86% of marketers consider personalized 1:1 marketing essential for B2B marketing success. But how do you scale personalization when you're starting from scratch and limited by manual processes?

When Ilana Trapeznikov joined Exclaimer as a Senior Digital Marketing Manager, the company was just beginning to think about personalization. While they understood its importance for improving conversion rates and driving business value, they faced a few challenges:

• Manual, resource-intensive processes for creating personalized pages

• Hard to scale personalization efforts

• Difficulty moving beyond surface-level personalization

• Lack of a structured framework for prioritizing and implementing personalization initiatives

“B2B buyers are expecting personalized experiences across all touch points in their buying journey. When you're starting out, personalization is quite manual. You might not have the tools, strategy or foundation in place," explains Ilana. "We were building pages manually for one-to-one accounts every single time starting from scratch, because we had no way to automate. It felt like piecemeal activities rather than a comprehensive approach."

Brock Goddard, Demand Generation Manager of ABM adds, “We didn’t have the people, power, and the time to really dig into our personalization strategy and scale it to a place where it would have a meaningful impact.”

The Exclaimer team believed that by taking a step back and establishing strong foundations before scaling, they could create a more effective and sustainable personalization program. They needed to:

• Develop a comprehensive framework for personalization initiatives

• Bring the right stakeholders together to align on strategy

• Create a structured approach to prioritizing and implementing personalization

• Build a scalable system that could grow from one-to-many to one-to-one personalization

Level Set with Stakeholders

Exclaimer began their transformation by bringing together a cross-functional team including demand generation managers, digital specialists, and content creators. In their initial meetings, they focused on establishing a shared understanding of what personalization meant for their organization.

Using visual frameworks, the team explored different levels of personalization and mapped out all the elements they could customize - from website copy and logos to social proof and call-to-action buttons.

Structured Brainstorming

With their foundation in place, the team moved into a systematic brainstorming phase. Rather than jumping straight into tactics, they first defined clear business goals for their personalization efforts. They then conducted structured brainstorming sessions using virtual sticky notes, where team members individually explored two fundamental questions:

• who could they target?

• what would work best for each audience?

The team then came together to synthesize these ideas, creating a comprehensive mind map that connected their target audiences with potential personalization approaches. Swipe the ungated template here.

Organize and Map

Building on their brainstorming insights, Exclaimer created a detailed matrix that would serve as their personalization blueprint. This living document mapped their target audiences against various personalization elements, creating a clear visualization of opportunities. The matrix became their strategic guide, helping them identify where personalization could have the most impact and how different elements could work together. This systematic approach transformed what could have been an overwhelming number of possibilities into a clear, actionable framework.

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

With their opportunities mapped out, the team faced the crucial task of prioritization.

They developed a three-tier system, categorizing initiatives into "Do Now," "Plan For," and "Backlog" buckets. This wasn't just a simple list - each initiative was evaluated based on:

• Available resources

• Potential impact

• Technical feasibility

The team created a flexible timeline that allowed them to maintain momentum while staying responsive to results and changing business needs.

Implement Three-Tier Strategy

The Exclaimer team took a multilayered approach on where to focus on 1:many, 1:few, and 1:1 personalization by defining focus areas, objectives, and examples.

Here’s a peek of how they personalized across channels for the construction industry, one of Exclaimer’s key industries: