Anticipating what customers really want and reaching out to them with exactly what they desire can be considered as the holy grail of digital marketing. Because the more skillful a business becomes in applying data to understand customer expectations, the greater the returns and customer loyalty. Such businesses also have better customer outcomes, allowing them to focus on business-consumer relationships and long-term value leads that can provide better sales, retention, and brand identity.
The sudden surge in digital-first strategies and online interactions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic escalated expectations—giving businesses more exposure to the personalization practices of marketing and raising the bar for everyone else. Even consumers nowadays view personalization as the default standard for engagement as they expect ads of similar products once they have searched it online.
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Why should companies abandon the usual one for all marketing campaigns and offer a more personalized touch?
Let’s find out!
Why Should Businesses Personalize Marketing?
The need for relevance in the current digital era is significantly imperative because customers are bombarded with sales messages, emails, social media ads, and many things that they are probably not even interested in. Digital personalization—the tailoring of content or offers to people based on their actual behavior and interest—promises to address this problem.
Vague content and irrelevant calls to action (CTAs) that don’t resonate with any business requirement are some of the most common issues in marketing. And even worse, the pop-ups on websites that cater to all people are even more frustrating as visitors might have not entered a website to purchase a product, rather could be there to gain more information.
With personalized marketing, businesses will be able to reduce such issues on their websites, social media platforms, and meet customer expectations seamlessly. Rather than providing all of your potential customers the same experience, businesses can take a customer-oriented approach and provide relevant, highly-targeted content for each of them.
While companies with just a few products or services have been able to better personalize their online offering, most still strive to scale across all the ways they engage with customers. If done right, personalized marketing improves customers’ online experiences and increases engagement. These benefits to the customer reflect in the businesses as well, resulting in a higher click-through rate, better lead generation, increased sales, and much more, which could eventually mean better ROI.
What Is Personalized Marketing?
By now, you might have understood the concept of personalized marketing.
“Customers who bought this item also bought…”
Yes, you have all seen such messages several times, especially after making a purchase. Or you might have simply browsed an e-commerce site looking for a product and later on flooded with ads and offers regarding the product on social media networking sites.
There are several businesses that leverage demographic and behavioral data to present such individualized messages and product offerings. With such a strategy they are able to provide customers with more relevant marketing ads, which can lead to more conversion. Hence, if you are looking to provide a more unique experience for each of your customers then personalized marketing is your best bet.
How To Personalize Marketing For Better ROI?
There are several ways for businesses to leverage advanced personalization strategies in their marketing. Here are a few:
Invest in customer data analytics:
Businesses can understand customer preferences better and reach out to their audiences more effectively if they have access to customer data and analytics. For digital marketing agencies, this is not a complicated task, because they leverage the right analytics tools to seamlessly analyze data. One such common tool that almost every digital marketer uses would be Google Analytics. This innovative tool from Google lets businesses understand customer data, identify behavioral patterns, and provide customer insights, such as age, gender, device used, geography, and much more. With this data, marketing agencies can help businesses dynamically modify the website content, social media posts, to create a more targeted approach.
Divide your audiences into segments:
A business can leverage segmentation by splitting up its customer base into smaller segments based on product or service offerings that they sell. While there may be several segment possibilities available based on their offerings, persona, or customer lifecycle, select the one that defines the customer audience more precisely. You can start by establishing a base number of customer segments to start from (it could be based on the most selling product or services) and define the segmentation goals. This will make it easier for you to get the initial idea so that you can increase the number of segments in the future.
Leverage geo-targeting:
As mentioned in the first point, you can use Google Analytics to understand the type of devices your customer base mostly uses. If it’s a smartphone then you are in luck because you will be able to identify users’ locations and then use the data to market everything near to their location. This can be exceptionally beneficial if you own a local physical store in the locality, such as a restaurant, or even if you are a service-oriented company with offices around the location. Geotargeting develops the idea of creating content for a specific target audience by presenting marketing ads based on the user’s geographic location.
Create a unique message for each audience:
Social media insights can provide businesses with the relevant data on what type of posts, videos, campaigns, etc are receiving the most engagement. This clearly shows the type of content that attracts and influences the behavior of your target audience. If there are more likes and engagements then it is quite evident that your audiences prefer that type of social media post. But if the engagement is rather dull then businesses can understand that they should never post anything similar again or have to make improvements before posting similar content. Based on this data, social media managers and digital marketing agencies will be able to create unique messages and in-mail content for networking platforms such as LinkedIn. They can leverage a more direct approach and reach out to customers with content that is related to the social media post they engaged with.
Make a hypothesis for marketing:
Similar to every domain, testing is absolutely imperative for marketing as well. Therefore, before beginning to launch personalized marketing campaigns, marketers should clearly have an understanding of the target customer segment, their pain points, the marketing funnel required such as whether they already know about the product or not. Because if they do know about the products and how they can benefit from it, then marketers can directly try to sell it to them. But if they are unaware of such a product, then proper branding must be performed in order to help the customer get to know about the product or services. Therefore, marketers should initially test out both informative and sales posters. They should then analyze how well each performed, then stick on to the poster that performed well. Nevertheless, do not completely avoid the other poster that did not work but also run such ads in between.
Revisit your marketing strategy regularly:
Every digital marketer will agree that marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it tactic and so is personalization. Even if you have adopted the above-mentioned strategies to implement highly successful personalized content, always keep in mind that customer preferences change often– and so should your approach to meet their preferences. Businesses should revisit their marketing strategy regularly, and proactively make changes, so that you not only meet customers’ evolving demands but also that you won’t annoy them with the same marketing technique over and over again.
Conclusion
Customer expectations, technology preferences, and market demands constantly evolve, making it really difficult for businesses to grasp what their customer base is really interested in. Personalized marketing is a powerful strategy that can be adopted by businesses across multiple domains in order to improve their customer experiences and drive conversions. With a personalized approach, businesses will not have to spend blindly on marketing but can ensure that their techniques help them reach the right audiences hence increasing ROI.
There are several agencies doing website development in Toronto that are proficient in using the most innovative data analytics tools to create personalized marketing solutions for businesses. By leveraging the guidance of such agencies, businesses can ensure that they have sustainable growth and moreover will be able to meet their customer demands more efficiently.
