opened Spotify, we’d each have a unique Made For You playlist. We’d also discover recommendations for new artists who we didn’t know existed. Spotify knows how to hook their listeners in with tried and true content, while slowly introducing other ideas. This is what we’re up against as marketers.

Don’t sit here and think, “While that’s Spotify, my audience doesn’t expect that.” Let’s learn from Spotify and figure out how to deliver personalized content experiences. By embracing a Made For You approach, we can get buyers to discover assets that they may very well fall in love with, leading them to trust and buy.

While the Spotify method has proven highly successful, both the B2C and B2B worlds offer many other examples of how to lead your target audience through the buyer’s journey. For the rest of this chapter, we’re going to look at a few of these approaches more closely, focusing on what makes them so effective (or in some cases, not so effective) in creating a personalized experience worthy of our middle school crushes. At the core of all these approaches is the same guiding principle: use content to keep your target audience engaged with you as you move them along the buyer’s journey.

The Infinite Scroll

According to IDG, on average, people need seven pieces of content before they make a buying decision.5 Our goal as marketers, then, is to serve our audience the right content at the right time (whether seven, ten, or, if done right, maybe only three pieces of content) so that we can drive them down the buyer’s journey—and do it as efficiently as possible.

In the world of social media, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn hook us into their content pipeline through what is termed the “infinite scroll.” If you’re like me, you probably find yourself caught up in the infinite scroll fairly often. As a regular contributor on LinkedIn, I usually try to spend five minutes or so before bed catching up on my news feed. I open the app, I start to scroll, and before I know it, five, ten, or even twenty minutes or more have gone by. I’ve been hooked by the infinite scroll, and I’m sure it’s happened to you.

What makes the infinite scroll so effective is that the medium presents us with contextual content. When I’m on LinkedIn, I’m not coming across content posted by my friend’s sister’s therapist, but rather by people who have similar interests to me in the professional sphere. LinkedIn and other social platforms carefully craft our content feeds to keep us moving through, using intelligent algorithms to make sure that we’re only seeing the most relevant content from our many connections—and as many of us can attest, it’s incredibly effective in locking us into a pattern of consuming content.

The infinite scroll makes consuming content and moving from one piece to the next incredibly easy. It’s all built around topics we’re interested in, and there are no dead ends. How nice would it be if, as marketers, we could emulate this experience on our own platforms? It’s great that our audiences can find our brand on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. However, once they’ve clicked on a piece of our content, what do they do? Usually, they jump right back into the infinite scroll, connecting with other brands and their content when they could be connecting with ours.

We as marketers need to think about the type of scroll we want someone to go through. Too many brands in the B2B world default to a chronological experience—our post on May 13 is followed by our post on May 12, and so on. However, are those two pieces of content relevant or connected in any way? Probably not. The beauty of what platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are doing is that they learn to adapt and personalize the content for their viewers—and in so doing, continue to keep them on their platform and keep them engaged. Isn’t this our goal for owned web properties as marketers?

Captivated by the Experience

What is it that makes Disney World so much more magical than most other parks? I’m a huge Disney World fan, but if I’m being honest, their rides aren’t the best out there. However, while some niche amusement parks or experiences may have better rides, Disney has mastered the art of guiding us through one experience to the next.

Take Space...