How Market Research is helping drive Hyper-Personalized Marketing Campaigns?

Relevancy in your marketing campaigns is getting more and more important as your target customers and prospects are literally flooded with all kinds of marketing messages and product claims! Creating compelling marketing messages and campaigns that make your brand stand out in the crowd is the single most important challenge that is top of mind for marketing leaders. And it’s much easier said than done with all your competitors offering similar products and claims, with neck-to-neck loyalty discounts. For the service industry, it’s even more harrowing when there is very little differentiation compared to the product industry. It all boils down to what is the end value for your target audience and more importantly how relevant is for your audience!

Gone are the days of mass campaigning and expecting to create an impact through that. Today, marketing leaders have to analyze each audience at a much more intricate level to be able to create personalized campaigns targeting them. And this personalization should be predictive in nature, in a way of already sensing what your audience would want, predicting their future behavior and already placing their desired products or solutions in front of them, thus creating a willingness to buy more.

What are the benefits of hyperpersonalized campaigns?

  • Staying relevant in the market always
  • Overall it increases a customer’s willingness to spend
  • Impacts direct top line
  • Customer retention
  • Optimizing RoI and marketing effectiveness – We all know the cost of new customer acquisition is higher than retaining existing. Therefore, personalized campaigns help optimize overall RoI and is a very strong tool towards building a loyal customer base

Companies like Netflix, Amazon are clearly at the forefront of providing their customers with consistent, contextual and very personalized experiences. And the single most important foundation for them is customer research & intelligence at all levels, backed by strong analytics tools, algorithms and AI based tools that analyze such data and provides recommendations for each customer.

But it all starts at one place – knowing your target audience better than anyone! So how does one get started with research on their audience/customers

  • Traditionally, most organizations have used customer segmentation as a basic starting point of customer intelligence wherein they attempt to segregate customers by industries and demographics. However, this is not enough to achieve deeper levels of personalization.
  • Real time behavioral data & intelligence: Researching and studying past and historic customer activity, interactions, behavior is the crucial next step to know your audience. And this is true not just for existing customers but also for prospects. Analyzing the digital footprint will help in predicting your audience’s willingness to buy/engage with a product, solution or brand
  • Investment in methodologies like customer behavior modeling, and predictive analysis – sitting on data is not enough, they have to be acted upon in and in a way to be able to predict likes and dislikes of your audience, this is where true hyperpersonalization starts! Market research platforms such as MarketNgage uses these state of the art methodologies to provide unique and actionable insights on different markets and buyers
  • Charter dynamic customer journey maps: What enterprises today sell is not just a product or service, but a complete experience in itself, and over the years your audience expects that experience to be more seamless and connected. And a great way to continue to deliver that experience is to charter a dynamic customer journey map that tells a visual story of your customer or prospects experience with your brand at every touchpoint. And it should be dynamic, with the constant changing audience needs and the way they interact with a brand

Even if all these stages of customer research & intelligence are adhered to, there are certain critical success factors to be kept in mind, for a truly successful personalized approach:

  • Integration within teams: Lack of integration between marketing, IT, sales and customer experience teams is a very common challenge enterprises face. As a result of which, despite all the right investments in customer research, they fail to show the proper RoI from their campaigns. There should be fluid data & intelligence flow across these teams
  • The right investment in tools: Investment in credible market research and customer intelligence platforms, which can be integrated with strong analytics platforms that provides insights on what to do next
  • How much is too much! While you want to be relevant for your customers, and know them better, the pressing issue of data protection and privacy is on the rise. In general people are more aware of the nuances of the fact that their data can be misused due to any security breach. But at the same time, people do favor personalized solutions rather than something generic thrown at them. It’s all about a fine balance between personalization and respecting data privacy

Hyperpersonlization in marketing is the future and is what your target audience wants. And it’s a clear win-win because it keeps a brand relevant at all times, and forge deeper connections with target audience. The foundation to such a strategy is research & intelligence, backed by strong analytics!