With consumer increasingly savvy about transparent promotions and marketing tricks, and annoyed with intrusive online advertising, companies know their marketing needs to play catch up.
But in a world saturated with noise and with a growing use of ad blocker software, how do you make sure your message stands out to the right customers? What can your business do to customize your branding message for better campaign results?
Personalization is the key to overcoming this challenge. Segmenting potential customers by behavior and preferences learned from your existing client base, and using data to serve them more informed promotional messages that appeal to their particular preferences and tastes is now a basic requirement of effective marketing.
If you are still working on mass messages, then you may well be wasting marketing budget, which is something no small business can afford.
Every single channel, from social media posts to website copy, interactive content and print can be re-designed to include this vital component if it is missing. Here is how to revamp your marketing to make it personal and win more business.
Start With Strategy
Personalization of marketing content isn’t just an add-on – it should be a fundamental part of your strategy from the beginning. Understand what different types of customers you have and what they are seeking from you.
You must also have a metric in mind to measure success – it could be a certain number of hits to a web page, making more sales, repeat visits, or a greater average cart value in an ecommerce store.
Next, weigh up the resources required to drive this new action in terms of the tools you have available or may need to purchase, the people and also the time it will take to action.
It is a good idea to look up some best practice examples of companies who have built their whole business model on personalization. They don’t have to be in the same sector for you to learn a lot from them.
Do Your Research
To develop the best personalized marketing strategy for your company, you need to undertake a period of research to really understand your market.
You can gather this information in a variety of ways, and should aim to use a combination of methods, as all will give you different insights.
Running focus groups is a highly effective way to gather anecdotal evidence about what works, and you could combine this approach with some opinion polling on social media or a web-based survey to back it up with quantitative data.
Aim to keep questions short and to the point to gain the most number of responses, and consider allocating a small reward like a discount or a chance to win a prize to encourage customers to respond.
Get Ready To Personalize Profitably
Once you have your customization strategy in place and you have segmented your customer database, you can start looking into a good set of marketing automation tools, linked to your CRM system.
These will complete actions like creating dynamic content for emails that displays different things depending on purchase history, preference or other parameters.
Before long, you will see engagement rates start to build, and as you can keep increasing your personalization efforts the more customers you have and the more you know about them, you will be back in the marketing good books before too long!
