How to Personalise your Marketing (and Why You Need To)

Personalisation is essential across all marketing channels, from Twitter to email.

Getting to know your customers, speaking their language, and addressing their pain points is all crucial if you want to build a real relationship and make money.

If you fail to personalise your marketing, you’ll fail to connect with your customers and fail to build the relationships needed to sell products and make money in today’s online world. But how do you do it? In a world of blog posts and emails, it can be tough to break through the screen and forge a meaningful, personal bond with your followers. But it doesn’t have to be.

In this article, we’ll look at why personalisation is so important and how you can make your marketing and content more personalised.

Why is personalisation so important?

Customers are used to be sold to. The business we call marketing or advertising is well over a century old now. Everyone on earth has grown up surrounded by marketing messages and ads — they’re immune to many of the old tricks.

To stand out from the noise and really make an impression on your audience, you need to connect with them on a more personal level. In today’s world, this isn’t optional — your marketing needs to be personalised even to stand a chance. Here are a few stats which show just how crucial personalisation is:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalised experiences
• 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalised messaging
• 66% of consumers say encountering content that isn’t personalised would stop them from making a purchase

There’s some good news, though. With the mountains of data available, personalising your marketing effectively isn’t just possible; it’s also easier than it’s ever been before.

How to be more personal

It’s important to note that personalisation isn’t just about setting <firstname> fields in your emails and using a friendly tone. These things are important, for sure, but they’re not much more than surface-level gimmicks.

Real, effective personalisation involves really getting to know your target audience and speaking to them in a way they appreciate and value. Here’s how to do that.

Get to know your customers well

You’ll never effectively personalise your marketing if you don’t get to know your customers on a deep level. Here are some ways to do that:

• Hang out in the same online spaces, such as social media sites, forums, blogs, review sites, and more. Take note of what your audience is discussing, their problems, the language they use, and the comments and posts that score high. This is known as “social listening”, and it’s a great way to get a feel for your potential customers.
• Ask questions. It may seem obvious, but many brands aren’t doing it. Ask your audience direct questions — in emails, on social media, at the end of blog posts, and when they call you. This is a quick and easy way to find out what they want and what they’re struggling with.
• Send out surveys. Surveys are another great way to gain a useful overview of what your customers like, what they struggle with, and what they want to see more of. In addition to helping you improve existing products, it makes it easier to create more personalised content and communications.

Your goal throughout this process should be to gain a solid understanding of your customers’ challenges, pain points, desires, and everything else that makes them tick. Understand who they are and what they want, and it’ll be much easier to connect with them.

Create buyer personas

Buyer personas are character profiles that reflect typical people you want to reach with your marketing. Ask questions like: How old are they? How much do they earn? Where do they live? What are they currently struggling with? What jobs do they do?

Maybe your typical target customer is a 25-35-year-old male who lives in a city and earns a middle-class income but wants to build more muscle. Figuring this out will allow you to create more tailored marketing materials that address specific demographics instead of trying to appeal to everyone.

It’s important to make your buyer personas specific enough to allow for effective personalisation, but not too specific that they filter out huge chunks of your potential market.

Create content built around your audience’s needs

Once you have a solid idea of who your target audience members are, it’s time to make contact with them through great content. This can take the form of blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, and almost every other medium you can think of.

When it comes to personalising your content, here are some guidelines to follow:

• Pack it with value and offer real solutions to your audience’s problems. Address their pain points and show you can help.
• Answer your readers’ questions, even the ones they haven’t explicitly asked. Provide real, relevant value upfront, without asking for anything in return.
• Position your brand as one that understands and relates to its followers

Use emails

Emails are an incredibly effective way to connect with your audience on a personal level. Email is, by nature, a highly personal form of communication. It’s built on one-to-one messaging, and even mass emails feel more personal and direct than a tweet or blog post.

Here, the same rules apply as with other channels. Provide real value, solve problems, and show your readers that you care about their challenges. Don’t just send bland company updates and dry newsletters — send real messages that read as if a human wrote them.

Most email automation platforms also allow you to personalise your messages with specific information about your subscribers. This can be their first name, company name, job title, and more, and if you have access to this data, it can be a quick way to ramp up personalisation. When asking your readers to sign up for your mailing list, make sure to at least ask for their name.

Personalising your marketing is essential. If you want to stand out and show your audience that you genuinely care about them and their problems, all while positioning yourself as a knowledgable authority with the ability to solve those problems, you’ll need to take a more personal approach.

At Blue Beetle, we have over 16 years of experience helping brands do that. To find out how we can help you do the same, get in touch.