Personalisation in corporate websites. What B2B Can Learn from B2C.

In the world of B2C, digital personalisation is a given. Visit a consumer-facing site and you’ll often be greeted with content that feels curated — based on what you’ve browsed, where you are, or what the brand already knows about your preferences. Relevance is the default.

In B2B, it’s a different story. Corporate websites still tend to take a broadcast approach: the same homepage, the same messaging, the same structure for every user — even when it’s clear that investors want access to financial content quickly, or potential partners are looking for confirmation of experience. While this one-size-fits-all model may have worked in the past, it’s no longer fit for purpose.

Today’s B2B audiences — investors, customers, media, future talent and more — each arrive with different expectations, different goals, and different amounts of time they’re willing to invest. Serving them all the same experience can mean serving none of them particularly well. The result? Businesses are left wondering why their site isn’t generating leads, building investor confidence, or supporting strategic growth. Instead, the website is too often seen as a necessary cost rather than a powerful communications tool that can deliver against commercial objectives.

But this is changing. Thanks to smarter CMS platforms and in particular the integration of persona-based personalisation tools built directly within them, B2B brands can now offer far more tailored, adaptive digital experiences — and without the need for large content teams or complex site structures.

Most of the client teams we work with aren’t set up to produce content at scale — although a few are. Unfortunately, many still don’t see the corporate website as a channel that can directly deliver ROI. That’s seen as the role of sales or consumer channels. But that mindset is shifting.

Personalisation at scale is no longer a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage and will soon be the new normal. Write it off as something only B2C brands need to worry about, and you risk falling behind.

Understanding B2B personas: who are you really speaking to?

Every B2B organisation serves a matrix of stakeholders and each one comes to the corporate site for a different reason. A prospective client might want case studies, sector expertise, and proof of scale. An institutional investor may be scanning for share price, ESG performance or governance updates. A graduate is looking for transparency in purpose, culture, and clearly defined career pathways. A journalist needs fast access to recent news or leadership profiles.

Many B2B websites try to account for this diversity by building deep navigation or duplicating content across multiple areas — hoping each audience eventually finds its way. But this often adds unnecessary weight and complexity, degrading the user experience at what could be the first — and potentially last — point of interaction.

Corporate sites can quickly become content-heavy, overly structured, and difficult to navigate. When we look at analytics for new client sites, it’s striking how much time and effort has gone into creating content that is rarely, if ever, viewed. Worse still is how that content noise makes it harder for users to find the information that would create a useful, engaging experience.

The solution isn’t more content. It’s the right content, served at the right time, in the right format. 

That starts with clarity around who your audiences are, what they care about, and how your content answers their specific needs. These audience profiles don’t need to be overly complicated. Start with a handful of key personas and map them to their core objectives. For example:

Investor: Financial performance, Shareholder information, ESG commitments and clear governance
Client: Capabilities, sector relevance, proven results through leadership
Media: Facts, leadership, access to current updates
Talent: Culture, values, career opportunities
NGOs: Transparency, accountability, compliance alignment

Once these needs are mapped, you can start to think about how your site responds to them not just through navigation, but through content that adapts intelligently to each visitor’s context and requirements.

Personalisation at scale is no longer a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage and will soon be the new normal. Write it off as something only B2C brands need to worry about, and you risk falling behind.

What B2C got right — and what B2B can learn

Consumer brands have spent years refining the art of personalisation, from Netflix’s recommendation engine to high street retailers like River Island and Zara — who tailor shopping experiences based on individual preferences, browsing and actions — B2C businesses use data and behaviour to anticipate what a user wants and to deliver it with minimal friction and minimal overt selling.

The best personalisation feels intuitive. You’re not aware you’re being marketed to — it simply feels relevant. And that’s exactly the mindset B2B sites should adopt. Subtlety is a far more valuable commodity than ‘shouty’ sales techniques. If a user feels manipulated or overly targeted, the effect is counterproductive — especially in sectors where trust and credibility are paramount.

Importantly, B2C personalisation isn’t about flashy features or gimmicks. It’s about sequencing, relevance, and thoughtful UX. The homepage adapts. The call to action shifts. Content suggestions evolve based on past visits, inferred interests — or directly from referral links via digital marketing. It’s seamless, effective, and almost invisible.

This mindset is finally gaining traction in corporate websites. More and more clients are asking for tailored user journeys — and we’re also seeing that shift reflected in the platforms themselves. Technology providers like Umbraco are investing in this space, acquiring businesses such as UMarketingSuite and repositioning their products with enterprise and corporate clients in mind.

At the same time, B2B buyers, along with other stakeholders, are also consumers themselves.  Their expectations are shaped by the digital experiences they have outside of work. They want relevance. They expect clarity. And they can instantly sense when a brand feels static or impersonal.

That said, B2B websites can’t simply replicate B2C playbooks. B2B organisations typically deal with complex services, long decision-making cycles, and nuanced brand messaging. But the underlying principles still apply:

• Serve relevant content based on behaviour, referrer, or audience type
• Prioritise messaging based on user intent — not internal hierarchy
• Adapt layouts or CTAs dynamically to surface what matters most

This doesn’t just improve engagement, it strengthens brand positioning and shows you understand your audiences and value their time. It also accelerates the right types of conversations with, for example, investors, who want confidence and transparency, with potential clients who want quick proof of relevance and expertise, and with future talent who want a genuine sense of the working culture and opportunities within your organisation.

The result? More efficient engagement, faster connections, and better conversion — across the board.

Keeping personalisation practical (and scalable)


Traditionally, delivering different journeys for different personas meant building entirely separate pages and in some cases, entirely separate sites. – we’ve done this before for clients, and while it can work, it rarely scales. That approach simply isn’t sustainable, especially for global organisations managing multi-language content, regional services, or sector-specific offerings. Factor in regional governance requirements as with some of our European and global finance clients the traditional model becomes a version control and upkeep liability. Complex architecture isn’t just difficult to manage. It adds weight, increases maintenance costs, and dilutes clarity for the user.

Platforms like Umbraco Engage, Sitecore Personalize, and Optimizely Personalization are bringing powerful personalisation capabilities to content teams and making B2C-style experiences scalable within B2B digital environments. They enable teams to deliver personalisation within a unified site structure — dynamically adapting content, modules, and messaging based on audience behaviours, needs or triggers.

For example:

• A returning visitor might see a homepage panel featuring the latest financial results, press releases, and reports.
• A user arriving from a job board could be shown people-first content,  culture stories, employee profiles and purpose-driven messaging — front and centre on the home page. In many organisations, career content is still siloed in an ATS — cutting candidates off from the wider corporate narrative.
• A potential client browsing a sector-specific page could be presented with targeted insight articles, an invite to a related webinar, or case study — helping build trust and relevance from the first click.

This personal experience is enabled by combining smart content tagging, audience segmentation, and conditional logic, and in Umbraco’s case, all managed within the CMS. You don’t need to build bespoke templates or rely on separate landing pages. You define the personas, assign behaviours or rules, and let the system surface content based on what matters to each user type. 

 For marketing and comms teams, this makes personalisation realistic. You’re not rebuilding journeys from scratch — you’re shaping modular content experiences that flex according to context. It brings the intelligence of B2C level personalisation into the B2B environment — but with the governance and control enterprise platforms demand.

Personalisation is enabled by combining smart content tagging, audience segmentation, and conditional logic, and in Umbraco’s case, all managed within the CMS.

If it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t work

Personalisation isn’t just a technology challenge — it’s a design opportunity. If your site is going to adapt to different audiences, it needs a design system that can flex without compromising structure or coherence. It also needs to reflect how your brand behaves and communicates in a digital space and for some clients realising that they need to up their digital game, this can be a challenge as their visual identity and brand are not designed for the digital space. 

Ensuring a seamless design and brand experience means thinking modularly — creating components, content blocks and page structures that can be reused, reordered and re-styled based on context or user persona. It also means designing for subtlety.  As I’ve already said, effective personalisation doesn’t need to be loud — it just needs to feel intuitive and relevant.

Consider:

• Page hero sections that adapt their headline or imagery based on audience or sector. 
• Navigation that prioritises certain links depending on location or referral source.
• Case studies or insight panels that dynamically surface sector-specific content.

Design has a critical role in making personalised experiences feel seamless — not stitched together or bolted on. Even as content adapts behind the scenes, the user experience must remain consistent, intuitive, and on-brand. Personalisation should never feel manipulative. Ideally, it shouldn't be noticeable, but when it is, it should feel helpful, like the site is working with you, not just presenting information.

Done well, this kind of adaptive design enhances trust. It demonstrates that your organisation understands who your audience is, and what they need — without forcing them to work for it.

Start small, deliver big

For many B2B organisations, the idea of personalisation can feel overwhelming, especially when content is already stretched or the CMS feels templated and limiting. The key is to start small and build incrementally. We often advise clients to begin with personalising the homepage, and then build out from there. There’s no need to change every element in every module overnight.

As with all digital change, there’s a framework to follow — manageable, incremental, and ultimately beneficial:

01 Define your top 3–5 personas


Focus on your primary audience groups and document their goals and motivations. This might be a client segment within a growth sector, or investors looking for key metrics. But remember — these personas should be shaped by your strategic goals, not just what analytics are telling you. I’ve seen clients prioritise careers content over sector-led messaging because traffic data suggested it — even when their strategy required a shift towards thought leadership and cross-sector positioning.

02: Audit existing content


Look for high-traffic pages or strategic sections that could benefit from adaptation. Identify what content can be reused, modularised, or moved into more relevant parts of the site. If you know your users are looking for insights aligned to certain sectors or offerings, how can those articles appear in context — not buried in a news hub?

03: Develop tagging and content models


Create a structure that enables content to be served based on user type, behaviour, or referrer source. Sector-specific news, for example, shouldn’t just live in the news section — it should surface dynamically on the relevant landing pages or homepage modules.

04: Implement personalisation in your CMS


If you’re using Umbraco, tools like Engage allow you to apply conditional logic based on behaviours like location, visit history or campaign referral. For example, if someone arrives from a LinkedIn post about your FX service capabilities, they should land on a page that reflects that need — not your generic homepage.


Pilot a single section:
Start with something focused — a homepage, careers section or insights hub. Measure impact before rolling it out more widely. Investor content is often the most obvious starting point, but don’t underestimate the value of personalising talent experiences too.


Measure, learn, evolve:
Track how different audiences interact with personalised content. Are they staying longer? Are they taking the next step? These insights are critical — not just to prove value, but to evolve the strategy as your organisation, goals, and audiences change. With tools like Umbraco Engage, you can also A/B test pages to further optimise performance.

From Broadcast to Relevance: The days of broadcasting the same message to every visitor are numbered. 
Today’s audiences, even in the most technical or conservative sectors — expect relevance. They want to feel that the brand they’re engaging with understands their needs and can help solve their challenges.

For many B2B organisations, the idea of personalisation can feel overwhelming, especially when content is already stretched or the CMS feels templated and limiting. The key is to start small and build incrementally.

Personalisation tools through a CMS now make that expectation not only achievable but practical. B2B organisations no longer need to choose between consistency and customisation. With the right platform and a clear strategy, you can have both.

Personalisation isn’t about bells and whistles. It’s about clarity. It’s about showing up with the right message, in the right tone, at the right time — and doing so without friction. And in a world where attention is short and competition is high, that relevance might just be your most powerful differentiator.

Time to get personal

If you’re exploring how personalisation could enhance your website experience, we’re here to help. From strategy and content to data and platform choices, we combine creative thinking with technical expertise to guide you through the opportunities – and help you implement a solution that makes sense for your brand, audience and goals.

Get in touch to start the conversation.