In an age where everyone devotes more than enough time online, digital platforms inevitably became an arena for marketing. Small businesses and established corporations alike strive to build an impactful online presence through a strategy we call digital marketing. And while digital marketing does involve intense competition, many businesses can still rise to the occasion and retain more customers. How can your company succeed in an otherwise cutthroat marketing arena? The answer lies in reshifting your strategy, and successful businesses do this by personalizing content.
When small companies begin their digital marketing venture, most owners market their products or services to a vast demographic. While such a strategy remains highly effective, it usually cannot contribute past the purpose of attracting prospects and customers. Once you’ve gained momentum in attracting customers via traditional marketing, what should your business do to win their loyalty? Personalizing one’s brand marketing (or one-on-one marketing) is a strategy that doesn’t only expand your reach to prospects. It also promotes customer retention. Let us discuss and explore the surprising benefits of personalizing marketing content and why it’s significant for your business’s success.
Defining Personalization as a Marketing Tactic
What is personalized marketing? From a general perspective, personalized marketing is a strategy that integrates different marketing mediums to personalize each customer’s purchase experience. It is a complex practice involving leveraging collected data to offer individual-focused content to capture each customer’s interest and loyalty. At the surface level, one might think personalized content mainly focuses on attaching the client’s first name to their emails. However, this marketing strategy offers more unique approaches for business owners to consider integrating into their practice. So, why should you personalize your content to market your products or services online?
The answer is simple: customers feel like companies speak directly to them whenever they consume marketing content personalized for them. Traditional marketing strategies usually center on targeting a broad audience. Since it addresses a larger pool of people, it may be ineffective if you plan on catching your prospect’s attention. People encounter countless advertisements online. And thus, they will ignore most of these marketing offers, especially if they find them uninteresting and generic.
Furthermore, a study states that 66% of consumers prefer companies to treat them as individuals—not numbers. Therefore, businesses that personalize their content make customers feel like the company understands their needs and interests. When customers value the content presented to them by their chosen brands, they are more willing to engage with them. For these reasons, such a strategy works significantly, and businesses reap the benefits of personalization.
How Do Small Businesses Benefit from Personalizing Content?
To recognize the benefits of content personalization, business owners must understand how to acquire customer retention. Once customers re-interact with a brand they’ve patronized before, they don’t want to receive irrelevant and repetitive marketing content anymore. Traditional digital marketing doesn’t involve filtering content to fit each client’s preference. Hence, customers may decide not to engage with your brand anymore. By choosing to personalize the content you present online, your small business will eventually experience the following benefits:
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It Nurtures Your Leads.
Leads (sometimes called prospects) are potential customers that companies strive to convert into buyers or brand patrons. Most prospects would instantly reject generic marketing offers since they will find it irrelevant at the time being. However, if your small business invests in personalizing your content for your leads, your chances for conversion skyrocket.
Companies must extract personal information from these prospects to overcome the first hurdle of converting a lead to a customer. According to SmarterHQ, 90% of customers opt to share information about their consumer buying behavior for personalized engagement. In other words, prospects trust brands that present individualized content more than those with generic content. Once your marketing team gains your lead’s trust, it will be easier to advance your offer and achieve a successful conversion.
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It Optimizes Brand Affinity.
In exchange for sharing personal information, most customers expect companies to consider their individuality. In 2021, a survey stated that 59% of customers prefer personalized responses. Such results had a 2% increase from the 49% of customers who responded similarly last 2019. Thus, the statistical data should be enough to highlight how personalizing marketing content is rapidly growing more popular among consumers.
Whenever your small business continuously provides your customers with a satisfying personalized experience, they will (most likely) entrust their loyalty. Your customers may also interact with your social media posts and recommend your brand to those they know. In that sense, your small business won’t have to invest more finances in seeking new customers. That is how personalizing your marketing approach helps optimize brand affinity.
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It Provides Better Engagement and Experience for Customers.
In recent years, digital marketing has shifted in its general approach. Most brands aren’t integrating the marketing tactic of sending generic advertisement materials hoping to convert those who come across them. These days, brands are working on their relatability with customers. A report by SproutSocial claims that 76% of consumers would engage more with a brand if they felt a connection. Thus, these results highlight the importance of collecting your customers’ data and creating personalized content for future engagements. But then again, this begs the question: how can your small business collect customer information?
Most small business owners might automatically want to ask their customers to answer online forms or surveys. Unfortunately, most consumers will find it inconvenient to answer any of these. Customers are most willing to provide personal data when they acquire something in return. Hence, you can offer them coupons or discount codes to better your customers’ experience and effectively collect data from them. Doing so will give a win-win situation for your small business and customers.
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It Warrants Positive Feedback from Customers.
Small business owners should never underestimate the potential of positive customer feedback. A 2021 report by PowerReviews states that 99% of online consumers read product/service reviews before engaging with a brand. Personalizing your content for each customer creates a notion that the business deeply understands its customers. With this, most customers would feel satisfied and proud of their association with your brand. And in turn, they will most likely leave you with positive feedback and may even suggest your brand to their peers. -
It Sets Your Brand Apart from Competitors.
One of the many benefits of personalized marketing is differentiating your brand from your competitors. When most of your competitors implement similar marketing tactics, your small business can be easily distinctive within your niche. By integrating proper personalization tactics in marketing, more prospects will gravitate towards your brand since it promises a unique experience. Personalizing each customer’s content will also show them that your brand understands their specific needs and can empathize with them. Eventually, your small business will be on your customers’ top list of brands to recommend to those they know.
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It Promotes Higher Revenue and Business Growth.
Understanding what your target audience wants helps your small business create unique digital marketing strategies and content. By focusing on delivering and improving content that your customers enjoy most, they will likely buy more from your brand. And if you can gain customer loyalty and continue harnessing values from their purchase, it will guarantee steady revenue growth. Let us explore a concrete example of how your small business can achieve this promise.
Imagine having a customer who frequents your company’s social media page and website. If that customer spends most of their engagement there, your company should devise a strategy for them to revisit time and again. Your marketing team can personalize their experience by filtering advertisements based on their preference and purchase history. If you only offer them products that pique their interest, they will keep returning to buy more.
All the benefits of personalized content discussed earlier contributes to your small business’s overall growth. From converting leads to customers to making your brand unique, personalizing your marketing content does optimize your brand’s success online. All you need to do is to integrate the ideal ways to customize content. And eventually, your small business will reap these benefits.
How Can Small Businesses Integrate Personalization into Their Marketing Tactics?
Implementing a new marketing strategy is never an easy endeavor. That is especially true for small businesses integrating general marketing strategies since their establishment. Before your company adopts a personalization approach in marketing, your team must learn the various elements driving the success of one-on-one marketing. Consider the following critical factors:
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Collecting Data
Firstly, you must conduct extensive research to learn which approach works best for your small business. Other business owners may model their strategy to their competitors. However, you must remember how specific factors vary from one company to the other. Hence, we’ll always advise that it’s best to focus more on your business and its unique processes.
Weighing the factors that will affect the effectiveness of your strategy is also a must. Once you are confident in your plans, it’s time to integrate certain features into your website’s back end. Such features help collect valuable data, such as your customer’s purchase history and time spent on particular web pages.
You may also conduct short surveys to harness valuable information from your customers. However, if your team decides to conduct surveys, remember to provide something in return for participants. Consider offering them discount codes or coupons to encourage them to answer your survey, as previously discussed. These pieces of information will help you formulate personalized content.
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Analyzing Data
Once you’ve collected sufficient information, you must analyze it to determine the content that suits your target prospects. Data analysis is one facet of market analysis’ extensive and continuous process. All these processes are necessary to generate a personalization tactic that ensures your small business’s success. Even after companies finish analyzing data and are now implementing their customized marketing strategy, they must continue analyzing its performance. Consider collecting the following necessary metrics:
- The number of newly generated contacts
- The effectiveness of your generated leads
- The average visits and views per blog
- The number of social shares
- The sources of traffic
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Implementing Measures
Once you continuously analyze these metrics and implement proper measures, your small business will begin to experience improvements. Doing so will help your leads relate to your content, value your offers, and ultimately entrust loyalty to your brand. But what measures can your small business integrate to achieve such promises? Let us share the common strategies most successful companies implement in their marketing approach.
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Personalizing Emails
Statistics project that in 2023, the whole human population will send an average of 347.3 billion emails daily. Email marketing continues to hold promise for countless small businesses worldwide. According to Omnisend, email marketing offers a significantly higher Return on Investments (ROI) than other channels. According to the study, average returns may reach $40 for one-dollar marketing investments. While emailing holds great promise for business owners, these benefits are never guaranteed. What can your small business do to optimize your email marketing ROIs? The answer lies in personalizing email.
The end goal of email marketing is to increase your business’s conversion rate. One practical strategy to achieve this is through segmenting your email list. You can segment your target audience into groups based on their profession, age, gender, interests, or purchase behavior. Your marketing team can obtain most of these details from the sign-up information to survey answers. After creating segments, your marketing team can send emails to capture the interest of the groups formed. For example, your team can send birthday emails to customers with coupons to encourage them to purchase something.Finally, you can personalize subject lines to seize your prospect’s attention. According to a 2020 study, catchy subject lines constitute 33% of email recipients’ reasons for opening emails. Therefore, you must fine-tune your marketing email’s subject lines through personalization (like adding the recipient’s name) and integrating these strategies:
- Adding power words to your emails
- Asking an intriguing question
- Offering discounts for products or services the recipient finds interesting
- Reminding them of the products left on their cart
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Personalizing Web Pages
Your small business’s website can also serve as an avenue for creating personalized content. An example most website owners use would be creating pop-up messages for website visitors.
Your website can showcase a “Welcome” message for first-time visitors. Meanwhile, regular visitors can receive a “We’re Glad to Have You Back” message or something with similar wording. If your business has an e-commerce website, you may also display a message reminding customers of products left in their cart. You may also personalize your website’s landing page to present content based on your visitor’s profession, location, etc. Customizing CTAs to fit target customers and non-customers is also a practice that’s gaining popularity. Integrating website content will supercharge engagement from your website visitors and hopefully convert leads into customers.
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Personalizing Product Recommendations
Personalizing product recommendations is a strategy that’s gained popularity and momentum in recent years. Since this tactic offers customers products similar to their past purchases, it encourages them to purchase more from your company. Marketing teams can approach the implementation of this strategy in several ways. The most prevalent tactic would be to generate recommendations based on the client’s product searches and purchase history. Another approach would be to ask customers to filter their interests, especially if it’s their first time exploring their options. When customers see personalized product recommendations, it gives them the impression that your company knows them well. In other words, implementing this strategy is one way of proving your company treats customers as individuals.
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Social Media Marketing
Statistics estimate that in 2023, social media platforms will help boost worldwide sales to $1.298 billion. Since, on average, people spend 2 hours on social media, it provides companies with countless marketing opportunities. When a brand interacts effectively with its customers on social media, it helps boost brand loyalty. Depending on your company’s nature of business, using a casual tone when interacting with social media users also offers benefits. For starters, casualness makes your engagements relatable, especially if your target audience is from the younger generations. It humanizes your business and helps customers and prospects overcome hesitations with interacting with your brand.
Regularly producing quality social media content will help place your small businesses in the spotlight. Your posts may go viral in the right ways and will help expand your company’s reach of prospects. Regular customers may also recommend your social media page to those they know. Hence, you should post content that reflects a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and what your company can offer.
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What’s the Upshot of This Discussion?
In a nutshell, companies that personalize their marketing content usually stand out in a sea of competitors. Just as search engine optimization (SEO) boosts a website’s visibility on search results, personalization helps highlight your brand’s uniqueness. From a customer’s perspective, they will most likely perceive a company’s decision to personalize content as beneficial for them.
Personalization demands significant effort; imagine personalizing your marketing approach to cater to the individual needs of thousands of people. Hence, a company that personalizes its content provides the impression that such a company treats customers as persons—not statistical data.
After thoroughly discussing the personalized content marketing benefits, we understand how you might want to experience such advantages immediately. However, integrating a highly effective method of personalizing your company’s marketing approach takes time and research. Companies who are freshly starting with this approach may encounter challenges like:
- Managing and aligning data (data silos)
- Addressing issues with customer privacy
- Providing transparency in data usage
Hence, if your company struggles to find its footing with content personalization, it’s best to seek the support of experts.
Are You Ready to Kickstart Your New Marketing Campaign?
Speaking of experts, we at Proweaver have (over the years) successfully aided clients in making the most of digital marketing. From the fully-customized website we create to social media management, we possess the expertise needed to help you personalize your marketing tactics. Our team of promising professionals promises to contribute significantly to making your digital marketing endeavors a success.
With our dependable service, we help small businesses produce quality content that piques the interest of their target leads. Are you curious about the difference our services can impart to your company? We invite you to schedule a free consultation with our in-house digital marketing team. You may also call us at +1 (877) 216-0852 or +1 (877) 300-6564 to have us address any further inquiries.
Remember: Personalization opens limitless possibilities for your small business to succeed in digital marketing. We are here to help you implement the necessary first steps!