Taking Personalized Marketing to the Next Level

At its most basic level, the entire concept of marketing is to capture the attention of individuals and convince them to make a purchasing decision.

We all know this, and yet the vast majority of marketing campaigns ignore individual people and focus on large demographic groups instead. Although this can clearly be very successful, it’s important to consider how much further each campaign could go if it incorporated a personalized approach.

How Does Personalized Marketing Work?

The purpose of personalized marketing is to connect one-on-one with people. This doesn’t mean creating an entire advertising campaign around one guy in Chicago who loves pizza and cats, but it does mean analyzing data to make each message as personal as possible.

In some cases, companies do create individualized messages that are delivered via email or on-site ads. For example, Amazon.com engages in personalized marketing each time they send someone an email that contains products the consumer has previously looked at.

Personalized marketing can also be as simple as inserting the customer’s name into each email they receive. However, if you’re building a broader marketing campaign, the personalized approach must change to have a widespread and individual appeal.

Ideal Personalized Marketing Example

How does a company reach out to individual consumers and millions of people at the same time with one marketing message? Coca-Cola provided one of the very best examples of personalized marketing with their Share a Coke campaign. The company printed thousands of individual names on their 20-ounce bottles, and this led to a 2014 summertime total of more than 150 million sales.

Not only did this bring each individual into the process through getting them excited to look for their name but it also enabled Coca-Cola to use a broad and specific marketing approach at the same time. On a broad scale, the “You” font that was created for this campaign spoke to everyone, as did the “Share a Coke” ads. However, individuals were able to feel like Coca-Cola was speaking directly to them when they found their name on a personalized bottle.

Personalized Marketing for the Social Media Age

Coca-Cola’s campaign was a big hit in part due to the allure of finding the appropriate bottle and then posting a selfie with it on social media. Selfies are by far one of the best ways to bring people into your message. After all, you can get consumers to advertise for you by asking them to post selfies with your products. This actually causes them to create a personalized marketing message for themselves and their friends, which in turn provides the boost of a personal recommendation.

Another viable way to involve individuals in your personalized marketing efforts is through encouraging them to make and post videos. Your company can then take the very best videos and share them to reach out to a broader audience.

In fact, Elon Musk recently accepted this advice from a nine-year-old girl. Tesla Motors will now launch a contest to get their customers and fans to create personalized marketing videos for them. This is a win-win because it fires up the fan base and provides Tesla Motors with free advertising.

Using Personalized Landing Pages

Are you attempting to drive traffic to your main site from a diverse list of customer profiles? You can take a personalized but broader approach by making landing pages for specific needs or locations.

For instance, if you’re building a website for a pest control company that works in three cities, you’d build a landing page for each city. To take this even further, you’d build a page for each city and each specific pest. This would help personalize each person’s experience by sending them to the information they truly need. Therefore, a homeowner in Atlanta who has a termite problem would be greeted by a landing page that addresses their location and issue. This is still broad from the company’s standpoint, but it will feel more personal to the consumer.

Each landing page and personalized email needs to have one thing in common: compelling graphics and colors that set the appropriate mood. Many people think of their logo and other graphic designs as a one and done endeavor, but you need to go beyond this to reach out to individuals.

Companies such as Designhill help make this possible by bringing new marketing ideas to life through personalized graphics and updated logos. Remember; Coca-Cola kept their iconic colors and logo, but they rewrote their basic script by acquiring a completely new font. Utilizing similar methods can truly make your marketing efforts stand out.

Speak Directly to Consumers

Whether you choose to create the next big personalized marketing splash that rivals “Share a Coke” or simply stick with sending out emails that address each recipient by name, it’s critical to speak directly to each consumer. According to Kissmetrics, studies have shown that something as simple as putting the consumer’s name in the subject line of an email will increase open rates by up to 42 percent.

When you combine this with the fact that 74 percent of Internet users report feeling frustrated when website content doesn’t match their interests or needs, it’s clear that personalized marketing is the way to go. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing, take the Tesla Motors and Coca-Cola approach by encouraging people to create their own advertisements and post selfies on social media. Involving everyone in this way could truly boost your company’s profile without causing you to go over budget.

Social Listening

Speaking about getting more personal, a social media monitoring tool might come useful here. It’s super useful in identifying people directly interested in your service or a product. Approaching your potential customers already talking about your product individually, shows that you care about them, their problems and solutions they need. It’s called social selling.

Also, you can listen to Brand24’s podcast with Tim Hughes who’s the pioneer of social selling.

Author bio:
Andrei Tiburca is the marketing manager at Teamweek, a project management tool and a great shared calendar that helps thousands of professionals have a more organized team. He is also a writer on WebDesignLedger and TheNextWeb where he likes to write about graphic design, development, and everything tech-related.