How To Practice Personalized Marketing Without Exploiting Your Audience
Personalized marketing has many benefits, from helping you to better understand and connect with your desired audience to tailoring your marketing to create unforgettable experiences. It comes as no surprise that personalized marketing can help increase the quality of leads that come into your business as well as help you build stronger brand loyalty. Yet, if done wrong, the data and insights you gain about your audience could quickly cause you to exploit the very people you want to serve and help. Within this article, I will be discussing what personalized marketing is and how we can practice it without exploiting our audiences in the process.
Protecting Your Audience’s Privacy
When incorporating personalized marketing into your marketing strategy, the first thing you want to consider is how you are protecting your audience’s privacy. This requires us to be transparent with how we are using the data people provide us and to be honest about how we are planning on protecting their data. Now more than ever before, we have come to realize just how often our personal information is being used and sold. If you are wanting to practice business consciously and ethically, while still personalizing the experience you provide your community, you want to start by identifying how you plan on protecting the information of the very community you serve. Be upfront about what data you are collecting, how you plan on using it, and allow users to opt out at any time. We want to be able to engage with our audiences and learn about them while still keeping their security in mind.
Along with the above, we next want to ensure that the very data we are gaining about our audiences is not being used to trigger pain or profit from vulnerabilities. Many folks who turn to personalized marketing wind up getting too focused on learning about their audiences pains, weaknesses, and trigger points…using these things then in their marketing to encourage sales based on manipulation marketing. We must make sure that as we venture into personalized marketing that we do not slip also into manipulation marketing at the same time.
Staying customer and client-centric
Our personalized marketing approaches should also stay customer and client-centric. We can collect data and put it to good use without exploiting our audience’s in the process. Personalized marketing, at its core, is about better understanding and connecting with the people we want to support within our businesses and brands by using data and insights to create relevant marketing messages. Personalized marketing moves away from one size fits all marketing, which is a necessary move in and of itself. It helps us tailor messages for specific segments of people so that we can creating meaningful, personalized experiences. Sounds great, right? It is, so long as we hold a strong ethical compass as we do so.
Personalized marketing requires collecting data on the audiences you want to be targeting with your marketing. When done right, we can form solid relationships with the communities we are supporting, helping us to better understand their needs, behaviors, goals, demographics and interests so that we can craft content and marketing to them in a way that establishes deep resonance. Applying data you have gained from doing market research can help your marketing efforts tremendously. If you find you are currently experiencing difficulty with attracting or connecting with your desired audience, personalized marketing may be just the thing that can bridge that gap. What is key to remember is that people want to be treated as such, not as numbers or data. When applying personalized marketing, we must hold the customer or client’s best interests at the heart of our campaigns. This means making sure we are compliant with data security, being transparent about how we are using their data, and using the data we collect in an ethical way.
The benefits of personalized marketing
Now that we have discussed the importance of protecting your audience’s privacy and staying customer and client-centric, let’s now go into ways we can apply personalization techniques into our marketing so to more deeply understand and connect with the people we want to serve. When we apply personalization to our marketing, we can experience many benefits such as forming more quality relationships with our community, nurturing potential leads in a way that is meaningful and relevant to them, providing a more memorable customer experience, providing a more customized opportunity for folks to provide feedback, and adopt a marketing environment that retains audience members. Simply put, personalized marketing can help us create a culture that is people-focused, making those that are involved in your business or connected to your brand feel like they are more than a number or piece of data.
In order to establish personalized marketing within our business strategies, we must first consider the styles of personalization that make the most sense for us and our business. There are many ways to bring in personalization, but not all of the options out there will be a good fit for your business. Depending on your organization’s values, purpose, and brand, you want to adopt personalization techniques that help you amplify what your business stands for.
Below are some common examples of personalized marketing techniques:
Name recognition
Location recognition
Interests recognition
Preferences recognition
Product/service recognition
As you consider the examples above, you may notice that there is a key thread that is woven through each of them and that is the thread of understanding the audience you are trying to connect with. In order to adopt personalization techniques into your marketing, you must first get incredibly clear on who it is you are trying to get personal with! This means, going through a deep exploration to discover the insights, details, habits, behaviors, and information regarding the very community you want to be connecting with via your marketing. If you do not have proper insights into who you audience is, adopting personalization techniques will be difficult. Let’s break down the above examples more deeply so you can understand how you can apply these techniques for yourself.
Name recognition: This one is pretty straightforward. It is using the person’s first name in your marketing! We see this most often used in email marketing, where the persons first name is addressed in emails. In order to use this type of personalization, we must make sure that when we are email list building we are properly collecting individuals information so that we can utilize it in a personalized way.
Location recognition: This type of personalization relates to connecting with folks based on location-commonalities. You may have a segmented audience that you are wanting to connect with that resides in a specific location. This location can create a common interest, where you can relate to one another based on the location and create a personalized marketing experience that relates to the location itself. I apply this type a lot in relation to the area I live in (Portland, Oregon) where I connect with and customize experiences based on engaging with others who also are from the same region.
Interests recognition: This is one of my favorite personalization techniques, where you create a more meaningful experience via connecting through common interests. This requires you to know what your desired audience is interested in! Often times, these interests do not relate to your business, but rather, are common interests such as hobbies.
Preferences recognition: This is another one of my favorite ways to tailor messaging and create personalized experiences, as connecting via preferences can help us connect with folks over shared values, beliefs, and tastes. I often find that this type of personalized marketing is incredibly important for creating quality leads and attracting audiences that are in alignment with what your brand is all about.
Product/service recognition: Finally, this type of personalization relates to connecting over specific products of services such as things that you know your audience would be using or participating in. This is a really great way to add personalization as it will help you know how your audience spends their time as well as how they spend their money.
From the above examples, you can see that getting to know your audience more deeply helps you them apply personalized marketing that can help you find connections and relatability between one another. In order to apply these types of personalization into your marketing, you want to first get clear on the insights pertaining to the audience you are targeting. Then, bring those insights into your marketing via copy, visuals, automations, and so on.
Applying personalization into your marketing strategy
There are some really great ways that you can apply personalized marketing experiences into your business. What you want to begin doing is considering first what types of experiences make the most sense for your to focus on based on the broad examples provided above. Then, you want to decide on what way in which you want to create a personalized experience based on what your brand already is doing in terms of creating content and marketing. Below are some examples of ways you can apply personalization into your marketing strategy:
Blogs tailored to your audience’s interests or preferences
Info-series that addresses audience challenges
Videos based on topics your audience searches for
FAQ pages or content pieces that provide answers to your audience’s common questions
Case studies breaking down similar situations to what your audience would be going through
Customized email sequences that address your audience by name
Customized content experiences that address and highlight specific locations
From the above, you can now see that there are great ways to bring forward personalized experiences by simply applying the information you know about your audience into the very content you are creating for them. This requires taking some serious time to get intentional about the content you are creating that helps you market yourself, using data and insights to create relevant content that was specifically crafted for the people you want to serve. This will help you establish a more meaningful, personalized experience!
Advanced personalization
Let’s wrap up by talking a little bit about advanced strategies for personalization. When it comes to applying advanced personalization methodologies, you want to ensure you first and foremost are very clear on the following things:
Your audience’s needs
Your audience’s behaviors
Your audience’s ways in which they spend their time
Your audience’s ways in which they spend their money
Quantitative data (data that can be measured)
Qualitative data (data that cannot be measured in numbers — FEELINGS/THOUGHTS!)
Demographics
Contextual personalization
Audience segmentation
Segmented audiences
The above things will not only help you create a culture where you are connecting with your audience in a way that shows you understand them, but that you are also tailoring your marketing to address your audience in a meaningful way. You may notice that you have several different audiences you want to connect with. Maybe part of your audience is location-dependent where as other segments are interests focused or preferences focused. The way to take your personalization to the next level is to begin segmenting your audience into groups so that you can target specific groups with specific marketing campaigns and content. This is where the strategy really becomes all the more important because you are dealing with a lot of data and varying groups of folks. I recommend first and foremost getting comfortable managing just one segment of people that you are bringing personalization into, and then expanding from there so to not get overwhelmed.
You have now been provided with a breakdown of what personalized marketing is, how it can benefit you as well as the community you serve, and ways to begin applying personalization techniques into your own marketing strategies. Start at one place and grow from there! Have questions about personalization? Drop us a message!
Until next time…
Natalie Brite
