It’s no news that marketers are in a race to capture and hold the attention of their target audiences. In this opinion piece, Bill Binch, Marketo managing director for Australia and New Zealand discusses building a marketing program with personalisation as the core.
It’s no news that marketers are in a race to capture and hold the attention of their target audiences. But too many are approaching the race as a sprint to the finish, when in fact it’s a marathon event. Not losing focus on long-term goals is essential for marketers who want their strategies to gain as much success as possible. But when marketers are spending more time aligning campaigns and content in a cohesive manner than actually distributing them, it may be time to change pace and review your go-to-market strategy.
The sheer volume and pace of communications today means it’s more critical than ever for marketers to leverage a self-sustaining strategy that reduces the number of times content needs to be rebuilt or manually placed for personalisation. Remember, marketing is a long-game; you need to conserve your energy.
By building marketing programs with personalisation in mind from the start, you can reduce the number of disparate activities that occur within your marketing team; creating a tailor-made plan for your running strategy that’s going to win you the race.
Here are five personalisation techniques that can help increase engagement while reducing the strain of developing more content:
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Develop messaging categories
When thinking about a go-to-market approach, start by defining commonalities in audience interests and solutions, then place these audiences into respective messaging groups that have similar needs. By creating messaging categories that are strategically manageable, marketers will be better able to produce impact and scale their efforts.
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Architect your audience into your site layout
A first step of audience personalisation is aligning website layout to the messaging categories (as created in step 1). This is often a key area where attempts at personalisation can quickly break down. Internally, companies may focus their communications more on the product than the customer, and these two objectives often conflict with one another. While it’s important to properly support and communicate product information, it is equally, if not more, important to communicate to marketer’s audiences, based on the problems the solution personally solves for them.
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Structure your website with responsive design
Another core breakdown in effective marketing is taking on more than the team can handle. To balance quality with quantity, marketers should build scalability into website design to support the go-to-market strategy. A properly managed website will incorporate audience personalisation into its core structure, allowing marketers to place content into appropriate parts of the site through system-supported tags.
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Leverage systems that automatically update list membership
Defining the criteria that will support the ‘who’ in personalized marketing is an essential, yet potentially time-consuming task for persona-based marketing. Having to rebuild these criteria before each and every campaign reduces the marketing team’s ability to focus on the important task of matching communications to the targeted audience. But by leveraging systems that have a self-updating list architecture, marketers can dramatically improve the accuracy and effectiveness of their campaigns. This will also help the team monitor results more effectively by eliminating the potential for human error and improving their ability to test the impact of the messaging.
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Find marketing systems that support dynamic content
A final component of a scalable personalisation strategy is the ability to automate the delivery of relevant messages without having to completely rebuild emails, landing pages, or the website. Different types of personalisation such as snippets, email scripts, dynamic content sections and web personalisation allow marketers to personalize content on a website. As the volume of communication continues to grow, marketers that personalize the experience and messaging for their target audiences will rise to the top. While it may seem like a daunting task, proper planning and tools can help marketers support a sustainable program for audience-oriented messaging.
Although personalisation may appear to be a daunting task at first, it’s actually a relevant and useful tool that will not only help marketers re-generate content, but also provide an enhanced experience for the customer. It’s a win-win for everyone.
