Four Ways to Personalise Your Marketing Strategy

The increase in small and large brands alike adopting social media as part of their digital marketing strategy has lead to personalisation fast becoming an integral part of online PR. Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy way to personalise your marketing strategy, it takes time, perseverance and handy blogs.
Personalisation is inherently a two way process, it involves you reaching out to your audiences and making them feel as though using your site, purchasing your goods or making use of whatever other services you offer is a unique, tailored experience. In turn this encourages audiences to interact more with you and your brand, because they feel that their contributions are appreciated and taken note of.

Studies indicate that the most effective social media pages offer a slightly more personable perception of seemingly anonymous international companies. When individual Twitter users get feedback, for example, from Nike or Apple, they’re made to feel like their needs are a priority; consequently this helps strengthen a healthy, customer-centric brand image.

The bottom line is that brands which embrace personalisation have noticed a marked increase in ROI and interaction, so moving into 2015 you can’t really afford to neglect it.  Begin to personalise your marketing strategy now by implementing the following simple steps:

1. Facebook Demographic Marketing
As more businesses turn to Facebook to market their services, the social networking site in response has come to offer more advanced methods to target new potential audiences. This means that when you’re trying to spread your message via social media, you can now heavily refine who sees it by, amongst a wealth of other categories, age, interests and even marital status.

Refining your audience however isn’t enough anymore, you need to personalise the message or advertisement you’re sending out. This means taking extra time to consider your audience; are you targeting males or females, young users or old? These differences must then be reflected in the copy at the centre of your advert, the very language used to articulate the message must reflect that of the target audience. If this is properly executed, audiences will not only get the impression that your marketing campaigns are specifically aimed at them, but that their desires are of paramount importance to your organisation.

2. Twitter Keyword Ads
When used properly, hash-tags aren’t just an advanced method of categorisation, they’re a way to directly target audiences who are actively searching for your products or services. Utilising Twitter’s keyword advertising, your adverts can be attached to specific search terms, and, similarly to Google AdWords, will show up when users are looking for what you have to offer. Say for example you offer a personal training service, you can peg your advert to terms like ‘fitness’ or ‘exercise’. By targeting consumers via Twitter, you’re addressing audiences who are already interested in your services, and thus further along in the conversion process.

3. Create a Landing Page
So you’ve now successfully drafted an engaging, tailored advert that has hooked in a new potential client, they’ve clicked through and where do they arrive? At a generic and boring ‘Home’ or ‘About Us’ page. Directing audiences to a page on your site that has little relevance to what they originally clicked on is the easiest way to destroy the illusion of personalisation and put them off converting. Where budgetary constraints allow, creating a unique landing page that follows on smoothly from the advert you have created is the best way to sustain the impression that the consumer’s experience with your company is tailored and personalised.

There’s also an overwhelming amount of research to support the argument that more conversions than ever are going to come from mobile devices in 2015. This means that if you do opt to create a personalised landing page, it would pay to optimise it for mobile users, allowing for a seamless transition from social media apps to your website.

4. Keep Communicating
The overall function of social media is to give your clients the impression that your company values their contributions and feedback, and the easiest way to achieve this is to spend time listening and responding to individual users. Whilst at first this might sound like a time consuming process, you will quickly find that it’s one of the easiest ways to strengthen or maintain your online PR.

Encourage your clients to share their experiences with your products and services, make sure they’re aware your social media channels are a steady source of advice and solutions for any problems they might have. This will not only convey to the customer that you’re an expert in your field, but will also demonstrate to other followers that you are a helpful and trustworthy organisation. The most important thing is to keep up a regular stream of responses, and capitalise on periods of high activity. Remember as well that even negative feedback should be treated as an opportunity to connect with clients and market your services.
As we move into the New Year, industry research increasingly shows that more and more consumers are becoming disillusioned with mass marketing techniques. If you want to keep your clients interested and invested in your brand in 2015, then you need to take the time to embrace personalisation.