In 2003, Seth Godin talked about the TV industry complex where companies spent millions on advertising. He said that this type of promotion was now dead and we should be remarkable (do something people will remark about) in our marketing. He talked about this over 10 years ago, but businesses have still not changed. Companies can be remarkable with inbound marketing. However, with so much content including blogs, videos, infographics for your persona, it is now harder for them to find those remarkable signals through all the noise. How can companies now make themselves remarkable? Better than the competition?
How Do You Become Remarkable?
You give personas, that have given you permission, what they want. One way I have seen companies being remarkable is personalisation. We all relish the personal touch and this is no less the case when it comes to the marketing we are subjected to online. If you were to stop and take stock at the leaps and bounds made in personalisation over the past decade or so, you couldn’t fail to be impressed.
Personalisation Using Digital Technology
For example, Share a coke campaign was remarkable. The soft drink giant replaced its usual branding with 150 of the UK’s most popular names. It was a multimedia effort, with TV adverts, billboards, and experiential marketing in the form of Coca-Cola tours where participants could have their own custom bottle made. Each bottle also carried the hashtag #shareacoke to encourage users to share bottles with their names, as well as those of friends and family, using social media. Share a Coke has emerged as one of the most compelling campaigns in recent memory. The overarching theme that gave Share a Coke its edge is the way a brand so ubiquitous that it can replace its logo with individual names reached out to consumers and spoke to people as individuals.
The campaign showed that when personalisation works and can be highly engaging and effective.
The aim of the IKEA Facebook campaign was to promote the opening of its latest store over in Malmö, Sweden. However, they decided not to just target potential consumers for the Malmö store, they also wanted to reach out to people all over Sweden.
To do this, they decided to utilise the ‘photo-tagging’ feature on Facebook. On behalf of the store manager, they would post up images of the latest showrooms from IKEA, the first customers to tag themselves onto a specific item would win it, it’s as simple as that. The marketing campaign generated a lot of buzz as nobody had done something like this before.
These last two examples show how technology allows personalisation to be executed at varying levels of complexity; virtual tagging coupled with personalised packaging provides the appealing option of attaching any manner of personalisation to an object without having to change it.
The are many ways your business can personalise, such as emails. If you buy marketing automation software such as Pardot, Marketo, etc. you can use dynamic content in your emails that meets your personas needs exact requirements from whatever content they downloaded.
HubSpot has a content management system with functionality that lets you personalise your website to your persona (given that they have done certain things on your website).
But even if you don’t have the money to fork out on these expensive tools, there are still free and easy ways to do it through WordPress, Google Analytics and MailChimp.
Personalisation makes your marketing useful
There is an overload of content, products and services out there. However, by providing a personalised experience, particularly one that is proactive rather than reactive, brands have a real opportunity to provide much-needed utility in an increasingly noisy world of choices.
The vast majority of marketers are fully aware of the benefits of personalisation. They know full well that personalisation onsite – and across other brand touch points – makes for a better customer experience and that good marketing can be made better with the personal touch.
Although personalisation may seem gimmicky at first, there is no doubt that doing it well helps consumers navigate a noisy world in a relevant, helpful and, ultimately, profitable way.
Personalisation is a powerful enough tool for these businesses to shake up their sectors and Sprout Traffic will be eagerly keeping an eye out for others looking to use personalisation to do the same in their industries in the rest of 2014.
To get started with personalisation download our guide to creating a buyer persona
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