What do you see when you look at a mirror? If you’re a business leader, entrepreneur, or marketer, you should see an opportunity staring right back at you.
Why?
Because personalization offers you the opportunity to make your products and services super valuable to your customer community and create brand loyalty that goes above and beyond anything you’ve had before. By getting personal with people, you will be able to get closer to their actual needs, wants, and desires.
Below I have outlined why personalization isn’t just a fad you can dismiss, but how it’s something you need to be hyped about all year round. Make it part of your marketing strategy in order to be at the top of your content and sales game.
Recommended reading: 5 Easy Ways To Improve Your Customer Experience
What Does Effective Marketing Personalization Look Like?
Personalization is a return to the dawn of sales and marketing, one where the service and pitch were tailored to meet the individual stood in front of you. It’s your chance to angle your product and service to your exact customer, not a scripted buyer persona.
As is so often the case in marketing, Coca Cola represents a perfect example of how personalization can look. Do you remember their “Share a Coke” campaign? Of course, you do, and you have the bottle to prove it:
Coca Cola’s genius was to make their sales pitch all about you while pushing the maxim: “Share a Coke.” Not only was this about you personally, but it was also about you interacting with your friends, family, and associates.
They adapted readily available demographic data in order to create branded experiences that looked and felt ‘personal’, despite really just being testaments of statistical probability.
Great personalized campaigns like the one described above have a few common characteristics:
- They are either widely adopted because they’re so universal, or they are very clearly targeted at a defined niche market of users or customers
- They involve social proof as part of their strategy to help the campaign gain momentum
- Also, they are easy to roll out and replicate, and they don’t have a clear end date
- And they evolve in function of audience response and uptake.
Personalization is what your customers want
OK, let’s say you didn’t get on board with Coca Cola’s campaign (they won’t hold it against you). Your customers are still sold on the idea of personalization.
Not buying it? These stats should persuade you:
- More than 78% of customers will only engage with offers made by brands if they have been personalized.
- Around 79% of companies who are exceeding their revenue goals are already using personalization as part of their approach.
- Approximately 82% of customers want brands to know them personally.
Personalization is what your customers want. And it’s what successful companies are already employing in order to push the boundaries of customer experience. It’s one of the best ways to improve customer retention, lifetime value, and overall brand loyalty.
How Do I Get Personalizing? Get the Data!
“Customisation is asking what the user wants. Personalisation is the implicit inference from the data that we collect about people… [..] confusion occurs when consumers do not dictate what they want, leaving brands to rely on guesswork”
It’s only through data that you can start to introduce real personalization to your business.
Here are some simple ways you can start to personalize your strategy:
Collaborative Filtering
Filtering is applied in order make predictions about customer preferences and behavior.
Information is crowdsourced from a variety of sources to create patterns and predictions.
This could result in more targeted product recommendations, pop-ups, emails, ads, etc.
User Profiling
Data about your customer is used to build a digital representation of that specific individual. This then feeds into a targeted segmentation and sequencing strategy. E.g., following specific users around with ads that subtly build up to a conversion based on their unique online footprint.
User-Generated Features
Spotify is a great example of a brand that makes the most of user data. They provide listeners with engaging and accurately-targeted playlists and music recommendations. It’s a testament to how user data can be used to create add-on features, and drive online engagements. It’s an attitude that would also work in an offline retail setting where previous purchase history was fed into individual vouchers and offers. And of course, B2B marketers could adapt the strategy to their own business.
Personalized Content
Gamifying the inbound content funnel with some personalized content is becoming easier and easier thanks to AI and chatbots. Especially useful for eCommerce brands who rely on content marketing, personalized content is where data meets creativity. For brands in the dropshipping niche who are dealing with aggressive margins and marketplace competition, personalized content can help drive sales and add value to a brand that’s very reliant on audience perception.
Why is Personalization Something I Need to Worry About?
While personalization is something you need to be hyped about, you should also be responsible for how you use customer data, and how you use it to communicate with your customers.
89% of customers want to know that any information that is held on them is looked after and held securely. This means that it is the responsibility of your business to ensure that your customers trust that their data is managed safely.
There are plenty of ways that you can keep your customer data secure and this article offers great guidance on how you can do just that.
Takeaway
Personalization isn’t something that only enterprise businesses can afford to do. There is enough user and open-source data out there for us all to make the most of personalization. Just make sure you veer on the side of useful and helpful, not creepy and pushy.
Any Comments?
Are there any personalization methods you’ve found helpful in your B2B Marketing? Please share them in the comments section, below.
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Victoria Greene
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