By Luke Fitzpatrick
The power of personalization creates a full-circle effect within your broader marketing strategy to keep customers coming back time and again.
Personalization continues to be the way forward in the marketing world in 2023. People prefer feeling connected to the things they buy and the companies they support. Finding unique and exciting ways to engage and connect with your customers is the key to marketing your product or service to fellow business professionals.
Giving marketing a personal touch is guaranteed to connect better with your desired audience, but understanding how to connect personally with that audience is also a key part of your marketing strategy. In this article, let’s explore the power of personalization and how it could greatly benefit your company’s marketing campaigns.
1. Hyper-targeted content curation
By employing a hyper-targeted marketing strategy using curated content, you can stay one step ahead of your competition and your customers. The goal of curating content is to put the customers’ wants before them and make their decisions to purchase your service or product much more effortless.
A hyper-targeted approach requires a deep understanding of your audience and how they consume content online. Are they using Facebook or Instagram? Or X? By creating content that connects with your customers’ personal lives in a clever but ultimately unobtrusive way will yield far more excellent results than an impersonal, hands-off approach.
2. AI-powered personalization
Artificial Intelligence is the inescapable way of the future. Artificial intelligence has made incredible strides in the last few months and continues to do so. Using AI as a marketing tool allows you to be faster in your audience analytics and making new connections, increase your revenue by saving time, and provide your would-be customers with interactions that feel more personal and tailored to their needs.
Using AI to create a personalized product placement campaign on customers’ social media channels, for example, will allow you to reach new customers much faster and offer new products to existing customers based on their online behavior and the data that AI collects, mines, and produces a profile from.
While “AI-powered personalization” may seem like an oxymoron, engaging with your clientele based on data and analytics is critical to a business-to-business marketing strategy.
3. Interactive content experiences
One of the most potent ways to connect with new potential customers and give existing customers something to explore is to create interactive experiences. Encouraging your customers to interact with your website (such as “Build a Shoe”, similar to Nike’s advertising campaign) will keep them engaged and having fun partaking in the experience. Marketing your product with interactive content lets clientele get others involved in the experience.
For example, if you are a kitchen cabinet maker, using interactive software to allow customers to choose their wood type, handles, drawers, cabinet sizes, and shapes offers them a near-perfect representation of what your product could look like on their wall and may encourage them to place an order.
4. Dynamic website personalization
Using data collected from your customer’s web browsers by that AI-powered personalization we discussed earlier. You can immediately tailor your website to your customer’s personal preferences based on data you’ve collected from their web browsers, like their location and browser history.
Marketing your product or service to customers using DWP is a huge opportunity to narrow down further a target audience for that product or service -. In contrast, static content is the same for everyone. For example, DWP allows you to market your female clothing line to women.
However, it also allows you to show your potential clients living in the heat of Arizona a different line of products on your landing page than your potential clients living in a wet and humid Washington. They’ll see the rainjackets before the sunhats.
5. Account-based marketing (ABM) at scale
Utilizing account-based marketing in your B2B marketing strategy is a fantastic way to yield greater returns on investments in a shorter time by targeting specific accounts and customers. This requires understanding what accounts are performing well and would be most likely to respond to a targeted marketing campaign.
Account-based marketing sells your products or services to your previous clientele that are most likely to purchase them again. Using AI, you can take a deep dive into your analytics and sales figures and create profiles of your customers based on their purchase history, then utilize that information to market to them specifically. You don’t have to do this one customer at a time. ABM at scale can run simultaneously across your ‘best customer’ base.
6. Personalized video marketing
Creating personalized video content is a way to keep your customer’s attention and is much easier for them to digest than written text. Keeping videos short (a minute is a good length) and to the point will maintain customer attention. Make the video too long (2+ minutes), and people will lose interest. Too short, and your message is lost.
Personalized video marketing relies on encouraging your audience to take that next step of buying or calling your business to schedule your services. Hire a professional videographer to create personalized messaging and include calls to action at multiple points in the video.
7. Customized email campaigns
There is a definite knack to email marketing campaigns. They must be short rather than long, filled with pictures, text, calls-to-action, and, most importantly, personalized to the customer.
Creating customized email campaigns can be something as simple as changing the thematics of an email campaign each month to reflect a significant cultural event happening during that month.
In the United States, this could revolve around Independence Day, or you could celebrate International Women’s Day with a specific email campaign targeting only your female subscribers. Creating customized email campaigns will make your customers feel as though they’re more connected to your brand and company.
8. Utilizing customer insights and data
AI analyzes large amounts of data and uses predictive analysis, a powerful tool in B2B marketing campaigns. For example, businesses can use AI to identify potential customers who are most likely to be interested in specific product offerings or solutions for their businesses. However, there can be security concerns when dealing with business information and data.
It’s imperative to ensure that you comply with relevant data privacy laws and regulations, train your employees and customers to recognize phishing attempts, and that if you’re using third-party tools or AI platforms to handle personalization, the partners have robust security measures.
Ultimately, the more data you collect or store, the higher the risk of a data breach or cyberattack. Cybersecurity solutions such as encryption and firewalls will help prevent data breaches, while innovative business security systems will safeguard customer data stored in offices or data centers.
9. Leveraging customer feedback for personalization
One of your greatest sources of personalization potential comes from your customer feedback. Encouraging your customers to leave personalized feedback allows you to understand the positive and negative aspects of their experience with your business.
Crafting a personalized email response to negative feedback helps you to connect better with your customers. Despite the initial negative feedback, it may prompt them to choose you over the competition next time around.
Leveraging customer experience by reaching out to them personally makes them feel your business truly cares for its customer base and is willing to go the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction.
Finding new customers in a changing landscape can be a challenge. However, making personal, deeper connections with customers, old and new, will guarantee you repeat business and give you a better understanding of who your audience is, which will inform your product and service offerings going forward.
About the author
Luke Fitzpatrick has been published in Forbes, Yahoo News and Influencive. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturing in Cross-Cultural Management and the Pre-MBA Program.