Personalized Marketing: Double Down On Your Strengths

Mass marketing or personalized marketing? What’s it gonna be?

Are you going to blast out your posting to the masses or will you deliver individualized messages to your most relevant audience?

Sometimes you can do both whereas other times you’re better off with the latter.

I’ve seen both marketing strategies in action and I’ve also applied them both myself. My first significant exposure to mass marketing and its effect on people was while working for big companies and corporations. Most customers were sorted by numbers and delivered accordingly. In terms of logistics and supply chain that’s a best practice, however, treating customers as numbers, marketing and selling to them as if they were something of little significance is a whole different game.

Then there was personalized marketing and selling at the opposite pole. Messages and offerings were tailored to a specific prospect or customer. Customization and individualization were key when deploying one-to-one marketing.

Mass marketing has its place and so does personalized marketing.

The question is what is your preference and how can you capitalize on the benefits of both approaches while delivering an outstanding experience to your prospects and customers.

Today, I’d like to dive deeper into personalized marketing and give you some hands-on tactics and techniques that you can put into practice immediately to boost your results and grow your business.

3 Simple Personalized Marketing Tips

All the automation tools and CRM services that are available at our fingertips have allowed us to take personalization to a whole new level.

On one hand, customers increasingly demand and expect personalized experiences and on the other hand, businesses juggle all kinds of complex systems and software to enable them to develop and deliver thoughtful marketing campaigns.

Assuming you don’t have the money of a giant conglomerate that can afford a team of people who track customer paths and deploy sophisticated algorithms to come up with some fancy new strategies, I’ll take the complexity out of the equation and for the greater good, stick to simple.

1. Use Personal Information to Create Identity-Based Campaigns

When a person comes to your website and fills out a form, you should at least ask for their first name. When you onboard leads via Facebook ads for example, you should capture their first and last name.

In return, this will enable you to skip such ineffective and annoying greetings such as “Dear Customer” or “To [FirstName]” and personalize your emails from the beginning of the conversation.

Big companies do a lot of marketing mistakes but sometimes they come up with amazing campaigns we can learn a lot from. A great example of a successful identity-based campaign is Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” marketing initiative.

In an effort to reach millennials, Coca-Cola came up with the brilliant idea of labeling their bottles with one of the most popular first names assigned to that generation. The campaign was first launched in Australia before rolling out globally.

Today, Coke has added surnames and all kinds of semi-personal labels such as “better half” to the bottles. Plus there is the option to customize your own bottle labels in case you have a unique name or want something more exquisite.

2. Send Personalized Emails from a Real Person

Emails continue to be one of the easiest ways to deploy personalization.

Yes, we’re getting more and more used to communicating and exchanging information with messenger bots but the reality is that we crave attention from humans. And this is where email marketing implemented correctly can make a huge difference to your business.

People want to receive emails from a human, not a company. So even if you use email templates, ensure you include certain components such as a photo and social links where people can get in touch with the sender. More importantly, use the name of an actual person when sending out emails.

3. Respond Personally on Social Media

This might be a no-brainer for you if you’re running a small business but for many companies it’s not. They prefer to automate the process. That’s why you receive those weird messages on Twitter or Instagram that have nothing to do with your initial question or request.

Social media can literally suck the life out of you and your business if you’re not disciplined and crystal clear about what it is you’re trying to accomplish. However, putting 20 minutes aside to monitor your social media and answer questions shouldn’t be something to debate about.

Obviously, you can use marketing automation tools to schedule posts and tweets, deploy machine learning and all the trigger capabilities they come embedded with, to segment people on your list so that you can provide them with information and products/services that best fit their wants and needs.

Relevance Above Everything

In today’s noisy world, authenticity and personalization matters more than you can imagine. People crave attention and appropriate content that matches their individual needs. Gone are the days of mass appeal.

According to a study conducted by Accenture, 73% of consumers surveyed prefer to do business with retailers who use personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.

This leads us to the following conclusion:

Your persona is unique. Nobody can copy that.

Therefore, use your personal style, skills, know-how and experience to tailor your marketing messages accordingly. This is how you stay true to your core while continuously working on positioning yourself strategically thus enabling you to always stand out in a cluttered environment where confusion is king.

What are some of your favorite personalized marketing examples?

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Originally published on my blog at StrengthInBusiness.com.