Striking the right balance between familiar content and fresh insights can make or break your B2B lead nurturing strategy. Lean too far into what prospects already know, and you risk boring them. Introduce too much new information, and you may overwhelm them. The key is blending both to engage, build trust and drive conversions.
Why familiarity alone doesn’t drive B2B conversions
We introduced a new approach to abandoned shopping cart emails in a recent optimization test for a B2B SaaS client. Rather than explicitly stating, “You recently viewed this product,” we subtly embedded content and products the subscriber had browsed over the past month.
We designed the email to feel more organic. When subscribers opened it, they saw the products they had previously explored without the impression that their behavior was being watched.
We discovered something interesting. Not only did subscribers click, download and purchase the browsed item at a slightly higher rate than in a dedicated “previously browsed” message (hooray, the test worked!), but many also bypassed the item entirely in favor of related products.
Could this secondary behavior indicate that prospects reject something familiar in favor of something they “discover” themselves?
The fun part of testing is developing reasonable hypotheses that might explain customer behavior. The “why” can only be known by asking customers through ongoing outreach, feedback sessions, and research. However, purposeful, empathetic hypotheses lead to tests that tap buying motivations and (hopefully) increase conversion. Plus, we now get feedback faster when AI-powered tools accelerate testing scope by personalizing the content to each buyer’s or browser’s history.
The long-accepted reason behind the popularity of previously browsed messages is that familiarity with the browsed item led to additive sales. A new one is that familiarity with the browsed product leads them to discover and purchase a new item.
Especially in B2B marketing, where buyers do a lot of research and planning — maybe even some decision-making — without reaching out to the vendor, it’s not enough to remind prospects what they already saw. It could make brands look reactive and out of sync.
Here’s the challenge: Prospects do not respond to overly familiar, redundant, irrelevant, generic messages. Nor do they generally respond to recommendations tied to browsing behavior that they feel creepy. What is the right mix of relevance, brand-building consistency and recommendation?
Dig deeper: The failsafe approach to building strategic nurture paths
Balancing familiarity and discovery in lead generation
Many lead nurturing campaigns — including my client’s previous efforts in the earlier example — tend to lean too heavily toward either familiarity or discovery, missing the sweet spot in between. Successful lead nurturing requires a careful balance in every message or touchpoint. This approach delivers personalized, relevant content while introducing prospects to valuable new insights.
Striking this balance between familiarity (relevance, personalization) and discovery (new ideas, fresh recommendations) in automated lead nurturing campaigns will likely boost engagement and conversions. I say this confidently because it’s a customer-first approach. Test it with your prospect list and web personalization tools. Adapting your content strategy based on actual results is a powerful way to listen to your audience.
Since customer preferences are constantly evolving — and people can be fickle — we must continuously refine our personalization efforts to build trust and drive conversions.
The pitfalls of over-familiarity
Many martech vendors have assured us that bland, non-personalized messaging will soon be a thing of the past if we just sign the contract. Yet, most B2B marketing content is too generic, relies on outdated customer data or reinforces existing knowledge without adding value.
Low response rates could mean we are boring at best and insulting our prospects’ intelligence. When we perpetuate the “same old, same old” — even if it worked in the past — it shows up in low engagement rates. Plus, we miss an opportunity for deeper engagement by strengthening our role as thought leaders in the space.
The pitfalls of unbridled discovery
Getting too far ahead of stakeholder audiences can be risky. Content that is too niche, too advanced or misaligned with a prospect’s current stage in the buyer journey can overwhelm rather than engage — reducing conversion rates just as much as content that feels too familiar.
Mapping out a balanced customer journey can help align the need for discovery with buyer intent. With so many buyers doing so much research before speaking to a salesperson, it’s essential to have the full range of content available and easily discoverable through search, social and AI research.
Below are some approaches I’ve run across and try to avoid:
- Too-technical content: Sending a lead who’s just starting to research a topic a highly technical white paper will likely overwhelm them.
- Premature upselling: Trying to upsell a lead on a premium product before they’ve even engaged with your core offering is likely to backfire.
- Irrelevant recommendations: Recommending a product unrelated to a prospect’s past purchase history or browsing behavior shows a lack of understanding.
- Too many choices: While I love giving browsers a self-selected set of options as a wayfinding tool, it has to align with the lifecycle stage and familiarity with the brand or product and channel.
In addition to lifecycle-based content, creating a signature piece of evergreen content — typically based on original research — is essential to establish brand value, enhance reputation and drive awareness-stage discovery.
Beyond its promotion plan, this content can reinforce a consistent theme across your entire content map, strengthening brand positioning and competitive differentiation. It should be forward-thinking while offering practical strategies to navigate big-picture trends.
When discovery goes too far: A cautionary tale
Too much focus on discovery can backfire. A technology client once produced a stunning white paper that identified a future-state need, included expert interviews, and was widely promoted. But there was a crucial missing step: gathering customer input before launch.
Despite its quality, the white paper delivered one of the lowest engagement rates the company had ever seen. A small sample of prospect feedback at a trade show revealed why — audiences felt overwhelmed, confused and even patronized. The content was too far ahead of their current reality.
Although the brand tried to be forward-looking, it came across as out of touch and impractical. The lack of social or blog testing before writing the full white paper was a missed opportunity to refine the idea and build rapport.
Today, the company is dusting off the white paper and updating it with current examples. While it’s reassuring that their analysis of future trends was accurate two years ago, it ultimately didn’t matter — customers simply weren’t ready for the message. Now, based on recent testing, they seem to be.
Dig deeper: How to map your selling process to the way your B2B customers buy: A case study
The sweet spot: Balancing familiarity and discovery
On the continuum from boring to breakthrough, we should use the incredible data and technology at our disposal to create nurturing experiences that are both relevant and exciting. The term “personalized discovery” captures this core idea — emphasizing that both marketers and buyers play an active role in the discovery process.
Achieving ‘personalized discovery’
Personalized discovery balances familiarity and discovery by using data-driven marketing to deliver relevant and engaging content. Engaging content can be familiar and consistent (without being bland or generic) while introducing new insights for audiences to explore.
How can we create this lifecycle-based, customer-first, personalized content? It’s well within reach with today’s martech, intelligence, and content strategies. Mapping out this approach and developing strong testing hypotheses also offers a valuable opportunity to collaborate with sales and product teams, who are increasingly key partners in effective lead generation.
Start by assessing and modernizing your martech stack to support data collection, segmentation, content mapping, recommendation engines and dynamic content. Ensure you can deliver content across a lifecycle matrix that may differ for each stakeholder in the buying process.
Next, align your strategies with the sweet spot between familiarity and discovery:
- Data-driven segmentation: Go beyond basic demographics. Segment based on behavior, interests and engagement to remind prospects what they know about you in the context of what they have yet to discover.
- Progressive profiling: Gradually gather more information about prospects over time. Don’t ask everything at once. Use the data as you collect it since it’s fresh. Relevant outreach will reward the prospects who made the effort to provide it.
- Content mapping: Align content with different stages of the buyer journey, ensuring relevance and progression.
- Recommendation engines: Use AI-powered recommendations to suggest content, products or services based on past behavior and introduce new possibilities.
- Dynamic content: Personalize content in email and web, as well as account-based marketing and sales enablement materials, based on individual prospect data.
- Multivariate and A/B testing: To optimize all that content personalization, continuously test different approaches to find the optimal balance of familiarity and discovery.
- Behavioral targeting: Tap AI-driven insights to shape the content map across the entire buyer journey to align buyer need and interest. Start with simple journeys, then expand them using insights. Don’t fall in love with any of them — they must continually evolve with buyer behavior shifts.
- Data-driven segmentation: Go beyond basic demographics. Segment based on behavior, interests and engagement to remind prospects what they know about you in the context of what they have yet to discover.
- Progressive profiling: Gradually gather more information about prospects over time. Don’t ask everything at once. Use the data as you collect it since it’s fresh. Relevant outreach will reward the prospects who made the effort to provide it.
- Content mapping: Align content with different stages of the buyer journey, ensuring relevance and progression.
- Recommendation engines: Use AI-powered recommendations to suggest content, products or services based on past behavior and introduce new possibilities.
- Dynamic content: Personalize content in email and web, as well as account-based marketing and sales enablement materials, based on individual prospect data.
- Multivariate and A/B testing: To optimize all that content personalization, continuously test different approaches to find the optimal balance of familiarity and discovery.
- Behavioral targeting: Tap AI-driven insights to shape the content map across the entire buyer journey to align buyer need and interest. Start with simple journeys, then expand them using insights. Don’t fall in love with any of them — they must continually evolve with buyer behavior shifts.
- AI-powered marketing: Most automation tools use AI to drive personalized experiences. Relying solely on AI can be a fast track to generic content. Be sure your company’s human ingenuity is added to the mix.
The goal is to create content demonstrating the brand’s genuine understanding of buyer needs and providing real value.
Experiment with different approaches and prioritize the customer experience
Personalized marketing is about listening to the customer first, then using technology to anticipate their next need. Since no customer journey is linear (or predictable), we must create content that adapts to wherever the customer is exploring.
A better way to nurture leads successfully is to find the right balance between familiarity and discovery. It’s time to move beyond a dependence on AI- or tech-driven, familiar or generic personalization (which can lead to echo chambers) and blend it with elements of discovery by surprising and delighting prospects with valuable new information they might not have found on their own.
Dig deeper: How data-driven email nurturing transforms the B2B sales funnel
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