The Threadgill Agency | The Best Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Strategy
Learn more about the best ways to personalize your marketing strategy.
Content Marketing, Social Media, Paid Social, Digital Marketing
16425
post-template-default,single,single-post,postid-16425,single-format-standard,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,qode-child-theme-ver-1.0.0,qode-theme-ver-13.2,qode-theme-bridge,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-5.4.5,vc_responsive

The Best Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Strategy

The Best Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Strategy

It was once the stuff of science fiction. Consumers enter a shopping center and, through some advanced technology, they are alerted to sales on the very items they came to buy. Today, it is how marketing is done. Consumers expect it and embrace the opportunities targeting offers them. According to an Infosys survey, nearly a third of shoppers want a more personalized experience when they shop, and technology is making it possible.

Digital marketing has evolved from the days of email blasts and mass ad placements. Consumers have lost patience with unwanted emails cluttering their inboxes, and they are blind to advertisements that have no relevance to their needs. In the current hyperconnected environment, the diversity of platforms — websites, social media platforms, and review forums — means prospective customers will intersect with your business at different points along their buyer’s journey. Segmenting your market, identifying what information about your service or product they need and when they need it will ensure marketing dollars will not be wasted pitching to the uninterested, or those who already know your message and are annoyed that you continue to deliver it.

Buyer Personas Personalized

Buyer personas serve as a guide for marketing messages. Businesses can reach their likely buyers by centering campaigns on specific job titles, geographic locations, and consumer interests. Creating content to appeal to an artificial person with the attributes you have determined to match your target is a useful but imperfect system. It fails to recognize buying behaviors and online habits. Unlike personas, human decision-makers change. As they research and learn more about products, their beliefs about their own needs evolve. AI technology platforms rectify this by collecting data using logic to refine prospect profiles based on individual habits.

Using this technology, automated systems can serve up relevant advertisements and curate content that will spark interest and drive users to landing pages optimized to encourage conversions. Data on past buying behaviors provide insight into individual buying preferences, allowing marketers to adjust promotions such as sales, discounts and other offers, to match what past actions have revealed will appeal to the user.

Personalizing Content

Social media posts, email offers, newsletters, blog posts, landing pages and paid digital advertisements can all be personalized using data aggregated with a data management platform. This may be in-house marketing automation software or service offered by a marketing agency. Inserting the target’s name in the salutation of an email is only the beginning. An analysis of data pulled from CRM software, social media, and other contact points allows for the serving of content based on the target’s level of knowledge of a particular product, their level of interest and their position along the buyer’s journey.

At the awareness stage, a focus on social media campaigns will familiarize potential customers with your name and products. Utilize targeted advertising and SEO strategies to attract clicks on informational articles, white papers, and webinars that will introduce your services and help establish a reputation as an industry leader.

Once a potential buyer opts-in to an email list, lead-nurturing content such as buying guides and demonstration videos will move a target closer to making a buying decision. A buyer at this stage may need a little nudge in the form of a special offer to take the next step. Once a target has become a customer, follow-up content can include recommendations for add-on and complementary products.

Personalizing Delivery

Consumers access digital content across multiple platforms. Finding prospects where they are online when they are online, is critical to the success of a marketing plan. Placing PPC advertisements on contextually relevant websites is a start at personalizing the delivery of a marketing message. The use of programmatic systems, which deliver ads based on user behavior, further refines targeting.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn have different audiences. Identify which social media platforms are most apt to reach your target market. Additional data necessary for creating an effective social media strategy includes discovering the type of information your audience seeks on social media, how they engage —share posts, download information, add comments,  make purchases — and the time of day they are most active.

Email automation software replaces the job of manually segmenting email address lists, streamlining the process of segmenting databases. These systems use data on user behavior to deliver the right sequence of emails at the right time, increasing the likelihood they will be opened and read. Because segmentation is based on machine logic, not subjective human judgment, the targeting is more accurate.

Artificial intelligence and automation are changing marketing and helping arm marketing departments and agencies with new tools to more accurately serve creative and execute strategies across the board. The goals are the same — build a brand and develop a loyal customer base — but technology has made the process of identifying and targeting potential customers more efficient.