Marketing Trends to Help Brands Personalize Experiences in 2022
Personalization. You’ve heard about this concept for years, but what does it really mean, and what’s the best way to properly apply it across your entire customer journey? How does personalization impact all your brand connection points—paid, owned and earned media (POEM)?
Yes, it’s true that personalization can make some people feel as though they’re being stalked. That’s why you need to strike the right balance of customizing your brand experiences to meet your audience’s needs while not over-tracking or undermining their trust in any way.
If used correctly, synced up with the customer’s path to purchase at the right times, and in the appropriate context across your POEM touch points, personalized experiences can be the difference between a lost customer and a sale.
According to a recent Salesforce survey, the most common benefits from personalization are an improved customer experience (64%), higher conversion rates (63%), and better visitor engagement (55%).
Personalization should be part of a customer-centric brand experience. Whether you’re introducing your brand to an audience for the first time or trying to close a sale, you should have a deep understanding of your target customer’s needs and desires. It’s a main element of AfterMath’s marketing experience strategy.
So, regardless of which marketing channel we’re talking about, how do you personalize?
First and foremost, you can’t assume what’s important to your customers; do the research and collect the appropriate data.
Employ a methodical approach rooted in direct communication (talking to your target audiences, implementing surveys and focus groups, etc.) to determine what they actually want.
Which specific products do they want to know more about? Do they actually want to receive emails from you, or would they rather not have you clog up their inboxes? Are text-based sales alerts helpful or “creepy?” And even if they’ve opted into these things, opinions and feelings change all the time, so you should regularly check in to make sure you’re giving your customers what they want.
If you know these things, you can better focus your time and resources. Even better, this knowledge results in a more positive brand perception, influencing your customers to share their experiences with others; more on this (earned media) in a moment.
In addition, you need to test and learn in order to best personalize the customer experience. You won’t get everything you need to know from pre-campaign research; implement some smart, calculated trials and see what you can learn.
So how does personalization apply to your various marketing channels?
The good news is that there’s an opportunity for it across any of your POEM channels at any point in the customer journey. Here are a few examples:
Owned Media
Across your owned media resources, focus on conversational marketing—your website is a great example of a touch point where this can be applied. Your visitors don’t want a generic, script-based message when they arrive at your website. Provide them with useful resources and assistance that is specific to their situation.
Create a unique experience
Consumers are inundated with brand messages every day, so you need to stand out through the experiences you deliver. Take this recent Starbucks idea for example: the company created a gamified mobile app that uses customer-provided information, such as purchase history and location, to deliver various tailored experiences, such as allowing them to customize their drinks and engage with its rewards program. Since implementing this program, Starbucks has seen a major uptick in new members, and it all stemmed from the personalized experience they delivered.
Create a positive customer experience (CX)
CX is the experience customers have interacting with your brand. Providing the opportunity to have an excellent experience with the brand (and brand-owned content, apps, etc.) will keep consumers coming back.
Provide transparency
The ongoing dialogue you have with your customers—through your website, social media platforms, emails, or live conversations—should be as transparent as possible.
Especially considering the prolonged pandemic, be upfront with your customers about things like logistics issues, delivery timing and other challenges with our “new normal” and how it personally affects them.
Earned Media
The content you publish on social media is technically “owned” by you, but it becomes earned media when it’s passed along from follower to follower in a positive context among various social groups—and this can be incredibly powerful when the content is personalized to the appropriate degree.
Understand and speak to your audience
Pay attention to what your followers are doing, where they’re going, what they’re engaging with, what they’re commenting on, and what their attitudes are toward your brand content on social media, so that you can determine the right types of content to deliver (and where, when and how to deliver it). Hopefully, you already have a social media strategy and content calendar. But even with those core elements in place, it’s easy to fall into a sometimes repetitive process of continuous content output just to maintain a high frequency of weekly content—but posting so often shouldn’t come at the expense of sharing customized content that your specific followers will appreciate.
A recent survey found that 71% of consumers who have a satisfactory experience with a company on social media are likely to recommend that company, resulting in more positive impressions of that brand for potential clients and customers.
Act on social media trends
It’s also crucial to understand the trends surrounding social media that will lead to valuable earned media. One of the biggest trends right now is social commerce, which has become the norm for many shoppers. Especially since the beginning of the pandemic, social media has solidified itself as a mainstream transactional platform, whether it’s Facebook (a veteran in this space), Instagram or now TikTok jumping on board.
With social commerce, not only does the shopping and checkout experience itself need to be as seamless, easy and user-friendly as possible for the consumer, but it should be connected to your surrounding social media efforts. For example, consider leveraging social ads that are tailored to your customers’ specific interests and that fit naturally into their social media feeds; this will help to drive qualified traffic to your social commerce experience.
In this vein, Instagram recently ramped up its efforts to create Shop Ads that retailers can use to link to specific product detail pages and help guide consumers through a customized shopping experience. Other social media platforms are quickly jumping on board with these shoppable ad experiences.
Paid Media
There are myriad opportunities for customization and personalization in your targeting and messaging in the paid media realm, especially when it comes to data-driven digital media.
Generic messages won’t cut it anymore. And it’s still possible to have a conversation with your customers through advertising and sponsored content; just because it’s paid for, that doesn’t mean you can’t deliver content that is valuable to them based on their specific needs.
In paid media, however, achieving that personalization is a bit tricker than in your other channels. More than ever, consumers are aware of the fact that companies collect their data to target them with ads, and let’s be honest—they’re not crazy about it. There’s a fine line between ads that are tailored to someone’s unique situation and ads that cross the line into invasion of privacy.
But here’s how to do it well.Some recent examples of AfterMath’s work for clients aligns the most effective aspects of relevant personalization, keeping privacy and relevancy in mind.
Dynamically customize messages based on content consumers are looking for
Working with manufacturers of products, AfterMath gets the opportunity to help each consumer find the right product for their situation. In this example, we leveraged the types and styles of products viewed on a client’s website to retarget ads specific to the product category, style or specific product the consumer was interested in and provide them with more examples and information to make an informed decision.
Make privacy a priority
AfterMath also works with more sensitive categories, such as healthcare, in which we need to be mindful of privacy regulations (and, of course, consumer trust), but we can still absolutely personalize our messaging based on content that is specific to patient needs and concerns.
For example, with weight loss being top-of-mind, as shown by the articles people read about weight loss–related New Years resolutions, how to eat better or how to get on a new fitness regimen, we can promote our weight management services via contextualized, personalized content within the healthy eating section of EatingWell.com, geo-targeted to our key markets, and delivered in an interactive, native format that will resonate with them based on AfterMath’s understanding of how they use media and how they respond to brand content.
By delivering just the right level of personalization and making it as easy and seamless as possible for your customers to interact and engage with your brand, you will help them better understand your offerings, evaluate their options and make an informed decision—and you’ll earn their trust in the process.
Get in touch with Mike Pocci to learn more.