Customization in the marketing space has been on the rise in recent years due to its unique ability to tap into specific prospect pools and increase lead engagement. According to SmarterHQ, 72% of consumers only engage with marketing content that is customized to their interests.
During the pandemic, personalized digital outreach has remained integral for retaining and building relationships with customers as the sales process has been mostly confined to a virtualized interaction. To strengthen any cybernetic campaign, customization is a necessary ingredient for engaging prospects by appealing to their particular needs.
Why Customize?
Customizing an online marketing campaign has benefits for marketers and buyers alike. It centers the marketing team’s focus on a specific, highly targeted goal and shows prospects that the company is aware of and responding to their needs. As Jeff Shjarback, internet marketing consultant, recommends, “Every step of the conversion funnel should prepare your customers to do business with your organization, and to feel as if the product or ad was exactly what they were looking for — or custom-tailored for them.” Furthermore, with a customized online marketing campaign, the marketing team can focus on creating specific, usable content rather than waste time on generic material. In turn, the sales process becomes more productive from the start, with improved performance and better conversion rates.
With all of these benefits, it’s clear why you should customize your cybernetic campaigns in 2022 to better engage audiences. For marketers new to personalization as a technique or more experienced marketers looking to improve time-worn strategies, here are some tips on how to best approach crafting a customized computer-generated marketing campaign that fits your unique prospects.
5 Tips on Customizing Virtualized Campaigns
1.) Know Your Prospects
When planning any marketing campaign, it is important to first identify the group of prospects to aim for. Start by answering these two questions:
- To whom does my company’s product or service appeal?
- How does the product or service fulfill their existing needs?
Once you identify your pre-determined segments, get to know your prospects by using email outreach, meetings, and data analytics to understand their perspective and needs.
With more information about the targeted persona, the next step is to decide how the tools in the usual marketing repertoire — such as email outreach and social media ads — fit prospects’ lifestyles. Once this unique mix of tools is established, you can make plans involving the channels that appeal to prospects the most. You can also track where buyers are coming from to determine what they are looking for and how to best engage them.
With a complete buyer persona established, the marketing team can craft a tailored cybernetic marketing endeavor that fits the lifestyle and interests of the specific group they are targeting.
2.) Use Video Content
According to Wyzowl, 94% of marketers agree that videos have helped increase user understanding of a product or service. As a visual medium, video is perfect for illustrating how a product or service works and how it applies directly to buyers’ lives.
Video content can be customized to fit a company’s product or service based on what that product or service is and who its audience is. When starting to integrate customized video content into a computer-generated marketing endeavor, ask yourself a few questions:
- Why are we creating video content — for education on the product? For brand awareness? To generate excitement?
- What do we want each specific video to accomplish?
- In what ways can each video meet the defined goals?
Once these details are known, effective online marketing promotions can grow more specific to better appeal to the prospective audience. For example, if a product is aimed at younger customers, then video content can be kept short, aesthetically engaging, and with an obvious call to action. The content can then be posted on the social channel that intended prospects are more likely to interact with and where it is most likely to perform well.
3.) Organize Virtualized Events
Virtualized events, such as live-streamed info sessions and discussions, can also provide valuable opportunities for marketers to engage directly with prospects and answer their specific questions and concerns. These dynamic events help make prospects feel more connected to the company and keep the company’s value fresh in their minds. Promoting these virtualized events on social media and in digital newsletters can also prompt higher engagement with your company across multiple channels.
To customize a virtual event to fit into unique virtual operations, the event itself should be relevant to the prospective audience. To make it relevant, pinpoint the prospective audience’s interests to ensure the event is an interactive opportunity for prospects to get their specific pain points addressed. Leverage an event platform that allows attendees to define their topics of interest and build their own customized agenda with the events they want to attend for a truly tailored experience.
4.) Use Social Data
Social media metrics can provide valuable information on the demographics, interests, and behavior of a company’s prospective audience groups — all important details that can shape a virtual marketing operation to appeal to buyers. With a social media analytics tool, marketers can deepen their knowledge and understand what content resonates most with prospective customers. By gathering insights on content engagement — in the form of likes, replies, and video views — you can optimize the content you create and make more of what engages buyers on social media the most.
To customize social media posts to fit the prospective audience, you need to have a firm understanding of who your audience is. Select designs and visuals that showcase the product or service in action and appeal to the prospects’ lifestyle. Adapting the tone in the written content of the post so that it comes across as friendly yet professional and on-brand also keeps posts consistent enough that it is apparent they all come from the same company. Remember that you can try slightly different strategies for each social media channel to better fit the platform’s overarching model. Offering surveys and paying attention to suggestions and questions in the comments can also help provide insight into how audiences are perceiving the content and help guide the marketing team to improve their strategy.
5.) Collaborate with Sales
When a marketing team is aligned with the sales team, both are better equipped to generate and disseminate content that uniquely appeals to specific prospects. Aligning marketing and sales gives marketers more data on what exactly prospects care about, who they are, and where they are in the sales funnel. With this knowledge, the computer-generated marketing endeavor can be tailored to that prospect or prospect or target segment based on those elements.
When marketing and sales work together, they create a “closed-loop” in which marketing creates content, sales uses the content, and sales provide feedback on what content worked and what content did not work so marketing knows what to create for specific campaigns and prospects going forward.
Things to Remember
It’s a process
Customizing any online marketing endeavor is a continuous, ongoing effort that demands adaptability, dynamic goal-setting, collaboration, and communication. A marketing team needs to be prepared and trained to adopt this strategy into new and existing endeavors.
Marketers ready to revitalize their virtual campaigns need to recognize also that “customization” manifests in different ways according to which channels they use to engage with prospects. For example, a company selling a product aimed at younger customers may embark on a dedicated Twitter campaign run by a special employee team to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of its competitors or it could instead choose to rely more on user-generated content on Instagram to elevate word-of-mouth excitement through the lens of customer experience.
Device fatigue is real
Customization gives new life to virtual campaigns as it directly appeals to specific customers that the marketing team is looking to engage. However, as a digital marketer, it is important to recognize that device fatigue is real and can influence how your team chooses to shape virtual campaigns.
When respecting the reality of device fatigue in consumers, you need not get discouraged if a few prospects aren’t as engaged during certain weeks. Instead, take it as a chance to recalibrate the campaign and figure out when is a better time to connect with them. With personalization integrated into the virtualized campaigns, you’ll already be better equipped to reconnect and engage prospects once these leads are ready to reenter the game.
Conclusion
Customizing a virtualized campaign for marketing or advertising is an ongoing effort with significant advantages as it helps marketers target and interact with specific leads. In a digital age where prospect engagement depends on riveting online content, marketing teams need to equip themselves on how to properly generate interest using the key tool that is customization. Doing so creates more adaptable campaigns that impact more users by appealing to them as unique individuals and prepares savvier marketing teams for 2022 and beyond.
Author Bio
Carissa Villagomez is a content strategist for Highspot, the sales enablement platform that increases the performance of sales teams by bridging the gap between strategy and execution.
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