Tailored Experiences: Personalization in Marketing

Have you ever experienced that all-too-familiar “I need to have this now” feeling when buying a product you definitely didn’t need? We have, too.

Let’s go through an example. Suppose you were mildly interested in a beauty brand and did some harmless online searching.  Suddenly, their ads are showing up all over your Instagram feed, you find your favorite influencers endorsing it, and somehow an exclusive discount code is sent to your inbox. Next thing you know, you’ve purchased the product and it’s on its way to you. 

In such a situation, you probably think that this product is destined to be in your hands and you simply cannot go on without it. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but this is just an excellent case study of personalized marketing. 

We’re here to teach you how to better understand how brands can tailor customer experiences according to their preferences so that you can be a more conscious consumer –  or a more strategic marketer. We’ll walk through creating customer brackets, the importance of geographical location, social media ads, and how data can inform your marketing strategy. 

Create Customer Brackets

It’s probably old news that you can’t use the same marketing techniques for every customer. For example, a campaign that works in Europe will not work in North America, and more specifically, a campaign that works in California might not translate well to a New York audience. This is where customer segmentation comes in. Companies can, and should, make separate customer brackets based on age, location, preferences, and social media usage to create highly customized marketing experiences that translate to customer retention, sales, and a higher chance of engagement. 

It’s important to be strategic in your customer segmentation and create three or four consumer personas your audience fits into. You definitely don’t have to create fifty different newsletters to send to different customers; instead, you can change the titles, some copy, or even the format to come up with three versions that fit into each of your customer buckets. 

Luckily, this doesn’t mean an increased workload for you. With ever-advancing artificial intelligence and companies that are pros with data analysis, you can quickly get all of the information you need to craft the perfect customer segmentation. Remember that it’ll always be a balance between catering to customer preferences and staying true to your brand and message. The latter is something that you can—and should—never compromise on!

Pay Attention To Location

Let’s look back to our example of a customer in California versus one in New York. Picture this: it’s December, and you’re in the midst of launching a digital winter campaign. New York winter is obviously very different from one in Los Angeles and will lead to a disparity in the way your customers feel, their shopping habits, and their lifestyles. If you ignore this, you might get a great response from one and not the other, or lukewarm reception from both. If you instead craft two campaigns tailored to these lifestyle differences caused by your customers’ locations, you have a higher chance of getting a stellar response from both!

While you can start off by thinking about personalized location marketing regionally, or nationally, you can continually expand your reach. To be a truly global brand, you will have to think about how big consumer countries spend—when they do it, how they do it, and why they do it. While this is a lot to take on, you don’t have to jump into the big goals immediately! Begin small, analyze your successes and failures, and work up from there. 

Social Media Ads Do The Work For You

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed thinking about tailoring content to a broad audience, remember that  big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Meta, and Google already have massive databases of users with data on specific audience insights. When you upload an ad through any of these servers, all you need to do is describe the kind of person you want to reach and the work of targeting this person will be taken care of for you.

Suppose you’re a beauty brand who wants to push an Instagram reel for promotion. You can select specific filters to indicate that  you want to target Gen Z users who are fans of Rare Beauty and want to treat themselves. Once you input this minimal direction, Meta will use their database to track users who fit your criteria and push the reel toward them! To recap, use the data bigwigs when you can.

Data Mining & Gathering Insights 

Have you ever seen the tab for data insights on your website? Or the Creator Studio on X? It might be tempting to gloss over several graphs, charts, and what could be pages worth of data—but don’t. 

Gathering insights on user behavior is a crucial aspect of all digital marketing, especially when you want to create tailored experiences. Focus on what your customers like, but also pay attention to what they don’t like.

Suppose hundreds of people add products to their shopping carts on your website, but only a few actually follow through with checkout. If you’re wondering how to incentivize users to finish the task, you might consider general ideas like adding a discount or including free samples to be shipped with the product. But with data mining, you can better understand exactly where your customers are hesitating and then brainstorm how to fix the problem.

Humanize What Customers See

Remember to keep all your marketing human, especially when personalizing consumer journeys! Customers are increasingly protective over internet privacy (as they should be), which is why it’s best to stay as up-front as possible. Every brand is legally required to give users a cookie (data storage) option, but you can go a step further to ease any hesitation they may have. For example, you can create a banner below the cookie preference letting every user know a human being has written this, one who cares about privacy, and assuring the customer that data will only be used to better their experience regarding this brand—and never sold to an external company. Company values increase customer loyalty and, more importantly, customer trust. 

Creating tailored experiences for your customers is one exciting venture in digital marketing, but it’s also one we must tread carefully. Stay honest, transparent, and remind your customers that brands are made up of people who care.

Always in your corner,

The Content Queens