Mapping Out You’re Next Hyper-Personalized Campaign
Hyper personalization – it’s something we’ve touched on a lot in our blogs (check it out here), and for good reason. Consumers are experiencing mass communication fatigue and in today’s uber-competitive business landscape, hyper-personalized experiences make a difference. It’s all about what stands out.
So, while in the past we’ve given you the low-down on why hyper-personalization is important and why it makes such an impact, today we’ll hit on the who’s, what’s, and how’s, and give you the info you’ll need in order to map out your next customized marketing experience.
Getting to Know Your Audience
In our previous blog, we mentioned how marketers can use technological advances like big data, AI, and machine learning to collect behavioral data and take generic customer characteristics to the next level. But with that, there comes a catch – it’s not a one shoe fits all deal.
Before you begin mapping out your hyper-personalization game plan, be sure to define your ideal customer. This can be anyone from a top prospect to a target at a specific high-value account – but it’ll be specific to you and your business.
Data for Success
After you figure out who you’re going to target, you’ll want to implement tactics to get in touch with them. Think of this as a time to strategically gather data points for your outreach.
When it comes to gathering data points, your end result will only be as good as the effort you put in at the beginning. It’ll take a lot of trial and error, and a mixture of using data you already have along with various data collection tools for optimal results, but the end result will be worth it. Here are just a few tactics to consider:
- Analytics platforms to aid in the collection of data
- Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) – your hub to customer info
- Post-click landing page platform
- Data management platform
From there, segmentation is key. As the data pours in, segmentation will allow for new personalization opportunities, and the ability to integrate it into your emails, direct mail, dimensional mail, digital ads – basically anything and everything in your omnichannel campaign arsenal. It may seem like a simple concept, but it’s important enough to make all the difference at the end of the day.
A Couple Clicks to The Goldmine
Once you’ve defined your ideal customer, gathered your personalized data, and segmented it, it’s time to marry them together and execute your hyper-personalized campaign.
According to InstaPage, nearly 79% of consumers will likely only engage with a brand’s offer if it is directly tied to their previous interactions with the brand making, so it’s smart to start with simple personalization such as gender and/or age. From there, put yourself in the shoes of your customer and think about what YOU would like to see next, then tailor your campaign from there.
The level of personalization in your messages should be at a happy medium between information you already know about your prospect at a level that they’re comfortable with, but not so much that they’re “creeped out” by how much you know about them. Balance is the key to success here. Show them you care about them, without scaring them away.
Give the People what they Want
It’s an obvious assumption – giving your targets what they want will help ensure trust and build lasting relationships. Consumers hate the feeling of being sold to, but they sure do love it when they feel like someone “understands” them. So, look at hyper-personalization as a way to “sell” without ever presenting a cheesy pitch. It’s a win-win.
We get that hyper-personalization may seem intimidating, but with time and some tweaking, it will make all the difference to your marketing efforts. If it helps, think of your hyper-personalized campaign like a sales process – it starts with initial prospecting that leads to an approach and then the wraps up with a closing and a follow-up. The follow-up in this case with be the continual testing of your campaign. What’s working? What’s not? Who else can be reached within each segment? Consistently ask yourself these questions and alter audience segmentation as needed for optimal results. If it turns out your strategy is working, why fix what isn’t broken.
If you’re sick of just getting by with generic marketing strategies, contact us to see how we can help.
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.
Understanding the Trends Shaping Today’s Marketing Landscape
Welcome to our future of marketing series.
As marketers in this new era, we are no longer selling products and services on a few superficial features, rather we focus on communicating the value of our products in the modern world.
In this four-part series, we’re going to be looking at the outlooks, technology, and some crucial techniques that will shape the way we market to tomorrow’s customer.
From customer outreach to fulfillment, MarTech to data and trends, let’s take a look at what that means for the future of marketing.
Pop the Bubble
With our noses to the grindstone, sometimes we forget to look up.
It’s important to keep tabs on the latest MarTech trends, including:
- Blending traditional and digital tactics
- Hyper-personalization
- Minimalist efficiency
- Artificial intelligence
- Advanced access to data
Re-Think “Trend”
More importantly, we must shift our thinking about them. There are two ways to think of “trends”.
It’s tempting to use “trend”, as in something that occupies the cultural climate now but will soon fade into obscurity once the surface-level interest is gone. This sort of subconscious dismissal of new tech is damaging.
A better use of “trend” is the way statisticians use it — to describe a pattern or trajectory. We not only need to embrace trends in our businesses (when it makes sense for us) but make consistent efforts to inform ourselves about them. Think of trends as markers indicative of what may come next.
Identify and Embrace Evolution
Marketing fads used to come and go.
In the past, someone would have an idea, it would gain steam, but once the superficial sheen wore off, it would reveal itself as an empty marketing tactic and fade back into obscurity.
Today, most marketing tactics are heavily vetted by the industries they target — one can be relatively certain that most widely embraced marketing tactics have at least some pith to them.
Despite this, most marketing tactics have a limited shelf life. Why is that?
We’ve shifted towards evolution-based marketing, where techniques and strategies are overtaken consistently by more dominate strategies.
It’s important we look at the waning return as indicative of more powerful tactics when it comes to our marketing. It’s even more important that we seek out those tactics and embrace them as quickly as possible if we want to stay competitive.
And remember: We’re evolving faster than ever.
MarTech
Arguably the greatest success in contemporary marketing is operational efficiency. When your Marketing Director is forced to micro-manage, minutia ends up distracting from more profitable, big-picture thinking.
MarTech developments have automated many of these tedious processes through:
- Marketing automation platforms
- Social media platforms
- Collaboration tools
All of these (and many others) work as great tools to help your team streamline the day-to-day functions that create drag for your business.
Customers and Personalization
Three things we know about customers and personalization:
- Every customer is different
- Every customer wants to feel different
- Marketing is becoming more segmented and granular
Customers have always wanted this attention to detail. The only thing that has changed is our ability to deliver on that reality and desire. When we couple this desire with ease of execution, personalization now (more than ever before), should be at the crux of your marketing campaign.
The Era of Now
The above are just a few of the things we’ll touch on as the series continues.
The Era of Now is an exciting time, and we’re extremely lucky—right now. We’re collectively witnessing an evolution so remarkable, it will likely prove to be a singular event in the history of marketing.
Our thoughts are bigger than ever, and for the first time, we have the technologies to support them. Contact us today to learn more.
The Technological Trend Affecting Consumers in Every Industry
In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, it’s imperative that companies constantly evolve and understand what resonates with consumers – and right now that’s custom-tailored experiences. Gone are the days of generalized mass-marketing tactics. Today, hyper-personalization and communications designed around individual preferences reign supreme – and for good reason.
What Exactly is Hyper-Personalization?
Typical personalization methods stem from utilizing generic customer characteristics such as name, location, or even title. While effective, marketers can take this personalization strategy to the next level using technological advances such as big data, AI, and machine learning.
This technology allows marketers to collect data on the behavior of their customers. They can quantify all kinds of variables in real-time, as well as relate them to each other to deliver the most personalized experience possible.
Why It’s Becoming a Marketing Mainstay
1. Increases Customer Loyalty and Goodwill
Brands need to show their customers that they care about their wants and needs. That’s why “Recommended Picks” when shopping or browsing are becoming standard practice as it demonstrates a level of anticipation that consumers appreciate.
Hyper-personalization makes this process easier, which goes a long way in increasing customer loyalty and goodwill.
2. Higher Conversions
Whether it’s a website, call-to-action, emails or ads, the data from these channels is clear—personalization is effective at raising conversion rates.
- 40% of U.S. consumers say they’ve purchased something more expensive than they originally planned
- 53% of shoppers value personalized experiences when shopping online
- A personalized CTA has been found to increase conversions by 78.5%
- The Economist found that personalized ads led to an increase in consumer awareness by 64%
Top companies such as Amazon, Starbucks and Netflix have been leveraging hyper-personalization into their offerings for years, yielding impressive results. Raising conversions is a goal for every company, and hyper-personalization is a great way to do it.
3. It’s Becoming Expected
According to a Salesforce study, 51% of customers expect that companies will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they even make contact. As time goes on, personalized offers will become the norm, and consumers will slowly become too accustomed to accept anything less.
How It Can Set You Apart from the Competition
Hyper-personalization is basically about getting up close and personal with your customers and prospects. Consider the following: Your competitor uses standard, everyday personalization methods. They send an email to a prospect with his/her name in the subject line and a mention of his/her company name and location in the opening line. Then they go on to introduce their new product and how it’s a perfect fit for the company.
You, on the other hand, embrace hyper-personalization. Your data shows that the same prospect that your competitor is emailing has spent 30 minutes on your site researching a specific product. Your hyper-personalized campaign sends an email to that prospect the same day, that includes the standard personalization mentioned above but it also highlights the exact product they’ve been researching and an invitation to an upcoming webinar relating to that product.
It’s easy to see the difference between these two examples and which one would stand out amongst a sea of generalization.
Capitalize on It
At the end of the day, hyper-personalization is all about understanding your targets on the highest of levels and using that knowledge and data to enhance the customer experience. Experts predict that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product selection as the key brand differentiator. And, if 81% of consumers currently want companies to understand them better, let’s give them what they want.
Looking to make sure your marketing strategy is up to date on the latest trends? Contact us to see how we can help.