What You Need to Know to Personalize Your Marketing Content

Every time you use your mobile device, you swipe through countless paid ads and branded posts. Most of them you don’t even notice, but some ads stick with you. What’s their secret? 

Often the secret lies in personalized marketing. These ads are not created specifically for you, but they seem personalized because they are created with people like you in mind.

Simply put, personalized marketing means targeting your content to those who would find it most interesting, and crafting specific messages for individuals or groups of customers.

Personalized content is carefully tailored to meet your target audience’s interests, covering topics that interest them, speak to their passions and address their needs. 

Content that speaks to you tends to stick with you as a consumer. And for brands, personalization can get you a much higher conversion rate, turning the whole interaction into a win-win situation.

These days, brands dream of building loyalty among their customers. Customer loyalty creates a sense of community, increases customer retention, turns repeat customers into brand ambassadors, and much more. 

Personalization can unlock this loyalty.

Customizing your content gives your customer an experience relevant to their career, passions and challenges. The path to falling in love with a brand starts with feeling heard and understood.

Social media platforms provide numerous options for targeting and customization. Anyone interested in sharing their brand with a public audience can take advantage of these features. You can target everything from age and gender to specific interests. 

Apart from this, social media platforms already know a lot about what users like—from what products they are looking for at the moment to what topics they are most likely to engage with. 

So the more you think about your consumers and put yourself in their shoes, the better your content becomes. 

Does this sound like a lot of work? Never fear, you can start with a few easy steps that will immediately improve your interactions with consumers.

Each action your customers take teaches you more and more about them. Get as  much information as you can about those you are addressing. 

Your main goal at this stage is to get an initial, overall idea of the customers you are targeting.

Now look into all the data you have about your audience and spend time mapping your buyer’s journey if you haven’t already. 

Combining your data and your mapped buyer’s journey, break down your overall target audience into smaller groups, accounting for behavioral, geographic and cultural factors. Once you have your audience segments, it will become more clear what you as a brand can say to each of these groups to engage them and demonstrate how your product can help them.

You can never know too much about your audience and your market. Take time to scan social media and set up alerts for mentions of your brand or relevant topics. 

Use any mentions of your brand or relevant topics as an opportunity to manage your reputation, communicate with your audience, tailor their experience and find user generated content. Take a look at some examples of user generated content on TikTok in our guide to using TikTok for your business.

While doing this you will get to know more about your consumers and find new leads, both of which you can use while targeting with personalized ads. 

This one is obvious, but still incredibly important. Create ads for various products that match the preferences of what customers previously purchased, and/or what content they engaged with while browsing the internet.

Having a distinctive, consistent voice always matters. But it matters even more when you are directly communicating with your customers. The more you know about them  (within the bounds of decency), the better you help them, the friendlier you sound, and the more they will remember interacting with your brand.

With each interaction you can learn more about your consumer, and there are ways to encourage the type of engagement you need to gain this knowledge. As ordinary as they sound, polls, surveys, and quizzes have long been an effective way to learn what makes your customers tick. 

With clever usage of these tools you show your customers that you care about their  opinion, you encourage them to interact with your brand, and at the same time, you  learn more about their preferences.

Verve Health Co. gives personalized workout advice based on user feedback. Interactions like this make consumers feel special and give them the information they seek as fast as possible.

Participants answer questions to find out what kind of traveler they are. When they’re  finished, they get personalized travel recommendations based on their results, with the option to share them and/or book a stay with Airbnb.

After you set up a free SEMrush account, you get retargeted with a Facebook ad offering you a toolkit on how to use the service to its fullest.

The importance of personalization grows with each day. Consumers expect it, brands  strive for it and social media platforms give you every opportunity to deliver it. 

If you put in the effort to personalize your communication, the results will not be long in coming.

Digital marketing never stops evolving, and the most successful marketers are always finding new ways to craft a positive customer experience. Sign up for our newsletter below to stay in the loop on current trends.