Tailoring Your Marketing Strategy for Each Customer
We know that marketing is always evolving, but occasionally we overlook the root cause of that change — the customer.
As marketing professionals, it’s our job to understand our customers, their wants and their needs. We need to be equal parts psychologist and salesperson.
Outdated Industry Standards
In the past, our standards for marketing outreach would make most modern marketing professionals balk.
Industry standards were founded on the belief that a “one size fits all” approach to marketing was sufficient for most campaigns.
Later, when personalization became a marketing norm, it was still only surface-level — putting a customer’s name here, adding a relevant detail there — and left little impression on the customers.
Setting New Standards
The marketing of today is setting new standards for the customer experience, particularly in the realm of personalization. We’ve shifted our focus from selling the product to selling value to the customer, and we haven’t stopped there.
Lately, marketers have been getting closer to true one-to-one marketing.
This customer-centric approach (coupled with the goal of true one-to-one marketing) is the impetus of modern-day hyper-personalization as the new standard.
Hyper-Personalization
Hyper-personalization is the sum of our data collecting abilities applied to personalized marketing. Using data points such as online purchases, browsing history, location discovery via geofencing, etc., hyper-personalization capitalizes on a fully realized image of the customer to inform high-yield marketing efforts.
These marketing efforts are often manifested as digital advertisements, although hyper-personalization is often used in advanced direct mail campaigns, such as targeting high-value prospects with dimensional mailers.
This granular understanding of a customer not only helps you market directly to the individual in real-time, but also helps inform more general marketing efforts, such as persona-based segmented marketing.
In short, across the board, hyper-personalization is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers today.
Translating to the Customer Experience
It’s important to remember that, although this level of customer understanding is a great tool for sales, it’s an equally valuable tool further down the funnel when it comes to the customer experience.
As we’ll discuss later in this series (The Future of Marketing: The Era of Data), data points can inform the choices we make when it comes to providing customers with things like customized portals, access to our properties via intuitive apps, mobile platforms, and web design.
Interpreting customer data and translating it into the ideal customer experience can be hugely important for more meaningful interactions with our customers, more thoughtful communications, and ultimately, higher levels of customer satisfaction — perhaps the most important component to long-term customer retention.
In Our Evolving Market, the Customer is Always Right
There’s nothing wrong with embracing trends when it comes to business, but when it comes down to it, a successful trend is rooted in the understanding of what a customer wants. Using our technologies to map our customers and segment on a granular level is the future of direct marketing.
You’ll hear it over and over in this series — marketing is evolving and will continue to do so. The market of today is as unforgiving as it is appreciative, embracing the useful and discarding anything less.
The major difference between market evolution now and years past lies in the timing: Where that process used to take months, thanks to our abilities to gather data, we can see the reception of our efforts in real-time.
But fear not: although virtually every aspect of marketing lives and dies by the opinions of our customers, if you listen, the customer will tell you what they want, and as the old adage goes, “the customer is always right”.
Looking to make sure your marketing technology is up to date and on trend? Contact us to see how we can help.
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