Marketers in 2020 have finally reached the ‘tipping point’ where scalable hyper-personalization of marketing activities is not only possible, but is rapidly becoming a requirement in order to stay up with evolving consumer trends.
The shift to more towards personalized, targeted shopping experiences is largely due to the advancements in marketing technology, with elements of machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometric identification all becoming more integrated with one another in order to deliver customized promotional opportunities.
Three main ingredients digital marketers need to follow to enable hyper-personalization:
- Engagement – Engaging customers with hyper-personalized campaigns which customize their experience with your brand or organization. According to recent findings by the Epsilon Group, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when the brand offers a personalized experience. In this qualitative study, one of the respondents reported hyper-personalized campaigns drove 3-4x more engagement with the brand. A B2B respondent reported that full-funnel personalization has doubled its webinar and event registrations. The key here lies in collecting and analyzing consumer data at every turn, and investing the time and effort to understand the key trends.
- Relevance – This is the ingredient that B2B and B2C marketers need to borrow from Netflix and Amazon – it requires truly getting the right message to the right person at the right time, all the time. Many have spoken about this in the past, but we finally have the tools and knowledge available to do it properly, by using richer behavioral data and intent data to create messaging that hits each individual’s personal needs and pain points.
- Trust – If the first two ingredients are added correctly, the third will naturally follow – trust. With so much competition in the online space, customers are going to choose the one that they trust the most – which is why reviews are now so important in every aspect of our process. Aside from customer reviews, good educational content is a prerequisite – companies need to invest in an education team that puts out how-to’s, instructionals and thought-leadership content, especially in video form. This type of content needs to be delivered to the customer based on their specific needs, intent, and funnel stage.
The key to making this recipe work is taking a data-driven approach that’s personalized for each account and each person at every touchpoint along the buyer’s journey.
If executed properly, it will result in higher engagement, more customers, a larger pipeline, and larger account wins.
Bonus
Let’s further define some of the terminologies we’ve used, so that you can walk away from this post with more than a conceptual approach to the process.
- Customer Content Audit – Re-evaluate all of your target customers and their needs at every stage of the purchase funnel. Evaluate all of your current content and tag it by the customer persona and funnel stage. Revise any content that will better suit each persona’s need at each funnel stage. Fill in the gaps by creating new content or identifying influencers that you can partner with to create new content for each persona designed to engage them at their current funnel stage and move them along to the next stage of the journey.
- Intent Data – This type of data can be collected in a couple of different methods: First-party intent data references how accounts interact with you on your properties while Third-party intent data uses the content people are reading on third-party sites to identify which accounts might be actively researching particular solutions.
- Behavioral Insights – Intelligence such as sales profiles that are rich in data on target prospective customers and accounts, primarily using manual research methods.
Source: Social Media Today Website
