Sometimes, delivering personalized experiences to customers within this vast expanse of digital world seems to be a distant dream. It’s difficult to achieve a breakthrough or optimize in capturing audience interests and then spread your message through the best possible channels of communication.
The technology to listen, learn, and engage is in place but the challenge is to leverage it in the best possible streamlined manner without overwhelming your marketing resources.
There can be variations to the refining process and simplified process of delivering personalized audience experience. But there is a basic formula:
- Begin with some “listening” campaigns that are in coherence with the audience preferences
- Synchronize and allocate ongoing communications to gel with those preferences
- Enhance your reach and underpin the messaging of your ongoing communication through other channels and digital locations
There are indisputably various other approaches worth articulating your digital marketing strategy. However, the above-mentioned approach is an excellent starting point if you plan to jump from your single-channel communication marketing to a multi-channel approach.
Identify Interest
As marketers you need to have a clear understanding of whom you are targeting and their interests before you even attempt to genuinely capture their engagement or calling audiences to action.
Digitally speaking, what you are attempting is to unearth when and how people are connecting with your brand. To achieve that, you need to be all ears on engagement from the point when an anonymous person visits your website, up until where he identifies himself, followed by tracking their patterns of content consumption.
Here’s few basic questions you need to ask:
- What brought a person to your website or content?
- What are they doing at your site or how are they using your content?
- What is the frequency of engagement with specific messaging?
- Is there a shift in focus of their engagement?
When there is an apt digital engagement platform, tracking your source of audience or visitors is fairly easy than it appears. Mainly, there are three modes of communicating with people about your content: ads, referring pages and direct messaging. There can be other means, the method of capturing your audience interest through these ways can be implemented in other channels too.
- UTM (Querystring) Parameters: The data located after the “?” within your browser URL is a rich repository of knowledge you can exploit to identify what led the audience to your site. Within your display ads and remarketing, make sure that UTM parameters are being used to determine which messaging has captured the initial attention of your visitors.
- Referring Pages: This information is routinely registered by your browser and delivered to 3rd Party engagement platforms. Basically, the browser makes insights available into what is driving audiences to your site.
- Direct Messaging: Emails, text messages and similar ways can supply sourcing information. While you may be sending out numerous messages, make sure to track one of those messages precisely that are diverting specific audiences to initially engage or continue engaging.
- Clicks, Click-Throughs, and Links: Thanks to modern digital tracking that you can track what part of your content or website an audience is clicking on.
Once you collect the sourcing information, it is imperative that you follow along with the actions and behaviors of audiences on your site. While Google Analytics is a great platform to capture overall time, pages and actions your audience take on your website, it also serves as the starting point of the overall effectiveness of page content. So, your next step should be to translate website behavior into audience preferences and interests. This is accomplished by studying the frequency and quantity of interactions.
As a marketer you have to syndicate WHAT audiences are engaging in with HOW often they do so. With that information you can create bespoke sections to evoke interest in tune with the topics that will deliver personalized and engaging communication.
Coordinate Follow-Up
Listening for preferences should be effortless. Using precise engagement platform, you can setup workflows that intake information from all valid touchpoints and vigorously swing segment inclusion in sync with the digital DNA of audience interest.
The right platform brings simplicity and scalability, to bypass manual recreation of the supporting tracking programs and other elements repeatedly.
While employing the appropriate fluid tracking in place to identify and assign interest segments, the approach of digital engagement will shift the content assignment to fit into the most relevant topic or focus within the buyer journey.
Instead of considering communication in a linear fashion, modern digital communication can be imagined as a landscape of buckets or stream of messaging.
As individuals display behavior that matches a specific stream of messaging, the right platform delivers functionality that will automatically acclimatize to what type of communication an individual receives, or even dynamically fine tune the content of messaging to appropriately fit in to their expectations.
In case a prospect is casually engaging with your brand, then a section of content speaking about finding interest is the best initial point for ongoing engagement. If your audience visits the same part of your website, or repeatedly clicks the links to very precise topics, it is in best interest to shift communication to a more targeted set of messaging. Lastly, it is vital to reflect on the appropriate buying stage within the relationship and have buckets of communication devoted to stages of the sales process.
Recognize your audience interest with time and adapt the ongoing set of communication to match the digitally tracked interest of your audiences. Slowly transform your messaging pattern from generic to more specific—mirror and match interest and you are more likely to captivate and engage consistently.
Be Where Your Audience Is
The ultimate component to keep the modern digital marketing strategies simple is to expand your messaging reach. Once interest is known (or re-identified) ensure that you setup self-updating programs or cross-channel audience lists that present interest-based to your audience periodically.
Let’s study an example of how this works. When someone visits your website for the first time, offer initial messaging. Once their interest is identified, communicate with them across channels with messaging that suits their interest. This can be accomplished by matching and reinforcing messaging across channels, such as remarketing, direct mail and other. The aim should be to reinstate pertinent topics top-of-mind throughout your target audience’s digital and offline associations with your brand.
- Employ cost effective methods for uncovering interest to begin with, such as email, website personalization, and mobile messages, to capture the main interest of a buyer.
- Later involve your audience through targeted campaigns such as ad remarketing on social media or direct mail to drive specific points of interest and be ubiquitously identified.
Summary
Delivering personalized engagements is at the crux of standing out for brands in this digitally connected world. To realize it, there are few primary steps that can help marketers begin delivering more relevant and interest-based communication.
An efficient way to learn that is to start with a section of target audience or set of behaviors that map with your key sales initiative. Once matched hone your approach and develop a set of repeatable campaigns/programs. Later start spreading your methodology on to other audiences and initiatives.
As discussed earlier there are different approaches and frameworks that can be used to drive digital results, this is just one of the tried ones.
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