In a marketing landscape that is more fragmented and chaotic than ever before, personalisation at scale is the solution to cut through the noise and drive your message home.
Navigating a digital storm.
A simple scroll through your social media feed unlocks the gateways to an endless barrage of advertisements, with countless messages from different businesses trying to pitch their offering to you.
This has resulted in a diminished consumer attention span, with exposure to advertisements often translating into the instinctive action to zap past such ads without even having a look through the message it is communicating.
Consumers are exposed to an average of 6,000 adverts per day.
How can we compensate?
The picture doesn’t have to be all too bleak for us advertisers.
Enter, marketing personalisation at scale – the equivalent of having an online salesman working for your brand around the clock.
Digital platforms offer limitless possibilities in terms of audience segmentation. This enables us to really narrow down your audience to pockets of people with distinct characteristics, such that we can craft a specifically tailored campaign for each of these pockets.
Addressing your messaging to each individual segment’s characteristics will result in ads that are highly relevant to the reader’s interests. This results in a downpour of benefits, ranging from better conversion rates to lower marginal costs, higher engagement, and so forth – ultimately contributing to a better ROI from your campaigns.
Personalised marketing messages make your audiences believe that you truly understand the problems they face, and have the best solution for such problems.
The 4 pillars to successful digital marketing personalisation:
We have broken down the 4 critical factors to developing a personalized marketing strategy.
#1: Crunch down the data to understand your audience.
The first step to formulating marketing personalization that runs at scale is understanding what makes your audience tick. By leveraging behavioral data to segment your target market, you will spot patterns that allow you to group audiences according to pain points and needs.
Some important data points include your website, social media accounts, third-party sources, as well as customer interactions that occur at your physical location.
For example, in segmenting the potential customer base for haircare products, one can identify several different pain points relating to hair health:
- dry hair
- damaged hair
- oily hair
- weak hair
- thin hair
Prospective customers within each of these segments are facing unique hair concerns, that make them interested in different types of haircare products. Therefore, messaging for the ads targeted at each segment can be specifically tailored to speak to their pain points, whilst pushing product placements that are relevant solutions to such pain points.
The next step to drive a marketing campaign that truly maximizes personalization is dividing the user journey into distinct phases. These are to range from the awareness phase – whereby a consumer first becomes aware that your brand exists – up until the ultimate point of conversion, where a sale takes place.
Having a clearly defined customer journey will enable you to further segment your advertising according to how warm a prospect is. During colder phases, such as the ‘awareness’ phase, educational marketing tends to work best – whilst direct product advertising and social proof work best at the warmer stages, such as the conversion phase.
#2: Plan your responses
A core factor of personalized marketing is efficient two-way communication between you and your customer. When a prospect reacts positively to an ad, this involves taking action – engaging with your post, clicking to your website, adding products to their shopping cart, or any other forms of value-added action. You need to have well-thought-out responses to each possible action a prospect may take, enabling you to capitalize on mass automated communication.
For example, should a user exit your website with products abandoned in their cart, you could trigger an automatic email that asks the customer if they need any assistance in carrying out their order, whilst linking them back to their cart page. This is a prime example of mirroring digital experiences to match the experience a customer would receive in a physical store.
Studies carried out by Campaign Monitor have shown that cart abandonment emails convert at an average of 10%, which is considerably high when compared to other digital marketing tactics. The huge benefit of digital communication is that it can be completely automated, giving you the ability to acquire data and optimize your communications on an ongoing basis.
#3: Implement agile processes
In this day and age, agility and automation are synonymous. As your marketing communications accumulate huge tracts of data on a daily basis, you can unlock its potential by tapping into a limitless stream of optimizations that can be implemented on ongoing campaigns. Not only will this maximise your return on investment, by it will also fuel even better performance through more and more data acquisition.
Of course, acting on such data and implementing reactive processes calls for agility. You need to be on the ball in crunching down the numbers and developing continuous insights that will guide better decision-making across your campaigns. Agile processes should be inbuilt across your team’s operational systems, as well as your arsenal of marketing tools and software.
#4: Build the right team
No matter how well-planned your strategy is, failing to have the right team in place means the inability to execute a strategy to its fullest capacity. In structuring your team, it is essential to gather experts across different disciplines, ranging from design to writing, data analysis, media buying, development, and much more.
The costs, both financial and operational, of building such a team in-house could many times be non-feasible. Outsourcing your marketing to an established digital agency like Bullshark will not only give you access to an incredible pool of talent, but it will also come at a lower financial cost than building a full-scale in-house team – not to mention the stream of experiential benefits you will derive when working with a third-party company.
