How to Personalize Marketing Campaigns in 2022
Personalization is key when connecting and building relationships with your current or potential customers through marketing efforts. This is especially true in a day and age where customers are flooded with digital and in-person marketing efforts that may otherwise overload their senses.
The impact of personalization is clear. According to a report by Salesforce, 84 percent of consumers prefer marketing that treats them as a person, not a number. A second report by Epsilon found that 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a brand when they are provided with personalized experiences.
One example of a personalized marketing campaign that many of us may be seeing at the end of the year is Spotify’s End-of-Year Wrapped Report, which looks at listening data from throughout the year to create fun graphics that users share over social media. As customers enjoy the content and share it to their own social media accounts, Spotify gets instant amplification across millions of users.
Other companies such as Cadbury have also leveraged social media for personalized campaigns. Cadbury launched a Facebook campaign that matched a user with a flavor of their chocolate and created a personalized video. Users were encouraged to share the video with their friends, which many did, amplifying the brand’s name and new products.
Social media isn’t the only way to personalize marketing campaigns in 2022. Some other common personalization techniques include creating personalized videos to humanize your brand and personalized email campaigns targeted to your particular customer segment. Some companies also use machine learning and other technologies to determine one-on-one product recommendations based on customers’ behavior or transactions.
Some businesses also bring personalization to their website, tweaking the content based on if visitors are customers, prospects, new visitors, or other categories. They accomplish this by leveraging a customer data platform tied with the website to increase conversion and renewal rates.
While personalized marketing may seem focused on business to consumer sales, it also benefits SMBs and other businesses that sell business to business. SMBs can still personalize their content to B2B buyers by identifying the person at the other end of the transaction and tailoring their advertising, emails, content, and communications to fit their needs. According to the same Salesforce survey, 83 percent of B2B customers say being treated as a human with personalized content is key to winning their business.
While it is true that there are many benefits to personalized marketing, there is a fine line between optimizing content for the user’s specific needs and being creepy. Many users (around 81 percent) said they’re willing to provide basic information in exchange for more tailored advertising, but brands that make incredibly personal assumptions often receive pushback. For instance, a campaign that used data to send women advertisements for their pregnancy when they were not actually pregnant (the data just suggested they might be).
With these examples aside, there is still plenty of room for SMBs and other brands to benefit from personalized marketing efforts in 2022 and beyond.