One-to-one marketing gives brands an unparalleled opportunity to stand out from their competition. Done right, personalised advertising delivers value to consumers and makes them feel valued and cared for.
Real personalisation takes time, money and strategy. Where exactly to start in building a programme of personalised marketing? Here’s a guide to doing just that.
Defining Your Target Audience
Lots of brands today use personalised marketing to reach their target audiences. Personalised marketing personalises content – such as writing a customer’s name in an email, or recommending products based on past buying history. Though personalised marketing can be intrusive at times, being upfront and clear with customers about what information is collected and how it’s being used is a great way to avoid the ‘spammy’ or ‘creepy’ feel of personalised promotions.
One of the first things you need to do to get targeted marketing right is define all of your target audiences. Then you can identify who your most engaged customers are, what day or time they’re most likely to be receptive to messaging about your brand, and how that receptiveness ebbs and flows over time. If you do plan on using paid channels (such as Facebook ads) to reach these groups, goals will be helpful to you too – your campaigns will often be more complex to run, and will require a team of specialists to run that operation smoothly.
Segmenting Your Audience
To create marketing campaigns that appeal to your intended target users, you need to know them inside out, and – in the context of audience segmentation – probably rather intimately. One way of achieving this is to break your mix of customers down into different segments based on data about each group that you collect. This enables businesses to communicate via marketing messages that resonate more effectively with target customers.
But businesses can gain greater return on their campaigns by micro-targeting these segments through the distribution of purposeful and curated content that resonates with these demographics, boosting sales, cultivating brand loyalty and fostering goodwill. Obama’s 2012 campaign reached out to undecided swing voters in particular voting districts by providing messaging targeted to relevant issues that touched their emotions.
Business must use personalised marketing in a transparent and ethical fashion; collecting personal information should require explicit consent, as well as abiding by data privacy laws and best practices. Customers should be able to easily opt out of personalised marketing efforts.
Creating Personas
Humanising comes into play when customising individual experiences. Personalised marketing is rooted in developing personas to help humanise your target audience – making them feel like your marketing is reaching them in the sense that it speaks to their needs and desires. The more you understand your target customer – whether by way of social media analytics, website traffic statistics or analysing customer service tickets – the more investments customers are willing to make, and the more loyal they will be to your brand. Here’s some of the information that should go into a well-done persona: Level of education Experience Estimated salary Age Income Family life Gender Marital status Race Relationships Goals, challenges and interests.
Creating a persona involves giving your audience a name and description; noting any distinguishing features you might find helpful about that audience – be careful of stereotypes! – and listing the goals of that persona so you can identify how to market specifically to that audience’s target market.
Remember, customer needs and behaviours shift rapidly, so be prepared to revisit personas at some frequency to reflect these changes. For example, a particular pain point may no longer be relevant or you might need to add one or two in its place. Alternatively, you might need to create new personas if your existing ones no longer accurately reflect your user base.
Creating Content
Customised marketing is a feature common to many commercial undertakings, and one that customers have come to expect from those with whom they want to continue a commercial relationship.
To compete in the ‘big, unmistakeable, always-on thing’, the marketing world has to take account of ‘the individual-as-consumer’ in an information-rich, ever noisy environment. Data can be used to better understand how people use and view content, to allow the creation of better-targeted and more meaningful content.
If you are a marketer that would like to be able to tailor your marketing campaigns into something that individuals will actually want to see, do not just study demographics and merely understand age and gender, but instead focus on getting your hands on psychographics. Why do people behave in this fashion? The more that brands can connect with their audience the more the people will care, and the more loyalty a brand will be able to garner.
Emails customised based on purchase history or abandoned-cart emails to lure back lost sales demonstrate ROI by boosting conversion rates while creating the impression that firms understand and care about individuals.
