INTRODUCTION

Classic lead nurturing tactics can draw vast numbers of early-stage leads
to your website, and that’s a great start. But the majority of those visitors—a
whopping 98%—are anonymous when they arrive. For instance, if you
TOFU (top-of-funnel) RTP (real-time personalization)
have 300,000 visitors to your site every month, 294,400 of them are
anonymous—that’s a lot of potential leads! Perhaps you’ve successfully Anonymous Visitors
attracted them with great keywords, targeted ads, and brilliant blog posts.
But who are they? 98% If you have 300,000 visitors to your site every
month, 294,400 or 98% of them are anonymous
Converting anonymous website visitors with your content is like trying to
meet your soulmate at a crowded masquerade ball. Though you technically
have a ton of dating prospects, you’ve got no idea what the other guests
look like, and it’s too loud to hear them clearly. Since you can’t gauge
how they are reacting to your words, you can’t supply engaging, relevant
conversation—instead, you tend to play it safe with general small talk.

Similarly, digital marketers have traditionally offered generalized content

to their anonymous, top-of-funnel (TOFU) audience. Later, as leads become
better defined, marketers employ automation tactics to serve up more
relevant product- or service-oriented content, moving leads down the sales
funnel to convert into customers. But by using real-time personalization (RTP)
software to track demographic and behavioral data, you can unmask,
engage, and convert your TOFU prospects the moment they arrive on
your site. RTP software not only listens to your prospects; it also supplies a
personalized, relevant web and content experience right from the start.

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LIKE REAL TOFU, YOUR TOFU MARKETING
MIGHT NEED SOME FLAVOR
They might be anonymous, but your TOFU web visitors are looking for something. Their visits to your
website provide a ripe opportunity to give them what they need—are you taking advantage of it?
You probably have a lot more potential in the top of your
funnel than you realize. While the visitors who land on
your site are not proven leads, chances are they’re actively
looking for a solution, and your content or products might
be the answer. Of course, that’s the catch: they might be—
for different reasons, on different levels, and at different
times. But without crucial information about your leads, you
can’t hone in on the why, where, and when right away. This
is why TOFU marketing—like real tofu—can tend to be bland.
Without insight into individual behaviors and traits, you
simply can’t provide your audience with content that hits
their exact pain points.
The one thing you do know about your anonymous leads
is that they took the initiative to find you. Chances are, you
paid to get them this far. Whether they clicked on ads, read
blog posts you paid someone to write, or talked with an
expensive sales rep at a convention, you spent money and
invested resources to cultivate these leads. But without their
email addresses and identifying information, you can’t use
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your marketing automation solution to convert them into customers at the
top of your funnel. By using personalization software, however, you can
provide your TOFU leads with relevant, flavorful experiences before
you even have their contact information. You do this by determining
demographic data, such as the companies and industries they came
from, and behavioral information, like which of your content
assets they looked at. Then, you serve them up content
customized to their demographics, firmographics, and
behavior. If the software detects that a lead is coming from
a company in the financial services industry, you
can change and personalize your website to speak
directly to that person.
Like bored guests at a masquerade ball, visitors move
on from interacting with you if they don’t quickly find
what they are looking for. This is why targeting the
content you offer these anonymous prospects is so
important. You need to hone in on each visitor’s
interests and needs, engaging leads from the very
moment they land on your site.
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UNMASK ANONYMOUS VISITORS WITH THE THREE WS

Modern attention spans are shorter than ever. It takes personalized, timely content to keep your audience on
the page. You have to grab each visitor’s attention precisely when he or she is ready for new information.
It’s easy to remedy the anonymous TOFU conundrum with real-
time personalization software, which lets you unmask anonymous
leads as soon as they enter your funnel. Using real-time technology,
RTP software identifies a visitor’s company and tracks his behavior
throughout your site. Next, you can feed your lead relevant,
customized content at the precise moment he is hungry for it.

How? By determining the three Ws:

Who
Decide who your target accounts are. You can define your
audience as a named list of companies or by vertical; consumer
marketers might define audience by location or past behavior.
Then, use RTP software to identify visitors by matching IPs when
they arrive on your site or mobile channel. Knowing where your
visitors are coming from helps you segment them by demographics,
organization, industry, and other logical parameters. RTP software
can also determine geographical information about your visitors
down to country, state, and even zip code. Think about how
powerful your marketing could be if it were localized and specific
to the interests of your anonymous prospects.

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UNMASK ANONYMOUS VISITORS WITH THE THREE WS

What
Divide your existing content into buckets appropriate for each target audience—case Target Audience
studies appropriate to their industry, products in line with their needs, blog posts that
speak to their issues. RTP enables you to create personalized content experiences using
content you already have, providing the case studies, ebooks, and other content assets
that are most applicable to your lead. Using analytics, you can continuously assess
what’s working (and what’s not) and make adjustments to your content placement.

Where
After you’ve determined who and what to personalize, you have several options of
where to reach prospects with a personalized approach. For TOFU prospects, your
website is the most important channel for real-time personalization and conversion,
because many of these prospects can’t be reached on email. Luckily, new prospects
visiting your website are engaged, attentive, and interested in learning more about your
solution. Personalized display ads are another effective way to reach TOFU prospects.

Real-time personalization software engenders immediacy. In less than 30 milliseconds,

Marketo’s Real-Time Personalization can create what seems like a magically customized
experience to the visitor. But there’s no magic; RTP technology is driven by science and
metrics. You input certain parameters up front, and the intelligent technology runs with
them to deliver a custom experience—to each prospect, and at each touch point. This
experience feels endearingly personal to your visitor, yet requires very little manual
effort on your part.

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TO ENGAGE AND CONVERT PREVIOUSLY ANONYMOUS
VISITORS, FOLLOW THESE TWO STEPS:

1 Identify 2 Act

Let real-time personalization analytics identify
valuable firmographic and behavioral
information about your TOFU visitors, such as:
Company
Industry (by extension)
Search term used to arrive on your site
Referral source
Content consumption
Number of visits
Product interest
Act on this information. Using RTP, you can present customized content to
each individual prospect, in real time, through the various stages of the
buying process. Ideally, your RTP solution can provide both A/B testing
and auto-tuning capabilities. A sophisticated RTP solution will try multiple
messages on a target segment, and then accelerate the message that
performs best—automatically.
Any CMS. Any Content. Zero IT.
An intelligent real-time personalization solution
requires zero IT implementation or management,
and simply clicks into place with your existing
content management system (CMS), allowing you to
access even more information and feedback on your
content marketing. You leverage your existing CMS
and existing content—it’s that easy.

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REAL-TIME PERSONALIZATION IN MOTION
You now know some key things about each TOFU prospect, and you also increasingly know what type of
content proves most engaging for that prospect during every stage of the funnel. You can use this information
in two specific ways:
1 Target Specific Companies
Using real-time personalization software, you can feed precise content
to visitors from target companies and industries the moment they land
on your site. For instance, if one of your sales goals is to secure more
healthcare clients, you can deliver wellness-focused content to visitors
from health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmacies. As they
click around, the RTP software continuously assesses their content
consumption and behavior to make adjustments in real time. This
approach aligns your marketing and sales goals, and makes it easy for
the marketing department to assign revenue attribution to campaigns.
2 Target Personas
A second approach is to create strategic buyer personas for your various
types of visitors. Then, you continuously analyze how your targeted
content performs with those personas, making successive improvements to
fine-tune your campaigns over time.
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Using predictive analytics—rapid analysis of your data that measures how
visitor behavior is measuring up to your business goals—you find the patterns
in your persona browsing and buying habits. You constantly assess how
each bit of content delivers for each persona, turning data into insight and,
more importantly, into action.
Tackling TOFU personalization is not a big shift; it’s simply a matter
of implementing technology that can identify a previously anonymous
audience. If you already have a content machine in place, it’s easy to
leverage your existing content assets once you’ve unlocked crucial elements
of your visitors’ identities. RTP software extends your ability to engage
customers at the very top of your funnel. RTP technology works in tandem
with your marketing automation solution to create a seamless experience
from the first engagement to the buy.
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IF YOU WANT TO GET INTEREST, BE INTERESTED

It makes sense that personalized content garners stronger outcomes. Think about it—when you talk to someone
face-to-face, you make eye contact, you listen, and you get a better response. In other words, get interest by being
interested. Find out who your visitor is, where your visitor is coming from, and what your visitor wants.

2
Marketing automation has already proven to us that educating, nurturing,
and interacting with prospects is the way to create relationships that
speed through the funnel. By adding real-time personalization to your
marketing automation, you can begin that educational, nurturing,
interactive relationship at the very top of your funnel. You can be
Determine your ideal audience—Name the companies
and industries you want to target. This is what you will use
to determine user experiences in your real-time
personalization solution.

3
interesting to each and every visitor from the moment he or she touches Sit back and react—Let your real-time personalization
down on your site. software identify each visitor, then feed your visitor the most
relevant content for that particular visit.
4 Steps to TOFU Mastery

4
Are you ready to become vastly more interesting to your TOFU visitors Continuously test and refine—Use predictive analytics to
by engaging them with real-time personalization? Here’s a recap of the assess what’s working, then make incremental changes to
process, broken down into four simple steps: perfect your content personalization strategy over time.

1
Put RTP software in place—RTP is an easy, IT-free install that That’s it! Before long, you’ll be engaging TOFU prospects with captivating
doesn’t involve APIs or heavy-duty training. Simply copy and content, customized to meet their specific desires and behaviors.
paste a tag into your source code. Now, RTP technology also
comes already integrated with some hands-free marketing
automation platforms, like Marketo’s.

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CONCLUSION

By adding real-time personalization tools to your

marketing mix, you can unmask an audience that
was once a faceless crowd.
You can direct them from the very top of your funnel with personalized content
and strategic calls-to-action, and add fuel to your marketing automation without
undergoing a radical shift in your marketing operation or strategies. Now, your
targeted content is account-based, and it’s also one-to-one.

Best of all, this entire strategy is virtually hands-free. Real-time personalization’s

intelligent logic requires very little human input, but it leaves the impression of an
utterly personal experience, with a clear path to buying.

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Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete.
Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to build
and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, the Marketo®
solution includes a complete suite of applications that help organizations acquire new customers more efficiently, maximize
customer loyalty and lifetime value, improve sales effectiveness, and provide analytical insight into marketing’s contribution to
revenue growth. Marketo’s applications are known for their breakthrough ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing
Nation™, a thriving network of more than 190 LaunchPoint™ ecosystem partners and over 40,000 marketers who share and
learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility
and superior results.

info@marketo.com DG2LG-01142014
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