This article originally appeared at Personalization.com

"Outside-In"
Prospect Personalization Techniques For Complex Products & Services
by: Bob Schmonsees, web2one, Inc.

Thesis:
As the Web evolves, and competition for the prospects’ hearts and minds increases, B2B web sites must become more effective at quickly educating visitors on complex products and services, answering their specific questions, and helping them articulate their unique issues and requirements. To achieve this increased effectiveness, eMarketers need to step it up a notch, and replace the two-dimensional static "brochureware” that is pervasive on the web today with more three dimensional point and click product descriptions that let prospects drill down into as much detail as they need without loosing context.

This requirement for a highly optimized prospect learning experience will require higher quality, and more detailed content that is managed in a more granular fashion, plus an "outside-in” approach to personalizing that content for each prospect.

The result: A more interactive and natural web conversation where prospects learn more about products, on their terms, and vendors learn more about prospects.

Inside-out VS Outside-In

Traditional web personalization techniques are based on an "inside out" philosophy, were the technology is presumed to be smarter about what the visitor needs to see than the visitor is.

The "inside-out" approach works well for selling commodity products where there are large numbers of transactions and a repeatable and well-understood purchasing pattern with few variables. The "inside” intelligence of the software processes some profile data on the visitor (either overtly or covertly acquired) and then makes decisions or recommendations that direct the visitor to specific content. While this can be helpful to the visitor, it can also has the potential to frustrate them when the suggested content is inappropriate or does not satisfy their real needs and desires.

The personalization challenge in marketing complex B2B products and services is not as simple and requires a different philosophical approach and user interaction paradigm. The objective of the marketing portion of a B2B web site is to effectively differentiate their offerings, educate the visitor, generate high quality leads, and begin the qualification and selling process. Optimal eMarketing requires the effective communication of lots of information, issues, opinions and ideas to a wide variety of prospects with many different needs and motivations.

This is where the concept of "outside in" personalization comes in. It is based upon the idea that, for the time being, people are smarter than software and they need to be given the ability to personalize their experience via the way they interact with the site. To get to this level of real time personalization, B2B eMarketing organizations need create web content that:

  1. Is easy to navigate without loosing context
  2. Quickly answers a prospect’s questions
  3. Educates the prospect on the uniqueness of their offerings
  4. Aligns the prospect with their position and influences them to take action
  5. Gathers as much information as possible about that specific prospect

This next generation eMarketing will require a more comprehensive content management strategy called "Message Management” and a new content delivery paradigm called "Active Content Pages”. Together, these techniques enable a highly effective interactive learning and two-way knowledge transfer experience between prospects and web sites. This is accomplished through an interaction that is more conversational and rewarding for the prospect because they control the customization of the content delivery in real time from their "outside in” perspective.

It’s About Control and Interactivity
It is a well-known fact that when a person is in control of an interactive content medium, they are more receptive to the content, and are able to absorb and understand vast amounts of information very quickly. We have been conditioned over the past several decades to engage electronic mediums by clicking a control or navigation device. So, when we click a mouse, for example, we are actually preparing our mind to rapidly receive and process new information.

If you want to test this phenomenon yourself sometime, just sit next to someone who is clicking through the TV channels with a remote control, and see if you can follow along. Most of us find this enormously frustrating because we loose context and can’t follow the rapid change of information. The other person, however, can engage at this level because they are in control of the click, and they are processing the information faster than we are.

Another example of this phenomenon is a video game, where each user controls the interaction to create a unique and highly personal experience. The intensity of the interaction is extreme, because of this "outside–in” control, and it heightens the players concentration, and as a result, their ability to absorb and learn is enhanced.

What if we were able to create eMarketing web sites that replicated this high performance knowledge transfer experience during the prospect education and qualification process? This is what implementing a more formal Message Management process and delivering product information through Active Content Pages can accomplish.

The Message Ain’t The Message Any More!
Broadcast messages and short product descriptions are fine for establishing over all product positioning, but they will not satisfy prospects who really want to understand a complex product or service.

As David Weinberger says in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "for every message, there are dozens or hundreds of facts...useful facts”. These facts along with other ideas, opinions, and FAQs are in reality micro-messages, that when linked together present an entire product story. Effective prospect communication involves organizing and delivering these many micro-messages so they provide crisp clear answers to seven key questions that prospects pose through out a sales cycle.

  • What does the product or service do?
  • Why do I need the product or service?
  • What is unique about the product or service?
  • Why is that uniqueness important?
  • What should I be concerned about?
  • How do you respond to these concerns?
  • Who else is using the product or service?
  • Why do I need to buy it now?

In today’s hyper competitive markets, the answers to these questions are constantly changing in "web time” and it is not unusual for a complex product to have hundreds of constantly changing micro-messages that need to be selectively communicated depending on the specific prospect and competitive situation.

Managing these micro-messages to insure currency, consistency, and maximum leverage can accomplished with software that simplifies the message creation and updating efforts and creates a centrally managed message knowledge base that dynamically generates the content for both internal and external web sites. Message management systems enable B2B eMarketing organizations to better organize, leverage and continuously improve their product positioning, sales intelligence and the hundreds of other pieces of information that are required to:

  • Effectively differentiate their products and services
  • Better educate and automatically qualify their prospects
  • Provide better leads and higher quality support to their sales channels

Delivery Is As Important As The Message
Building a comprehensive message database solves only half of the eMarketing effectiveness problem. To maximize their differentiation and generate higher quality leads, B2B companies need to deliver the many different messages through an informative and engaging web experience that is more conversational in nature and that can be personalized for each prospect. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional nature of traditional web pages prohibits them from delivering the level of interactivity and personalization required to accomplish this.

When you put a lot of information on a two dimensional web page, it increases scrolling which results in the loss of context and reduced comprehension. Intra-page links, like those found on many FAQ pages try to address this problem by linking the questions at the top of a page to their answers at the bottom. In doing so, however, many web sites have replaced the scrolling problem with a jarring visual experience that breaks concentration and interferes with a person’s ability to retain context. Both scrolling and the jarring visual change that occurs with hyper-links restrict a visitor’s ability to absorb and understand information.

These shortcomings are addressed with a new generation of web page called "Active Content Pages” (ACPs), that are constructed with Dynamic HTML and can contain hundreds of messages and chunks of information, much of which is hidden, in a more structured format. ACPs create a three-dimensional point and click conversation with the visitor that lets them drill down into more and more detailed information while maintaining context. This highly interactive and engaging interaction paradigm is created by expanding and contracting chunks of content in the same way that Windows Explorer expands and contracts folders.

HTML programmers can hand-craft ACPs, or they can be automatically generated from an XML knowledge base that is maintained by subject matter experts and marketing communication professionals in their Message Management application.

The Keys to an ACP’s effectiveness are:
Heightened Interactivity

An ACP increases user interaction with the content and creates an interactive experience much like a video game, which engages and stimulates the visitor and improves their learning and comprehension. Additionally, the increased click stream data that is generated by the interaction with the content provides invaluable information as to what prospects are really interested in. Increased Personalization The interaction model of an ACP is inherently more individualized, and this personalization can be significantly enhanced with a concept called "Message Level Bookmarks”. Since each ACP is comprised of many small chunks, you can allow visitors to mark the messages that are of interest to them and create a customized set of electronic notes for them. Message Level Bookmarks are like a virtual knowledge shopping cart, and like the act of highlighting a book, represent a tangible, highly personal activity. Increased Conversations When a person interacts with a well-constructed ACP, it is like having a point and click question and answer conversation with a subject matter expert. Great conversations go both ways however, and the same chunking technology that allows Message Level Bookmarks also supports message level feedback, so visitors can engage the vendor in a conversation about the individual messages.

Summary

It is the visitor who decides if their experience has been unique and personal…not the web site developer

The web is like a freight train that will hit B2B marketing organizations the way Japan hit the manufacturing sector in the 1970’s. Prospects will continue to demand higher quality and more specific content along with a more rewarding and personalized web experience just to let you into the game. B2B eMarketing organizations that embrace the process of Message Management and adopt Active Content Pages as their preferred prospect communication and knowledge transfer strategy will be the ones left standing at the end of the day.

Bob Schmonsees is the CEO of web2one, Inc. web2one provides high performance Message Management and Prospect Personalization solutions that help B2B companies clearly differentiate their products and services, generate higher quality leads, and shorten the front half of their sales cycles. He has managed high tech marketing and sales organizations of all sizes for the past 27 years.