26/07/2019 Making Personalized Marketing Work

MARKETING

Making Personalized Marketing

Work
by Sathvik Tantry
FEBRUARY 29, 2016

Let’s face it — U.S. marketers spent nearly $60 billion in 2015 on digital ads, but the industry
doesn’t do a great job connecting people with products they want. According to Christophe
Primault, CEO of GetApp, just 10% of consumers find what they’re looking for when interacting
with online content.

The key to relevant messaging lies with data, but the challenge is no longer collecting it. Each
day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Today’s challenge is using data to deliver customers
more contextual, personalized impressions.

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Imagine a world where programs execute optimized, data-driven campaigns tailored to each
consumer. No longer will “audience” refer to nebulous demographic swaths. Soon, every digital
ad you see will be tailored to a very specific audience — you.

The Silicon Valley giants that gave us social networks, smartphones, and apps have realized the
power of those tools to capture the customer data required for hypertargeted marketing.

Twitter, for example, recently launched Brand Hub, an analytics tool for large advertisers and
medium-sized companies. It enables businesses to monitor brand-related tweets, measure their
share of conversations relative to competitors, and automatically classify customers’ tweets.

INSIGHT CENTER While marketers want to track customers’ brand

sentiments on social media, the tool’s real power
The Global Digital Economy
is that it enables companies to hypertarget by
Strategies for growth in a connected world.
viewing top influencers in the conversation.
Brand Hub lists phrases being tweeted and
estimates brand loyalty implied by tweets,
enabling marketers to personalize messaging according to users’ online behavior.

If your company isn’t eligible for Twitter’s Brand Hub, don’t fear. There are other techniques your
company can use to make your marketing more personalized.

1. Get (more) social. Once you’ve qualified a high-quality lead, it’s tempting to make the sale and
move on. But don’t view a high-value customer as the end game. Instead, realize he’s the tip of a
valuable iceberg: his social networks.

If you were a professional photographer, you’d consider a woman searching for wedding
photographers to be a target customer. The key is to step back and look at her family and friends,
too.

First, offer discounts to encourage her to like or follow your brand on social media. Once you can
view the customer’s profile, investigate her online connections. Are her friends getting married?
Would family members want to take a family portrait? Contact connections and — this is key —
mention your shared connection to provide social proof. Simply mentioning a mutual connection
can increase conversions by up to 468%.
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2. Try account-based marketing software. ABM software is another effective way to hypertarget
marketing efforts. ABM treats accounts as separate marketing opportunities and tailors digital
messaging accordingly. For example, my company uses ABM to deliver personalized ads based on
search queries. Somebody who searches “land contract” will be targeted with a message reading,
“Create your land contract today.”

While ABM was once a tool for enterprise brands with a few highly valuable accounts, big data
has made ABM useful to companies of all sizes. One digital company I know increased page views
by 300% and pipeline growth by 22% with ABM software.

3. Consider the bigger picture. This is all about critical thinking. Let’s say a consumer searched
“calculus textbooks” before leaving Amazon. Rather than remarketing those textbooks to the
customer – usually by showing him ads for them all over the web – Amazon might instead assume
he’d bought them elsewhere, and instead consider complementary products like graphing
calculators or tutoring guides.

Spotify personalizes ads based on consumers’ interests and demographic data. If somebody
listens to a “Morning Run” playlist, Spotify might deliver ads for running shoes or athletic
apparel. By monitoring a person’s Spotify activity, the streaming service can categorize leads with
great specificity: cat owners aged 40 to 45 in a big city; beer drinkers in Kansas; young, African-
American men who bicycle.

4. Use geo-targeting. Nearly two-thirds of American adults now own smartphones. As a result,
brands can tap into users’ locations to market everything from nearby fast food to industry-
specific software.

Geo-targeting is particularly useful for industry conferences, a concentrated source of leads. If

you can’t attend, use geo-targeting to market to attendees without leaving your office. Buy
mobile ads in the city — or in a specific block — where a conference is held. Then, use ABM
software to tailor messages for each lead.

At my company, we create ads based on leads’ IP addresses. To market lease agreements, for
instance, we consider a user’s city (e.g., “Create your Phoenix lease agreement!”). We further
adjust messaging based on time of day and seasonality.

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It’s incredible how far marketing has come in recent decades. Not long ago, marketers would buy
a newspaper ad or billboard, then hope for the best.

Today, we can’t predict exactly who will buy what and when, but we’re getting closer. The
industry has begun a radical transformation — one where marketing dollars will be better spent,
ads will speak directly to us, and brands will intuit our every need.

Sathvik Tantry is the co-founder of FormSwift, a SaaS platform helping organizations go paperless. FormSwift’s
tools allow businesses and individuals to create, edit, sign, and collaborate on documents and workflows in the cloud,
eliminating unnecessary printing, faxing, and snail mail.

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Brad Adams 2 years ago

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