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Why Relevance Must Be at the Heart of Any Direct Marketing Program

Personalization has become a must-have marketing strategy; today’s digital audience demands it. The current availability of data and digital technology allows for a deeper understanding of the target audience and a greater level of personalization than ever before. Yet many brands are still struggling to deliver the level of personalization that consumers expect today. 

The failures of personalization are really failures in relevance. Basic demographics and purchase history are not enough — brands must understand and anticipate customer preferences, needs and wants. Relevance is defined by the consumer, not the marketer. These insights are essential in order to get customers to find, buy and consume a product or service. Effective marketing strategies leverage personalization to achieve relevance with a target audience.

There are three key steps to use personalization to build relevance with your target audience.

Know your audience

The first step is to define your audience. Capturing data isn’t enough. Mine your data to uncover a narrowly targeted audience. Look to your data to answer a key question: Who are you trying to reach? When you know what is most important to your customer and understand their wants and needs, you’ve created a much stronger picture of your audience. 

Create a customer persona to piece together your target customer’s geographic, demographic and even psychographic variables. This helps you conceptualize your target customer and “talk” to them in an authentic way. Diving into this level of detail with your target audience establishes the foundation for personalization and relevance. The more you know about your target audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.

Develop a content strategy

At the heart of all opportunities for personalization is relevant content. Our job as marketers is to build meaningful connections with our customers, and a content strategy is the basis. Aligning direct marketing with content teams is essential. Marketers must serve up content that’s tailored to their customers’ wants and needs and based on customer data. 

One benefit of digital functionality is its ability to switch out custom digital content depending on the audience segment, delivering a more relevant message based on where the targets are in the sales funnel. The challenge is that we must keep a steady content stream at the ready to answer to the pace of the audience’s search for information. 

Building the right depth and quantity of content to satisfy your customers’ needs, and then tracking their engagement with that content is critical. Focus on using content to create a memorable experience for your customers at all points of interaction with your brand. Successful personalization requires orchestration within experiences across channels to deliver relevance at every point of consumption. 

Start small

Test different communications tactics. Test different hypotheses. Once you test the tactics, adjust for your next iteration and try again. Monitor comments and engagements with the content on all channels. Real-time marketing and analytics give you a competitive advantage by improving your relevance and providing early visibility as to how your marketing campaigns are performing. 

When supported with the right dose of strategic planning, creative and technology, real-time marketing holds a world of promise for you to optimize every touch point and interaction with target audiences. By starting small, you can build an informed strategy over time so you’re always one step closer to driving better results.

In today’s digital age, businesses need personalization to succeed. But data shows us that relevance is critical to a personalized marketing strategy. Pairing the right personalization with relevant content choices can result in significantly higher returns. 

Put simply, personalization is a necessary vehicle, but the goal is to achieve relevance with your audience. Relevant communication builds trust, reputation and sales qualified leads. 

Want to know more about using personalization within experiences to deliver relevance with your target audience? Click here to connect with us for a free consultation and analysis of relevance in your direct marketing program. 

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