Marketing Personalization: Why It's Important and How Your Brand Can Achieve It
by Monique Gandy
Illustration by Hailey Patterson
In a highly competitive world of impersonal experiences and fast-paced digital interactions, marketing personalization can be the very tool that saves a brand or campaign and allows it to stand out. Marketing personalization is crucial for your publics because it demonstrates a deep understanding of their individual needs and preferences, fostering a stronger emotional connection to your brand. By tailoring content and offers to each audience segment, you can enhance engagement, increase conversion rates, and ultimately build more meaningful and profitable relationships with your customers or clients.
What to Personalize
Brands can begin their marketing personalization journey by catering their communication channels and multimedia content to their consumers. Brands can personalize videos, website pages, email and mobile application content, paid media messages, discount offers, sale alerts and more. A brand can personalize its content to make it feel catered to a specific consumer. A report done by the Harvard Business Review states that 69 percent of customers appreciated brand personalization as long as it was based on data they explicitly shared with a business. As long as a brand is transparent about the information it gathers about its consumers, the right amount of personalization can make a consumer feel heard, respected, and valued.
Person-based instead of Persona-based
When it comes to marketing for your consumers, brands should aim for person-based marketing strategies rather than persona-based strategies. Most brands focus on persona-based marketing and group many of their consumers into broad groups, sometimes glossing over important details about the individual consumers within the persona groups. Persona groups offer a significant theoretical look at who your target audience might be, however, relying on persona-based marketing is not enough in today’s digital landscape. Consumers want to feel like they’re not grouped in with a variety of different consumers just because of their demographics like income, race, gender, etc. Instead, consumers want to feel listened to and shown content that reflects their individuality. By embracing personalization, brands can not only stand out but also build a loyal and profitable customer base that will champion their cause in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Trends in marketing personalization
Marketing personalization is always changing as new technological developments are created. It is crucial that brands stay up to date with the latest personalized marketing trends so they can have a competitive edge and be well-versed in the changing digital marketing landscape. New personalized marketing trends include the need for personalized emails, less generic advertising, increased personalized product recommendations, growing consumer expectations, beneficial purchasing behaviors, boosted email open rates, and AI-powered personalized marketing techniques. Brands must stay up-to-date on the latest marketing personalization tactics in order to solidify their position as industry leaders.
Attracting Different Types of Consumers
Market personalization is especially important when trying to attract different types of consumers such as open consumers, seasonal consumers, extroverted consumers, and spontaneous consumers.
Open consumers are consumers that are always searching for innovative products that can improve their everyday routines. These types of consumers appreciate creativity and originality, which is why catering a personalized marketing approach to their everyday needs, can be a good way to win them over.
Seasonal consumers in contrast, are the type of consumers that purchase certain kinds of products during specific times of the year. With seasonal consumers, personalized marketing can help a brand prepare for the different seasons and meet the consumers when they’re ready to purchase something seasonally in everything from their mailboxes, email inboxes, text messages, etc.
Extroverted consumers are individuals who thrive on extensive human interaction during their purchasing decisions. These consumers seek personalized experiences, craving a strong social connection with the brand. To cater to their preferences, brands can organize product demonstrations and deploy floor sales representatives to engage in meaningful conversations with them.
Lastly, spontaneous consumers are characterized by their impulsive purchasing behavior, often without much deliberation. To captivate this consumer segment, brands can employ personalized strategies that tap into the emotional triggers unique to these consumers. By understanding how to evoke specific emotions, brands can create a sense of personalization that resonates with the impulsive nature of these consumers.
When Personalization can go too far
While consumers applaud personalization catered towards them, sometimes brand marketing can go too far. Brands must be careful with over personalization such as email programs that are clearly automated with intros like “Dear %%FIRST_NAME%%” It makes the consumer feel like you aren’t listening to their needs and you’re using their personal information to add them to a pool of data. Brands must actively avoid the “creepy” factor in personalized marketing by having clear data and compliance protocols about how their personalization campaign will work. In addition, it is important to run tests on your personalized marketing and make sure they are effective and don’t come off too personalized or initiate the “creepy factor.”
In essence, marketing personalization is a strategic tool in a world where generic and one-size-fits-all approaches no longer suffice. It’s the key to breaking through the noise, forging lasting connections, and ultimately thriving in an era where customers crave not just products or services, but personalized experiences that resonate with their individuality. By creating personalized and thoughtful marketing strategies, brands can establish themselves as dedicated listeners to their consumers, improving their relationship with their consumers and building a loyal customer base.
If you’re not already using personalized marketing to connect to your consumers, now is the time to start. Here at 1893 Brand Studio, we can support your brand’s personalized marketing through our services of campaign strategy, storytelling, design and multimedia. Our writers can help you learn more about your consumers and find strategic ways to make them feel like you are listening to their wants and needs and treating them as a person rather than a persona. The Brand Studio recognizes and understands the evolving dynamics of consumer preferences and works to tailor our strategies to ensure our client’s brand resonates authentically. With our comprehensive analytics, we can help you track the impact of personalized marketing and fine-tune your approach for maximum engagement.