Today, there’s a cry in the world of marketing and it goes like this: Personalization matters.
In an environment where virtually everything is personalized (you can get your name on anything from a coke bottle to a marketing email), modern brands can’t afford to fall behind the curve.
As it stands now, 96% of marketers report that personalization is instrumental in advancing customer relationships.
As if this weren’t enough, 66% of marketers see a 1-20% improvement in their KPIs as the result of personalization, while 96% have maintained or increased their personalization investments from the prior year.
With these stats, it’s easy to see why personalization is the modern holy grail of online marketing. Here’s what you need to know about the tactic and approach:
How to Personalize Your Marketing (Without Scaring Your Clients)
Personalization has an upside and a really creepy side.
If you’ve ever worked with Facebook advertisers, for example, you know that part of their business is trying to insulate customers from running screaming after they realize how much Facebook really knows about them.
That’s the extreme side of personalization, though. When it’s done right, personalization can be a major boon to your company.
Here are a few ways to strike the right chord:
1. Start With Data
If you’re interested in diving into personalization, start with your data. After all, great personalization relies entirely on data, and creating targeted ads and good buyer personas is easier when you know exactly who you’re talking to.
With this in mind, analyze your data for lists of attributes your clients share, and other factors that could help you optimize your customers’ experience.
If you’re actively collecting data, it’s more important now than ever before to remind your customers that their data is safe with you and that you’ll never share it with third-party sites. This is especially essential in the post-GDPR world. If you need help complying with recently-passed privacy legislation in California or other areas, TVDA can help.
2. Build Target Audiences
If you have yet to generate customer personas, now is a great time to do it.
Once you understand enough about your client base, you can generate a series of personas that allows you to segment your audience based on factors like gender, income, age, location, interests, pain points, and more.
This, in turn, allows you to refine your customer messaging even further and push separate segments of your audience through your respective marketing funnels.
It also allows you to build relationships and grow community throughout, which is the most essential part of marketing, after all.
3. Create a Content Plan
Once you’ve gathered a fair amount of data and created a few audience personas, you can map out your content accordingly.
For best results, it should fall in-line with the specific interests and needs of your various marketing personas.
This helps ensure it is viewed and shared all the more, and that it will appeal accordingly to each persona you’re targeting.
4. Always be Testing
When you introduce personalization, there’s a large opportunity for error.
For example, the “dear first name” email tactic won’t work if you don’t have someone’s first name. With this in mind, continue testing your personalization approaches. If you find something that either doesn’t work or doesn’t work well, you’ll have to make a plan to move around it.
For best results, always keep two versions of everything in the pipe. One should be personalized and one shouldn’t. As you deploy them, pay attention to how your control group faired and how your testing group did. Learn from that experiment and then run another test!
It’s the age of personalization, and brands that can get on board with the trend now stand to enjoy better outcomes and more productive experiences than their counterparts.
Ready to start personalizing your content? Contact TVD Associates today!