The marketing landscape is more hectic than ever before. A simple scroll through your social media feed unlocks the gateways to an endless barrage of advertisements, with countless messages from different businesses attempting to pitch their offerings to you. This has resulted in a diminished consumer attention span, with exposure to advertisements which often result in the instinctive action of zapping past such ads without even glancing at the message behind it.
But the picture does not have to be all too bleak for us advertisers. Enter, marketing personalisation at scale – the equivalent of having an online salesperson 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, so 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, thus significantly improving customer experience. 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 (Return on Investment) from your campaigns.
Personalised marketing messages make your audiences believe that you truly understand the problems they face and that your products and services offer the best solution for these problems.
The 4 Pillars to Digital Marketing Personalisation Success
We have broken down the main critical factors to developing a personalised marketing strategy into 4 pillars.
1. Crunch Down the Data to Understand your Audience
The first step to formulating marketing personalisation that runs at scale is understanding what makes your audience tick. By leveraging behavioural data to segment your target market, you will be able to 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, or 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, when the messaging for the ads is targeted at each segment it can be specifically tailored to speak to their pain points, whilst pushing product placements that offer relevant solutions to these pain points.
The next step to driving a marketing campaign that truly maximises personalisation is dividing the user journey into distinct phases. These 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 during the warmer stages, such as the conversion phase.
2. Plan Your Responses
A core factor of personalised marketing is efficient two-way communication between you and your customer. When a prospective customer reacts positively to an ad he will take action – engaging with your post will manifest in clicking to view your website, adding products to their shopping cart, or any other form of action. You need to have well thought out responses for each possible action a prospective customer may take, enabling you to capitalise on mass automated communication.
For example, should a user exit your website and leave products abandoned in their cart, you could trigger an automatic email that asks the customer if they need any assistance in finalising their order. This is a prime example of mirroring digital experiences to match the experience a customer would receive in a physical store.
The huge benefit with digital communication is that it can be completely automated, giving you the ability to acquire data and optimise your comms 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 optimisations 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 a 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 out your strategy is, failing to have the right team in place means an inability to execute the strategy to its fullest capacity. When 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 frequently prove to 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.
If you’d like to learn more about the potential to drive marketing campaigns that are personalised at scale, fill out the form on our site and a member of our team will get in touch!
