Why You Need a Strategy to Get the Most Out of Your Personalization

An effective marketing and personalization strategy looks to the future, with the intention of building a sustainable edge ahead of the competition.

This strategy can cover everything, from how a company positions itself in the public eye to strategic and creative partnerships, channels utilized, tactics and media relations. It also encompasses more high-level terms, such as the value proposition, key brand messaging terms and data demonstrating target audience and customer demographics.

It’s easy to become lost amongst swathes of data, leading to misdirection and weak execution, but with a strong strategy, your company can thrive in an ever-changing environment. By discovering and highlighting your goals and what it takes to achieve them, you will never lose sight of what matters regarding personalization.

Personalization requires deep customer knowledge. Without this, you cannot build effective methods that will boost customer acquisition, retention and build more meaningful customer relationships.

What does a personalization strategy look like?

A successful and developed personalization strategy typically has five essential building blocks.

1. A definition of the brand value and a breakdown of the offerings

It is essential to define the core values of your message to ensure that they align with what potential prospects and customers find important. This must align with industry trends and shifts within the competitive environment.

This stage of the strategy is where your company defines what they are solving, utilizing value-based language to demonstrate this and how it intertwines with your company beliefs.

An excellent example of this in practice would be Casper, the mattress brand. Their brand values are dreaming big, innovation and bringing happiness to a tired industry.

This messaging is carried over into every aspect of their company, from emails of receipt playing on the 'dreaming big' mentality, employing a pun such as 'next stop dreamland' to a feedback culture, with regular reviews being requested. These reviews can be used to innovate their offering further and as a marketing tool (as they are almost always positive).

2. An understanding of customer pain points

One of the main reasons that cause products or services to fail is poor identification of their customers' pain points.

There are two main aspects to a customer’s pain:

• Customers want to save money. Does your product help them achieve this? It must be more cost-effective than the alternatives, with savings defined as either short-term or long-term.
• Consumers are always reaching for convenience. A product must be more convenient and easier to use than its competitors to lead the race to customer acquisition.

This pain can be identified by employing strategies such as customer journey maps, analyzing reviews, surveying customer opinions and studying competitors. Through these methods, it is possible to have a thorough understanding of customer pain and, therefore, a solid foundation on which to build your personalization strategy. 

3. An acknowledgment of trends and competition

By identifying and categorizing competitors, dissecting their media presence and branding and analyzing their traffic sources, you can adapt your personalization strategy so it stays ahead. Without this strategy stage, it is almost impossible to build a truly unique product that provides value to the consumer and comes across through marketing and personalization.

4. A realization of the target audience

Deciding on your target audience could change how you present your brand and the language used to do so. This is particularly important when discussing personalization, as, without target audience analysis, the results will not land.

This understanding must be gauged at every stage of the consumers' journey, for example:

• What are the expectations?
• What process does a customer go through? How do they gain information on your offering?
• What is your goal for each of their decision-making stages, for example, purchase points?
• What actions can you employ to achieve these objectives?

5. Defined marketing channels

Marketing channels must fit your brand and product to serve the best results.

There are four main potential avenues:

• Social media: This can help boost traffic and customer analysis. Which channel is best will depend on the status of your market. For example, B2B companies find more success on Linkedin and Instagram, whereas content-heavy companies thrive on sites such as Reddit and Quora.
• Search engine optimization: This can provide targeted and high-quality traffic to sites and is particularly successful with ecommerce models.
• Messaging and chatbots: Individualized marketing through chatbots and messaging have a tremendous success rate. It can be automated with messages and flows sent to a customer or chatbots that can bring customers from the product discovery stage to purchase point without any human involvement.
• Email marketing: The ROI of email marketing still holds its position as one of the most successful digital marketing platforms and channels. These communications can be personalized further, with aspects such as individualized offers to further boost returns.

6. Define the individual personalization approach

Once these groundworks have been laid, further developed personalization strategies can be employed, determining insights and prioritizing what is most essential to your business.

These insights can be split into deductive, inductive and customer self-selected approaches. 

• Deductive: These insights are derived from testing whether known available personalization or persuasion approaches apply to your situation. This is known as a top-down approach to testing personalization approaches and has varying success rates. To determine its success, experiments and justification stages are essential. By deciding which avenue to go down through strategic planning, you can reduce the prevalence of false starts.
• Inductive: Inductive investigation questions, such as 'How can I interpret the specific behaviors I'm seeing?' and 'How can I induce available personalization approaches from individual patterns?' are a well-researched and justified approach that provides a high success rate.
• Customer self-selected: This is potentially the most straightforward strategy to implement. To do this, ask your users to self-identify and segment themselves, which triggers specific messaging-based solutions determined by how they self-identify. Then, you can test and further justify the best approach for each of those segments.

The final and most essential stage of this personalization strategy is streamlining your findings. Once you have determined all of the above factors, you will be presented with an in-depth and justified approach to personalization. This is what true personalization is - a thorough and researched understanding of your client base.

Building a personalization strategy allows for higher success rates and gives your company a framework to develop and shift upon as the market evolves.

Further reading:

• Reinventing the Digital Commerce Experience
• How to Create a Single, Unified View of Your Customers
• Customer Data Platforms 101