Personalizing Your Marketing Initiatives

Through online users’ shared personal data and data analytics, marketers can access valuable insights about their target audience’s preferences, needs, and desires. This access creates vast opportunities for marketing personalization—a type of marketing that allows you to place tailored solutions directly in front of your audience at the exact time they are looking to fulfill their needs.

Providing your audience with personal touchpoints will dramatically improve your marketing results by increasing online traffic and boosting sales. In addition, relatable ads that target your audience enhance the consumer experience and build brand loyalty. To help you develop powerful marketing personalization strategies, let’s take a closer look at what personalized marketing is and why it’s so important.

What is Marketing Personalization?

Marketing personalization—or personalized marketing—uses online user data to create and deliver branded messaging tailored to a targeted lead prospect. In contrast, traditional marketing generally employs several types of offline advertising to reach a wider audience but gains a smaller number of customers with more significant effort and expense.

Personalized ads that incorporate the following elements can help you provide targeted advertisements that inform consumers of products they need and want in ways they feel are acceptable and even beneficial:

• Build trust by offering voluntary ad transparency.
• Provide users with control over how their personal information is shared and used.
• Make it clear why you are using their data.

Marketing personalization is a powerful means to interact with your audience personally and places their likes, interests, and preferences as top priorities. A personalization marketing strategy may include:

• Personalized email campaigns
• Customized ads
• Targeted product recommendations
• Tailored content

Why is Marketing Personalization Important?

While research shows that many types of marketing personalization improve ad performance and meaningful consumer response, other types have led to a loud consumer—and industry—backlash. For example, citing concerns for user privacy, Google announced its intention to discontinue allowing third-party tracking cookies on its Chrome platform and any supported ads across its Google network by 2022.

With increased restrictions on how marketers can use consumer data and research that shows certain types of personalization reduce ad performance, marketers have had to find new and effective ways to reach consumers on a personal level. That’s where marketing personalization comes in. 

Personalization tools allow marketers to exploit the benefits of reaching targeted consumers at the right time and place without having consumers reject the ads and cause long-term damage to the brand-consumer relationship.

Successful Marketing Personalization Tools

Increasingly, marketing personalization is something that your customers expect to see in their regular interactions with you. Yet, according to a market survey, 31% of customers indicate that they’d like their shopping experience to be more personalized, and only 22% are satisfied with their personalization level.

This leaves a lot of room for personalization! Fortunately, common marketing strategies exist that don’t rely on third-party data that your brand can utilize to ensure your personalized marketing plan is successful.

Learn and Meet Your Customers’ Needs

Customers have come to expect you to know their needs—what online actions they have taken, the type of messaging and content they’ve responded to, their communication and device preferences, and more. 

At every touchpoint throughout your marketing and sales funnel, you need to ask yourself what information the customer would be looking for and make sure to provide it. Consumers expect to be able to find personally relevant content quickly and easily. Customer surveys and opportunities to test your products or services are great ways to become familiar with their needs.

Compile Solid First-Party Data 

Your marketing strategy must include a reliable and well-managed Customer Relationship Management—CRM—system. You want to retain and compile information about the customers who’ve interacted with you and what actions they’ve taken on all channels and devices. The analysis of this data can help you avoid siloed communication leading to negative user experiences, such as targeting them about a product after they’ve already made a purchase.

Anticipate Future Needs

Being aware of your customer’s online habits gives you increased power to predict what they might want next. For example, when you visit a bank, the employees ask if you’re interested in signing up for a credit card even though you’re there to deposit money. They know you’re saving, but they also know you might need credit in the future. Apply this same marketing strategy to your product or service before and after the buying stage and watch your repeat customers grow.

Getting Your Marketing Personalization Strategy Right

With increasing user data restrictions, it can be challenging to determine your customers’ needs at any moment as there are many variables at play. In addition, trying to keep up with users’ data collection and analysis can severely tax your business’s resources. Finding and managing the right combination of strategies to achieve your business’s goals can be a lot easier if you engage the expertise of a professional branding and marketing company like Glint Advertising. Call us today to learn more.