Personalized Marketing Age: How to Deliver the Right Message?
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Users of the digital age connect with each other and with businesses 24/7. With all this increasing speed, the expectations of consumers have also changed. There is now much greater expectation of customization and user interactions are fueled by end users’ behavioral data. This situation created a revolution in marketing: By recognizing each persona separately, giving the right message to the right people at the right time.
While the average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000, it dropped to 8 seconds in 2015. So now, companies are running out of time to impress customers and get their attention.
We all know what it’s like when the grandparents get the kids. The grandparents are looking to garner extra hugs and kisses, and their offer of extra candy and more cartoons than they get at home. By asking the kids if they wanted candy when the parents weren’t around, they actually gave the right message to the right person at the right time. As a marketer, this kind of information is critical. If you were marketing candy, this situation gives you knowledge of the exact thing you need to capitalize on most to sell your product, and you’ve even learned that your ideal target audience may literally be 70 years older than you’d previously guessed.
But if you can simply identify the right time, message and person for your message, then you’re in business. So how do we do that?
What is the right message?
This could of course be its own article, but in short, the right message is how you tell your audience what exactly it is that you do. That’s the easy part – the hard part is crafting that message to convert people who might be skeptical and turn them into believers. If that’s the case… that leads us directly to:
What’s the audience then (or “right people”)?
This is possibly the most important part of this idiomatic threesome. Generic content that isn’t for a targeted audience is often wildly unsuccessful. Infosys reckons that 74% of consumers, in fact, react negatively to generic content, whereas 59% of shoppers are influenced by some degree of personalization.
This means you have to identify who they are, what about the current set of products they use is frustrating them, and why your product is perfect for them. This means identifying personas and getting to know them on a personal level and what exact language they speak as you craft your message, all of which in turn means that you have to get the segmentation right. Dataroid provides exactly this kind of behavioral segmentation, finding the right people and splitting them up in exactly the right way.
When is the right time?
The right time is also a consequence of who the audience is. As in the first little scenario, the right time is when the parents are away. For others, the right time maybe at the end of the month when people receive their paychecks, or maybe when they are walking around your store, or maybe when they check the same product twice in one week. Different products will differ of course, but mostly this is determined by who your audience is and when they will be most receptive to your pitch.
OK, you got the message, the person, and the time. How do I deliver it?
You might think that this is the easiest step but it really isn’t. Content may be king, but if you don’t deliver it properly then you won’t get anywhere. There are 3 steps (at least!) that you have to go through to make sure your message gets delivered properly to the right person at the right time.
1) Get the channel right
This is a critical step, and there’s no one size fits all. What channel works for one person might not work for another (Grandma might not have gotten the candy to her grandchild if she’d tweeted out “would you like a candy?”).
Even as you’re creating your message you need to know which channel you’ll be sending your message through. Again, your audience is critical, as you’ll need to know which platform is the one through which they most engage with content. After that you need to hone that message to the channel, very obviously a personal mail might be significantly different than a social media message. By checking your customers’ response rates to the messages from omnichannels, you can finetune your channel strategy, personalize the delivery method through marketing automation and customize the delivery channel for the next message. Dataroid can uniquely merge behaviors from multiple channels at this point.
2) Send it at the right time and right frequency
This is a critical step, and there’s no one size fits all. What channel works for one person might not work for another (Grandma might not have gotten the candy to her grandchild if she’d tweeted out “would you like a candy?”).
Even as you’re creating your message you need to know which channel you’ll be sending your message through. Again, your audience is critical, as you’ll need to know which platform is the one through which they most engage with content. After that you need to hone that message to the channel, very obviously a personal mail might be significantly different than a social media message. By checking your customers’ response rates to the messages from omnichannels, you can finetune your channel strategy, personalize the delivery method through marketing automation and customize the delivery channel for the next message. Dataroid can uniquely merge behaviors from multiple channels at this point.
3) Send it to the right place
Right time, right place. Target location is just as important as everything else mentioned in this article. Is the message being sent via push notification or in app message? Why not benefit from geofencing or location-based campaign capabilities and put location to work? The location matters as much as everything else and you need to have a solid grasp of your customer to know which location makes the most sense.
Key Takeaway
Marketing effectively means finding the right person at the right time and delivering the right message to them. That sentence may sound relatively simple, but there’s a lot in there and each step of the way needs to be treated with thought and care. You need to know your target audience in and out so you can determine what message will be best for them, and how best (and when) to deliver that message along lines most appropriate for them. And of course, as technology changes, the ways to reach your customers change along with it. Which channel you’ll need to use to take advantage of the latest technology is as critical as the timing of your delivery. But when it comes to timing, whether that person is a 4-year-old or a businessman, the basic tenets remain the same!
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