Remember the last time you felt the sudden urge to click on an ad? Or found yourself down a rabbit hole of “suggested” content in the sidebar? Then, you’ve likely been influenced by personalized marketing.
Personalized marketing is a type of growth marketing that has revolutionized the way businesses attract and retain audiences. This approach has shown a positive impact on lead engagement, conversion, and ultimately, customer relationships — all factors that drive long-term growth.
But how does the strategy work? And where should your team start to optimize their marketing channels for growth? Let’s start with the basics.
What Is Personalized Marketing?
Content is at the heart of marketing. Personalized marketing takes this concept further by using engagement data to create content around the target audience’s interests and pain points. The resulting data-driven content strategy guides the visitor from sparked curiosity to a purchasing decision, and a long-term partnership with the company.
But how is that different from a general marketing approach?
The two frameworks have stark differences. General marketing targets a broad audience but typically falls short of tailoring the content that meets consumers where they are. In other words, the strategy often involves a “create content and hope that it sticks” approach.
In contrast, personalized marketing focuses on a specific audience. Content creation is informed by the consumer’s need for topic education, solution selection, or — when they’re ready — your product. And that’s why it works: when content speaks to and offers value at every step of the customer journey, the consumer tends to respond.
For example, a CRM company aiming to expand its customer list has the tools it needs for audience insights. Software features like data management, usability testing processes, and integrations can easily reveal the pain points of its customers.
However, the actual delivery of this data-informed message makes the difference. The same company can begin investing solely in product promotion, based on data indicating that the audience has a problem that the CRM solutions can solve. More often than not, this approach will quickly turn off individuals who don’t know or trust the company — or even understand their own problem in the first place.
That’s why successful companies use the same data: to tell a story, centering content around customer needs and readiness level. When implemented strategically, personalized marketing can and will drive people to your product; but it builds education and trust over time, allowing the audience to “discover” the product when they’re ready and to feel excited to partner with your company.
Now that you’ve learned about personalized marketing, let’s dive into the different elements that make its foundation.
Elements Of Personalized Marketing
To use this powerful strategy in your business, it’s important to know the different elements that drive its success. Plus, understanding these factors will help you form a strategy that will be effective for your specific team and market.
I. Data collection
How do you create relatable content without concrete information about your customers? There’s no effective way. That’s why successful personalized marketing strategies run on well-researched data.
The data you can collect here would be about visitor engagement with content, nurture email conversion rates, offer downloads, and many more. Take note that this aspect can vary from business to business. What you find useful might not be useful to your competitors, so make sure to focus on what your business needs.
In terms of the method for your data collection, you have a lot of choices at hand. Surveys are the most common. If you like to get information easily, give your customers a short survey. You can also look at the heatmap of your website — this can show where the most clicked part of your website is. Popups are often a good option too, but some claim that it disrupts customers' website experience.
II. Analysis
Market analysis is a continuous process containing many parts, but let’s begin with data collection analysis. Simply collecting data and setting the information aside isn’t enough. Analyzing audience data and using insights to brainstorm a full-funnel content strategy or editorial calendar is how static data turns into action.
Even after planning and publishing personalized content, marketers should analyze performance on an ongoing basis. Important metrics to collect include:
- Blog post visits
- Traffic sources
- Average views per blog
- Social shares
- New contacts generated
- Lead generation effectiveness
Wondering how to track this data? Lead generation metrics can be tracked via the HubSpot reporting tools and analytics.
If the KPIs have not budged, go back to the drawing board and analyze your content strategy. Audit your content for gaps in persona pain points, funnel stage, call to action optimization, etc. Analyzing these elements will lead to a content strategy that allows your prospects to relate to messaging, see the value of your offerings, and ultimately trust your company to solve their challenges.
III. Action
Without calculated action, data collection and a series of analyses simply go to waste. It’s time to put the foundational work to the test and see the impact of personalized marketing content on your audience.
Remember not to settle for mediocre content. Always go the extra mile in creating your marketing materials. After all, no matter the quality of your product, the content you present is how you communicate your brand and value to your audience.
For example, when it comes to email nurtures, it’s always a good idea to go beyond “Hi, [First Name]” personalization tokens. Go for product recommendations and services for a specific lead. Surprise them with how well you know their pain points and challenges. Create a message that can successfully convey the specific idea you want them to receive.
Benefits of Personalized Marketing for Business Growth
1. Improved revenue
If you can hook a prospect’s attention and then deliver value on a continual basis, there’s virtually nothing to stop your business from steady revenue growth. This will ultimately happen when you understand your customers well and know how to convey your message in a clear and compelling way.
When done in a strategic way, personalized marketing can drive lead generation and conversion — two elements that contribute heavily to revenue.
Lead generation, the process of gaining prospects’ information and providing value as they need it, starts with a sparked interest from a visitor. Those contacts become leads in your system and are nurtured through the marketing and sales process. Conversion is the point where a prospect turns into a customer, which is of course essential to continue growing your business.
2. Better customer experience
Gone are the days of going the general marketing route and hoping to convert some people who see it. Now, it’s all about how a brand can relate to a customer.
According to NetCore, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a business that offers them a personalized experience. Adding to that, SmartHQ mentioned that 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails.
Considering these statistics, the importance of personalization is no secret. So it’s vital for you to analyze the data you’ve collected and make a campaign or marketing content that’s relatable to your customers. Successfully doing this will provide for a better customer experience.
3. Increased marketing engagement in marketing content
Your content engagement strategies will improve when you curate messages that speak directly to your customers. Personalization in content can come in a well-written body of text, like an email or a blog post. But it can also be in images via excellent marketing visuals. Videos are also an excellent way to add personalization using web animation, video ads, etc.
Accenture reported that 91% of consumers are likely to shop with brands that provide offers and relevant recommendations. Statista stated that 90% of U.S. consumers find marketing personalization highly appealing.
Those figures only show how significant personalization is in today’s business landscape. Without integrating personalization into your processes, you might run the risk of having unsatisfied customers.
4. More leads in your marketing and sales funnel
When you’ve consistently provided solutions and answers to your market's needs, prospects will eventually feel that providing their email or other contact info is worth the value you’re providing.
This in turn will increase your number of leads and improve your chances of conversion. Accenture again wrote that 83% of consumers are willing to share their data for a more personalized experience. SmarterHQ even said that 90% of customers would share personal behavioral data to get a cheaper and seamless experience with a business.
5. Brand loyalty
If a customer enjoys your recommendations and suggestions and finds that your products and services are a great fit, then you can be sure that you have just turned a normal customer into a loyal one.
Turning a customer into a loyal brand ambassador is one of the best benefits of personalized marketing. Why? Because loyal customers are the best customers to have. They will undoubtedly do word-of-mouth marketing for you. They’ll share your brand with their friends, coworkers, and general network.
Plus, these are the people who will stick with your brand even if there’s a new competitor. Their brand affinity is strong with your business. They will even go to the lengths of defending your brand from doubters and critics. These are the reasons why you need to nourish these types of customers, because they are an asset and a friend to your business.
6. Customer retention
A common problem that businesses face is retaining customers after conversion. Sometimes they tend to forget to nurture such relationships which leads them to lose customers after some time.
But suppose you’re consistent with your personalized marketing strategies, and you take time to further strengthen your relationship with current customers. In that case, you will definitely see improved customer retention.
Just because you’ve converted a prospect to a paying customer does not mean that you should forget them. In fact, you should spend extra effort on these people because they have already shown interest in your business by purchasing something from you.
Just take Amazon or any big e-commerce store for example. Their personalized recommendations are on point for every customer. Let’s say you go to a website like Unscramblex, which is a site for Scrabble Word Finder. Minutes after you leave the website, you will find recommendations for a Scrabble board game.
This shows how far big companies are willing to go when providing recommendations and personalized strategies to their clients. It also shows that they are using a strategy that works very well.
7. Positive customer feedback
This is one aspect that businesses often overlook. Positive feedback plays a more significant role than you think. It has a heavy influence on the purchase decisions of a customer.
There may even be times that you first check for reviews before buying a product. And when you see a negative review, how does it affect your decision? How about when you see only positive reviews?
One thing is certain: never underestimate the power of customer feedback. Trustpilot stated that nearly nine out of ten consumers worldwide make an effort to read customer feedback before buying products. BrightLocal reported that four in five consumers trust the reviews they read online.
This only shows how important getting a positive review is when collecting customer feedback. Fortunately, when you go with personalized marketing, the feelings towards it are mostly positive. In fact, non-personalized content may yield negative feelings from your customers.
So using personalized marketing can help you gather positive reviews and lessen the negative ones. As long as you partner personalization with a great product, you’re on the right path to more than satisfying your customers.
8. It makes your brand stand out
When your competitors are doing the same old thing, this gives you an opportunity to stand out in your niche. Leverage personalized marketing to differentiate your brand from the rest of the businesses out there. Once you do personalization correctly, there will be a lot of buzz surrounding your business.
More customers will prefer your company over the rest because you know their problems and the solutions to them. Consumers tend to gravitate to businesses that understand them better and know what they’re going through.
If you’re able to convey the message that you empathize with them and, most importantly, you know how to fix their issues, then these people will come flocking to your business. Additionally, this strategy will even invite more people to check out your business since the ones you’ve converted will surely recommend it.
9. Efficient departments
When you give importance to personalization and leverage it for your marketing and sales strategies, you will have more efficient departments. Sales and marketing will be more productive in their work when they know what their market wants. Even the tech department benefits from this by coding an AI that your business uses for marketing or sales automation, which also helps greatly if you’re involved in software outsourcing.
For the sales team, they can tailor a sales strategy or script that hits all the critical pain points of a customer. As for the marketing team, they can think of a more strong call to action and a lead magnet that increases the number of leads and conversion.
All of these things can be achieved through a simple tweak in the strategy and by adding a bit of personalization to the business.
10. Business growth
All of the things mentioned above contribute to a company's business growth. The benefits here can positively affect the things that are important to a business — customers and employees. By knowing what your market wants, you can create more strategic marketing content and business processes.
This will ultimately affect conversion, customer relationships, business authority, the performance of departments, and most importantly, revenue. All of which help in growing a business.
Conclusion
Although the benefits of personalized marketing are something you want to achieve immediately, it’s important to understand that this isn’t an overnight thing.
It requires patience and dedication to hone your craft in understanding your customers and serving them better. But, reading this article is the first step toward your personalized marketing journey.
Use the points mentioned above, and you’re on your way to improving your relationship with your customers.
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