Personalization is an important part of any digital marketing strategy, and the era of instant gratification has made its importance has increased over the recent years, as customers want to see what they are interested in more quickly. They tend to decide in a matter of seconds whether or not they like your company’s message. If you miss the mark on their interests, they quickly move on to another company that may have more of their interests.

In a national poll, 75 percent of the respondents “expressed frustration at content that does not recognize them and adapt to their interests.”

Consumers are regularly bombarded with different marketing messages, most of which they are not interested in, but by implementing an effective personalization strategy in your marketing, you can find the right messages to send your customers. Personalizing your marketing strategy is not easy, and many companies struggle with how to do it. If you can do it right, you can end up with loyal customers for life.

Personalizing your content is not easy, in fact, “60% [of digital marketers] note they struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial.” Privacy issues are one of the reasons that personalization can be so difficult for marketers. The systems needed to create customer profiles are complex, and it can be hard to access the data you need in real-time.

In order to use personalization in your advertising strategy, you use data points that give you insights into who your customers are, which will help increase how relevant your ads are to them. The insight can range from demographics to something more specific like behavioral patterns of your customers.

No matter how you use your customer insights, the desired goal is to make them feel like your brand is speaking to them and giving them what they want or need.

GATHERING CUSTOMER DATA

Gathering data is one of the big struggles with personalizing your content, and there are a few different ways you can tackle this problem. You can ask for anonymous feedback on your website, send your customers surveys or questionnaires, ask for feedback on social media, have formal focus groups, or have informal discussions. No matter which way you try to do this, try to gather as much data as possible from your customers or prospective customers.

However you decide to do it, try to keep it short; customers may give you more feedback from a short survey than a long one.

PAY PER CLICK

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing relies heavily on personalization, because if the ads are not personalized in some way, you may lose out on clicks, or get clicks from people outside of your demographic, who are not really interested in your brand. Then you end up wasting your clicks.

When setting up a PPC campaign, you can target who sees your ads by their life events, behavioral patterns, and demographics, among other things. Targeting has advanced beyond relying solely on keywords to target your PPC ads with.

RETARGETING CAMPAIGNS

You visit an e-commerce website, look around at some items, and the next day there is an ad in your Facebook newsfeed featuring those items, or items similar to them. This is the most basic version of a retargeting campaign.

In addition to having ads show them similar items, if someone ads things to their cart and ends up not checking out, you can have ads remind them of their cart and encourage them to complete their purchase.

EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

One of the most common forms of personalized advertising is emails. Customers are more likely to open an email ad if it seems tailored to them.

Putting a customer’s first name in the subject line of the email, or in the opening of the email will help make an email ad stand out, and make it look like the ad was made entirely for them.

When you are using personalized emails, have them be from a person on your marketing team instead of coming from your brand. Making your emails look like they came from a person instead of a company will help give your email campaigns a personal touch.

Another thing that can be successful in an email campaign, is to put together personas for each ad group you use. Give that persona a specific way of wording things that speaks to that demographic. These personas allow you to give the customers the feeling that the content in the emails was written specifically for them.