You’ve heard all about the increasing importance of website personalization. You have a firm grasp on how to achieve it and how to measure success. The next step in the B2B buyer journey? Assembling stakeholders to execute a more customized website experience for your prospects and customers.

With the right team in place, you’ll build website personalization campaigns that are thoughtful and strategic and cover every aspect of the buyer journey. 

In this post, we reveal how to structure a successful website personalization team, why structure matters, and how to divvy up duties across different departments to create a better customer experience and, ultimately, increase conversion rates.

B2B website personalization: why it’s important

Website personalization has become a powerful strategy for B2B marketing teams because it opens doors to new revenue opportunities. Today’s personalization solutions help those without the technical know-how deliver tailored user experiences, test and optimize site experiences, and track the success of personalization campaigns. 

Examples of website personalization can take many forms:

• Dynamic content and interactive elements to enhance the customer journey
• Custom messaging that speaks to visitors’ intent or pain points
• Localization that makes content accessible to visitors all over the world 
• Personalized recommendations based on queries or past behavior

When implemented methodically and effectively, website personalization can positively impact B2B marketing growth in a number of ways:

• More accurate persona targeting. Personalization allows you to narrow your audience targeting to hit the right people with the right message at the right time. 
• Increased engagement with decision-makers and B2B customers. A website that delivers exactly what you’re looking for is more likely to catch your target’s attention, especially if the messaging speaks directly to their immediate needs.
• Improved brand awareness and trust. When a visitor knows the site will hand them solutions without having to scour the website themselves, they’re more likely to develop loyalty to that brand.
• Meets customers’ expectations. According to a study from Forrester and Adobe, 72% of B2B customers expect either a fully or mostly personalized experience when they interact with the professional products and services they use. 
• Increased conversion rates. A Statista survey revealed that 93% of B2B professionals attribute an increase in revenue to personalized website content. 

In summary, website personalization is a must for teams seeking to craft more  impactful and memorable user experiences that boost your bottom line. But to ensure you’re enacting your strategy in a way that works best for your business’s unique revenue goals, you need the right team in place.

Building your website personalization dream team

Assembling an in-house website personalization team might seem like an overwhelming and time-consuming task, but the more thought you put into this process, the better your outcomes will be.

Let’s dive in to identify who you might need for this process and who should be responsible for each task.

Define roles and responsibilities

Marketing

Involving your marketing team in website personalization may seem like a no-brainer, but the importance of having this team on board is still worth mentioning. From your SEO manager to product marketers and content writers, each member of your marketing team brings a unique perspective and skill set for optimizing your site.

For starters, they have a solid grasp of your business’s target audience, and they’re experts at developing content that speaks directly to these personas. With a propensity to make data-driven decisions, they’ll be the first to offer insights to guide your optimization efforts based on key performance indicators. 

Lean on your content writers to keep your persona-based messaging consistent across all channels and to optimize content for search engines, user experiences, and conversion.

By providing them with a visual-first web development platform from which to launch and monitor your site campaigns, your marketing team can keep a close eye on performance and make any necessary changes in the moment, without having to rely on engineers.

UX/UI designers

The visual appeal of your site is what will catch your target audience’s attention. To do this effectively, you need a strong team of UX and UI designers to create compelling, eye-grabbing websites that guide visitors on a journey to conversion. 

These key members of the team can help design personalized website experiences, examine how elements on the page integrate and interact with each other, and ensure a seamless path to action for the intended audience. 

Web developers

An essential addition to any web project, web developers gather all the elements above to build the website’s infrastructure. This may be a technically-capable web designer or someone embedded within your engineering or development team, depending on your org structure. They help establish optimal page load times and ensure seamless functionality across different browsers and devices to deliver a consistent user experience.

To help the marketing team optimize websites for search engines, for example, they can structure sites for easy navigability and implement security features that establish the website’s quality and reliability in the eyes of search engines. This also helps build trust with your target personas.

Data

It (almost) goes without saying that your data team must be a part of your decision-making process. It’s crucial to have these analytics experts on hand to help analyze user journeys and ensure website data is appropriately integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This will give you insight into customer behavior and allows for greater alignment with the rest of the team to make informed decisions going forward.

The data team also can monitor website actions in real time and fix errors on the spot. Once a campaign is complete, count on them to create custom reports that deliver the precise learnings you’ll need for optimization efforts down the road. 

Other roles to consider

The teams above can give you a robust start to your website personalization efforts, but it wouldn’t hurt to include experts from two other departments.

CS and CX

Your customer success and customer experience folks witness your customers’ pain points and preferences on a daily basis. They’ll have valuable insight into where your customers struggle and can help inform your personalization tactics for the next batch of to-be customers.

Sales

Like your customer success team, your sales team also listens to prospects’ pain points and gets a first-hand account of where they need the most help and what would drive them to make a purchase. Adding a few salespeople to your website personalization team also ensures they’re aligned with marketing efforts in terms of messaging and positioning. 

How to structure your website personalization team 

Now that you’ve built your dream team, it’s time to implement structure to give you the best shot at achieving your goals.

Leadership

First, you’ll need to assign a project manager or project lead. This might be one person or it may involve one person from each of the teams mentioned above. This person (or people) is responsible for ensuring all teams are aligned and project deadlines are met. 

Centralized vs. decentralized

With a centralized team structure, there is a clear chain of command. A decentralized structure, on the other hand, offers more opportunity for flexibility as the decision-making is evenly distributed. The makeup and size of your team will determine which of these structures is the best option.

Two-team structure

You may find that you want to define a core team as well as a supporting team. The core team would be hands-on participants in the website personalization activities, while the supporting team would provide expertise if and when needed on things such as design and/or SEO.

Role-based structure

With this structure, each team would stick to its responsibilities (e.g., marketing would focus on messaging and content; design would manage UX and possibly include developers) without venturing into other teams’ duties. This creates separate, discernable boundaries to ensure teams stay in their lane and focus on the task at hand to help contribute to the overall shared goal.

Cross-functional structure

Regardless of which structure you choose, all team members must be prepared to eventually work across functions. Confirm that teams are on the right track by scheduling frequent check-ins, allowing for open discussion and expectations-setting.

Solutions and tools for B2B personalization

To build a team that supports a personalized B2B buyer journey, you and your team will need to identify a few things: goals you hope to reach, a strategy to meet those goals, and a way to measure the success of your efforts.

Whether you’re a smaller team just starting out or a big team ready to hit the ground running, a tool like Webflow can put the controls in the hands of whoever needs them, regardless of company size. For example, your marketing team can build campaigns on their own and tweak these campaigns post-launch, all without needing to involve developers for the smallest of tasks. 

Increased conversion rates: A collaborative approach 

Your website personalization efforts don’t end once your team is in place and your campaign launches. Lean on your team to conduct continual testing to track the effectiveness of the campaign as you go. 

Webflow’s optimization tools can assist with SEO, accessibility, and localization, amplifying your marketing efforts and ensuring a seamless customer experience. With a well-structured team and the tools to help you streamline personalization, you’ll transform your website into a conversion-creating machine.