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Personalization

If you choose to implement a customer-centric marketing strategy, personalization is a useful and perhaps necessary approach to incorporate. Personalization creates a more thorough understanding of your customer base as a group of individuals, focusing on individual traits, then finding others with similar traits and developing a strategy for this particular sort of customer. You may choose to create personas in order to better visualize your customers. This is different from more traditional forms of marketing where you look at larger groups of people, your point of departure being groups to fit people into (via location, age, demographics) rather than understanding people, and then joining these people with others that are similar. It is a strategy of differentiation rather than generalized unification.
Data is essential in order to approach a personalization strategy. It is due to access to online data that we have the information to be able to discover people’s personal ideas and behaviors. Some of the tools and strategies to acquire the necessary data for personalization include data segmentation, dynamic content, surveys (for example, asking customers questions upon landing on your website, to be better able to help them), interactive content, and post-purchase ratings.
Some of the methods marketers can use in implementing a personalized approach include marketing automation, which automatically personalizes your content for customers, personalized email, and content recommendations (“recommendations for you”) as used on Amazon and Netflix. Dynamic content helps in responding to immediate, individual customer needs.
The Nike PHOTOiD campaign for Instagram is an example of an inspired marketing strategy using a personalization strategy to reach and engage customers. Nike created a means to design your own shoes and share the results, using interactive, personalized, dynamic content and social media in a powerful mix.
B2B personalization tends to focus on account-based management, targeting decision makers in an organization. One company that has implemented a successful personalization strategy is software provider Brainshark, by using targeted messages.
According to a 2016 Demand Metric report, 50% of marketers are finding personalization to be an effective approach, and 76% intend to increase their use of personalization.
Personalization is an increasingly valuable and necessary approach to incorporate if you intend to market your product or services online, and using the information gleaned from online data, you can create a more targeted, personalized approach for your offline marketing.