Interview with a Digital Marketer: Personalisation

Written by Cat Leaver

Friday, 23 September 2011 09:21

Over the past two decades there has been a dramatic paradigm shift in marketing, from mass standardisation towards mass customisation. As consumers we have never had so much choice and the degree of personalisation throughout the whole buying process, including the end product, is extensive. Thus, as marketers the challenge today is to reach individuals and not the masses, to create unique experiences, and to not just speak to people like we know them but to actually know them (and technology helps us to do just that more and more).

So with that in mind I conducted an interview with Alienation’s Digital Marketing Manager, Simon Bennison, to get to the crux of ‘personalisation’ - what it is, how it benefits you (and us) as a business, and how to best go about using it.

What are the different types of personalisation? And, what is the evidence that personalising marketing messages in these ways improves campaign outcomes?

There are many, but here are some that we have experience of:

Remarketing: Providing highly targeted display advertising to an end user. Remarketing allows you to show your advertising to people who have previously visited your website as they travel around the web. So if you are a hotel comparison website, and I visit your site looking at hotels in London, you can show me a tailored advertisement with the actual hotels I've been looking at, when I visit other websites. Most customers will not make a purchase the first time they visit a website, so remarketing is a way of showing reminders to visitors, encouraging them to come back and buy. If combined with discounts and special offers, you can make a very compelling case for customers who didn't purchase first time to return.

Social Media: As personal as it gets! With social media, you generally know you are speaking to an individual. Targeting specific individuals through their interests and interactions is made much easier through social media, where people are happy to openly discuss their personal lives on a regular basis. So Facebook ads can be target to an individual's 'likes', as well as their specific demographic, where they live, work, went to school, even relationship status. With Twitter, there is the opportunity to find the people that are passionate about what you do, and get them on board to do some marketing for you. Even better when these individuals are popular and thought leaders in their own network.

Personalised Website Experience: By providing a service for customers to login to your website, you can personalise the experience in many different ways. Because the returning customer will tell you who they are, you are able to show them what they want to see based on past choices, and let them personalise their own page. The BBC homepage is a great example of this, where users can select the modules they want to see and drag and drop them into any order they wish. This kind of technology is not as prohibitive as you would think, and you don't need to be the BBC to afford it. Alienation Digital has developed this kind of feature for clients such as Beatson Cancer Research [http://www.beatson.gla.ac.uk/] and Maclay Inns [http://www.maclay.com/], who use the technology in their staff intranets, providing a personalised web experience to staff who use the system every day.

Email Marketing: If somebody opts in to receive information from you directly, you have a responsibility to provide that information in a useful and timely manner. Most Alienation Digital customers will look to market to existing customers in this way, by allowing customers to select the elements that they are interested in, and send information regularly via personalised email. Tracking software then allows us to look at what links were clicked in the email, whether it was forwarded or shared, and how many times it was opened.

What technology do you need to achieve this level of personalisation?

Alienation Digital uses open source software to achieve all these elements of personalisation. This ranges from online content management systems for websites (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Umbracco) to freely availably social media management tools such as Hootsuite. You don't need to be a master of the technology to be able to use and update it, and if you have the content then you can use it, however you will need a technical team involved at the beginning to set things up.

How will B2B marketing personalisation evolve?

I can only see personalisation becoming more and more important. It is a marketers dream to be able to speak to people as individuals, as opposed to making assumptions based on the ‘group’ that they fit into. The more options for personalisation that become available, the better it will be as far as I can see.

Whilst Simon has provided us with an insight into the world of personalisation there are many creative strategies your company could adopt to reach customers on an individual level and develop more effective and valuable customer relationship management. Key to any personalisation activity is building in measurability from the start, recognising and respecting the privacy and responsible usage of data gathered, and constantly maintaining communication networks and relationships. Today’s social media present all businesses with an almost equal playing field when it comes to personalisation marketing, however this is a long-term strategy and your business must actively and regularly engage your audience.