We’ve shown how creating custom user experiences for digital marketing campaigns, known as personalization, can greatly increase outreach effectiveness. When people believe content is more relevant to them or that a brand is paying attention to their specific needs, they’re more likely to engage and respond positively. Yet one must maintain a balance to ensure personalization efforts don’t become intrusive or “creepy,” which can harm long-term customer relationships.
How do you incorporate personalization in your campaigns and content, knowing you’re hitting the right target audience with unique messaging that speaks to them without overreaching?
Start with Data Gathering
Data collection is the essential first step. You’re never going to properly position your content without fact-finding about your target audience, industry trends, pain points, and so on. It’s vital to get high-level overviews for your audience. Plus, you should drill down to info such as their primary email addresses and names so you can address them more directly. Data types include demographic data, behavioral data, corporate data, or contextual data. Whether you pay a research company, run study groups, or pull data from newsletter subscriber lists, this market research is what will let you take the next step.
Move to Market Segmentation
Not every piece of content you create and use in a campaign will be for every single market audience you have. Take the time to break down your target audience into well-defined segments, each with unique needs and wants as well as a more specific language that speaks to them. Having too broad of a market audience results in campaign efforts that provide vague or ineffectual results. This step can include demographic mapping and more in-depth research to pinpoint industrial subcultures within your overarching audience.
Strategic Personalization Implementation
Once your data has been gathered and has been used to inform the development of your campaign outreach content, what are specific strategies you can employ to optimize personalization? Here are just a few:
- Dynamic landing pages: While the core of your landing page content might remain the same (touting similar product or service values and benefits), it is increasingly easy to establish a page that presents an altered message to different members of audience segments when they land on it. Their name might appear above the main message, or the storytelling element might change to be relevant to a certain industry or lifestyle. This can be applied to most digital content these days, such as emails, video segments, and opt-in forms.
- Behavorial targeting: Timing and placement play a huge factor in sales and marketing responsiveness. Advertising campaigns and other outreach can be linked to target demographic browsing patterns, scheduling preferences, and countless other factors that determine when and where a particular person runs across your content. Fine-tuning these elements can dramatically increase campaign effectiveness.
- Split testing: By presenting the same audience with variations of a particular message, you can determine which one they better respond to. Analyzing content split results can also help you avoid investing too much time and effort into content that doesn’t connect as strongly as you imagined it would. This lets you run a constantly improving campaign as you tweak and polish the content for more impactful results each time your audience encounters it.
For more ideas about how to personalize your marketing outreach, contact us today.
