What Is Personalized Marketing & How Can Local Brands Use It?
Audiences are bombarded with marketing messages. Every day, they see hundreds of ads and brand mentions on TV and social media and in inboxes and text messages. That is why personalized marketing is so important. Personalized, targeted messaging that speaks directly to audiences and refers to what they want and need has a better chance of cutting through the noise and driving prospects and customers to take action. So, what is personalized marketing exactly, and how can you use it for your local brand? Personalized marketing is the strategy of tailoring marketing messages so they are unique for each person. It creates targeted messages for customers so one person might see different messaging than other customers. While that may seem overwhelming (how can you create unique messaging for every single person who sees your marketing messages?), it’s not as difficult as it sounds. Using digital tools and data, any brand -- big or small -- can set up personalized marketing initiatives. This post will show you how. To better understand personalized marketing, it helps to imagine some examples. You can use personalization in marketing to: Personalized marketing uses what you know about a prospect or customer to create targeted messaging. Rather than sharing general ads and promotions for your products and services, you determine what the prospect might be most interested in, and then showcase those offerings and content. On the surface, personalized marketing seems like something reserved for mega-brands with huge budgets and resources. But even small and local brands can put personalized marketing to work for their business. It all starts with customer data. If you don’t know who your customers are and how they engage with your business, it is going to be very difficult to share personalized messages with them. To use personalized marketing, you need to have a customer relationship management (CRM) or point-of-sale (POS) system that, at the bare minimum, collects: With just three pieces of information, you can start to engage in personalized marketing. For example, a restaurant could send an email using the customer’s first name and share a coupon for a food item they recently purchased. If you don’t already have a CRM, POS, or other customer data platform, it’s time to set one up. Related: What’s a Customer Data Platform? And Why You Need to Use One It’s not enough to have a system to collect customer data. You also need an effective way to funnel prospects and existing customers into your system. You need to give customers an incentive for sharing their information. Prospects and customers will be far more willing to pass over their contact information if they see that there is something in for them. To encourage people to sign up, you need to give them value in exchange for their email address and phone number. Encourage customers and prospects to sign up by: Learn More: 7 Simple Ways to Collect Customer Contact Information Data to help you create more personalized marketing doesn’t always come directly from customers. It can also come from your website and social media accounts. Using pixel codes from Google and social media sites, you can begin to tag people who visit your social profiles and website. The benefit of this data is that you can identify prospects interested in your brand and reach out to them again. For example, a local hair salon could identify people who visited their website and looked at a page for wedding hairstyles and then target those audiences with an ad for a wedding hair consultation. Finally, once you start to collect customer information, you can begin to launch personalized marketing campaigns based on who your customers are and how they engage with your brand. A few marketing tactics that can use personalized marketing include: When designing personalized marketing tactics, look at how you can segment your audience. Segmenting your audience is the process of breaking up your audience into smaller, more defined buckets. For example, if you have a multi-location business, you can split your customer base up into segments based on which location they visit most. To create effective personalized marketing campaigns, define your customer segments and then create messaging that resonates specifically with those audiences. Related: Launching Marketing Campaigns: Everything You Need to Launch a Successful Promotion Personalized marketing might sound like a complicated marketing tactic reserved for big brands with even bigger budgets. But, personalized marketing is easier than ever thanks to tools and software designed to bring the power of personalization to brands big and small. If you haven’t tried personalization in your marketing yet, find out how you can begin to collect customer data and set up strategic campaigns using MyArea Network's local marketing platform. What Is Personalized Marketing?
Examples of Personalized Marketing
How Can Local Brands Use Personalized Marketing
#1) Collect basic customer data.
#2) Give customers a reason to share their contact information.
#3) Track customer data on your digital platforms.
#4) Create campaigns based on your data.
Start Using Personalization In Your Local Marketing
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