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Among all the marketing strategies that the current business world is interested in for effectiveness and efficiency, personalized marketing is one of them. So, the question that comes out here is what is personalized marketing?.
What makes it special is the fact that, in the scenario of it, literally each and every customer is being treated individually, not like just a common part of a mass.
What happens in mass marketing, the marketers collect data regarding a large demographic and design the marketing campaigns or other relevant activities according to it.
On the contrary, in the case of personalized marketing, the situation is totally 180° opposite.
What is Personalized Marketing?
Personalized marketing is all about making a proper strategy, campaign to implement for an individual and analysing it to show/ give them a perfect message, showing video, post, podcast or ads etc.
As the name suggests, personalized marketing has got a lot to do with the personal touch.
The meaning is that every person needs to present in the context which will receive content from the marketers that are customized only for him/her.
And the right message from the brand can be delivered in the most appropriate way.
With the aid of digital technology as well as digital marketing, you can collect all the necessary information about your customers.
To use that information, customize your marketing strategy and the content that you are going to deliver to your customers.
Now if it was for mass marketing campaigns, you would do it in a more generic way.
But since it is now about personalized marketing, you have to design the content in such a way that the customer feels like this content was designed only for himself/ herself.
In the meantime, it should be very clear to you that personalized marketing focuses on a very targeted manner.
The goal of personalized marketing is to engage your customers as prospective customers in your business activities communicating with each as an individual.
The Way Personalized Marketing Works:
There is no denying the fact that Information about your prospective customers can gather the possibility that your personalized marketing will be successful.
It’s a matter of great fortune that we have a vast sea of data about our customers nowadays.
So what you have got to do is to analyse and leverage those data so that you can provide your customers with customised, targeted offers as well as recommendations and appealing messaging.
No need to say that all of these will be done based on past behaviour, interests and other forms of data.
If you want to systemize the whole procedure in a specific way, then you can follow the steps below:
- Identifying:
At first, you try to collect all the relevant necessary information, for example, the basic data like gender, age, location and so on.
- Differentiating:
Then you have to start analyzing the data and do the segmentation of the users or customers to categorize them into particular niches, whom you want to target.
- Interacting:
Now you will start interacting with your prospective customers via the methods to which they are most likely to respond conveniently.
- Customizing:
Finally, the personalization comes at this point, you customize the content that you are going to send or represent in front of the customer and thus close the deal.
Pros and Cons of Personalized Marketing
Benefits of Personalized Marketing
Whether you are the marketer or you are the customer, personalized marketing is going to bring you some advantages in both cases.
After being able to implement the strategies effectively, the following benefits are supposed to come into play:
- Improved Customer Experience:
Customers would agree to share their information once they get to know that in return.
They will be offered a more personalized experience while buying from your brand and also with the confirmation that their information will be highly protected by you.
If they feel like the content they are delivered to and the overall buying experience they are having is more personalized.
Then they will feel that the brand is most likely focused on them.
So there will be more possibility that they will be filling out forms, downloading whitepapers, participating in surveys in order to get discounts, indicating their favourite purchases or preferences more.
After that, you will be doing personalized marketing more efficiently and improving the customer experience a lot.
- Drive Revenue:
Personalized marketing can also drive your revenue upward since you identify which channels are the most appropriate for your customers.
After locating those channels, you can utilize them to communicate with your customers and they will also be more responsive as well.
So the use of proper automation technology will drive your revenue to a great extent.
- Increase Brand Loyalty:
Personalized marketing can also contribute to increasing brand loyalty.
Remember that when customers provide you with valuable information regarding their preferences and choices.
They will always expect that in return they will be offered much more personalised content.
And it will be treated as a unique individual with particular preferences.
So you have got to dedicate your time and resources so that successful personalized marketing strategies can be implemented by doing it properly.
You can make sure that your customers will possess a higher amount of loyalty towards your brand and will have more customer satisfaction rates.
- Create Consistent Across Channels:
Since their brands will be interacting with their customers through a number of channels including emails, social media platforms, mobile phones and so on.
It’s important for marketers to maintain consistency while communicating through these channels.
Don’t forget to make sure that your customers are having the same experience
The one that they would have in store matches with the one that they are having through the app.
Disadvantages of Personalized Marketing
Now even though personalized marketing can have lots of beneficial points, there are some challenges that come with it as well. Let’s have a look at those:
- Finding the Right Technology:
There is no denying the fact that personalized marketing is highly dependable on technology.
As a result, without having access to very high-level technology, it is going to be absolutely hard to use personalized marketing for your brand.
Most of the technologies that exist are outdated that cannot be properly used for personalized marketing nowadays.
Also, one of the significant elements of personalization of marketing is data collection and automation, and you must use a very intelligent algorithm for it.
Unfortunately, lots of marketers struggle a lot to figure out which technology is going to be appropriate for use and cannot perform personalized marketing properly.
- Time and Resources:
The right type of software is not the only thing that you need for personalized marketing.
Apart from that, you also need to have a very dedicated team to continuously collect data and automatize the whole process for personalized marketing.
However, there are lots of companies and brands that do not have that much resources to use for personalized marketing.
So it becomes extremely hard for them to do it for branding and communication.
Also, there are time constraints, sometimes, the huge amount of time required for successful personalized marketing.
That marketing makes it harder for companies to execute such marketing strategies.
- Creating a Single Customer View:
As we already know that as part of personalized marketing, the marketers will be trying to find out the common threads across channels to which customers are the most responsive.
The result of that is to get a better picture of the customer that can be established by piecing together all the information in a single unified customer profile.
However, from the research that has been done till now, it can be seen that marketers often have difficulties doing this, that is linking data to individual customer profiles.
- Implementing Smart Segmentation:
Whether smart segmentation is being done in a proper manner is extremely crucial for personalized marketing since performances can actually boost up to a great extent through this.
Unfortunately, 85% of the marketers have reported that the segmentation strategy that they use is based on broad segments and simple clustering is not effective for smart segmentation. And thus suffer from failures in many cases.
Personalized Marketing Examples
To understand more about personalised marketing we have some examples so that you can clearly see how personalized marketing works.
1. Product Recommendation
Collecting data for every individual is the best part of helping you to choose what types of product, service you like.
For example: if you like to read motivation, inspirational and business types of books and you talk about every place and give reviews about that.
So, those show data collecting will not recommend any fictional books or you don’t not – fictional and fictional mixed books.
2. Social Media Messaging Marketing
Social media massaging marketing plays a key role for the brands. A huge amount of audiences interact with the brand through social media massaging.
One to one massing gives customers a belief, trust and royalty for the brand. The brand makes auto massing options by using a third party according to most of the question and problems types. Those works build the brand authority and increase the sales as well.
3. Starbucks
4. “Share a Coke” Relationship: Coca-Cola’s
5. Cadbury’s
Creating a successful Personalized Marketing Strategy:
Launching a successful personalized marketing strategy is going to require lots of effort and hard work.
Here are some steps that you might want to follow to execute a successful personalized marketing strategy.
To begin with, if you are not already using any kind of personalization technology for the content that you are delivering to your customers, you should be.
In case you have already been using one of these technologies, then make sure that you are making a proper comparison with your existing solution against all the other solutions.
As a matter of fact, you have an option and determine which one is going to provide you with the best outcome.
Now that you have the best option for collecting data, it’s time for you to actually start capturing information about your customers so that you can use them in your marketing strategies.
These data might include clicks, time on site, abandoned shopping carts, purchasing history and so on.
Once you’ve started gathering your required data about your customers, the time has come for you to start analysing them as well.
The automation technology and personalization solution that you are using, with the help of these.
Just after a few weeks of starting, you should be able to provide relevant recommendations for your customers through personalized marketing and start visualising the positive outcomes.
In the meantime, most of the workload has already been done and now you have just got to continue to do the personalized marketing tactics properly to provide a higher satisfaction rate for your customer.
Do not try to play with the calculation method that your personalization solution is using, more than necessary because it might not end in a very fruitful way.
Final Words:
To conclude, You can get the idea of what is personalized marketing. One thing that should really be suggested to the marketers is that, even though the procedures of personalized marketing might seem quite a hassle sometimes.
But don’t forget the splendid results that you will be getting once you are done with it effectively and efficiently.
To survive in the competitive business world of the 21st century, it’s really important to start undertaking personalized marketing strategies in case you still haven’t.