Prioritize Context to Personalize Your Marketing
Learn from lifestyle, interests and purchase intent
Marketers know they need to personalize their messaging to reach and engage consumers. The problem is, they’re just not sure how to execute it successfully.
Too often, they believe they can home in on personalization by identifying data patterns but that’s just one hurdle. More importantly, they need to prioritize context. Doing so will maximize one-to-one marketing campaigns and allow brands to become closer to the consumer by understanding their everyday behaviors and genuine interests.
We’ve identified three key elements marketers should consider when utilizing context to bolster a personalized marketing campaign.
Weigh consumer interests and habits
Successful personalized marketing campaigns go beyond plug-and-play advertisements to leverage key context elements such as consumer interests, lifestyle and purchase intent. The first step to owning the end-to-end customer engagement journey is knowing who your consumer is across every screen that they use, and then weighing these subsets together. Interests and lifestyles may not match the average consumer, and life patterns change, so it’s imperative to balance both sets of data to market effectively.
Here’s an example: What does it mean if a consumer is looking at an online listing for a $5 million home? It could be an aspirational, fun moment, or it might indicate they’re going to make a lower-cost purchase. They might be looking for ideas for a home renovation project, or they might work in an industry like interior design and be looking for prospects. So what would be the appropriate ad to serve? One for luxury houses? One for DIY? Having an understanding of the individual’s lifestyle will let you tailor engagement and positioning.
Be conscious of content type
Many consumers today have a mobile-first mindset, and their attention spans are getting shorter as a result. These consumers do not devour: they snack. So the industry should prioritize bite-sized content.
Brands can magnify a more personalized lens into their audience’s lifestyle and develop mobile-first ads accordingly. Acura, for instance, has prioritized this mobile context, leveraging prior data sets to find that a majority of consumers prefer watching vertical video. It used this insight to deliver a truly personalized ad for its“What a Ride” campaign to promote the new TLX vehicle.
Tap into home versus work behavior
The expansion into the Internet of Things has provided marketers with more context into people’s behavior while at home versus work. For example, a consumer might use Alexa at home to look for new clothing. That same person at work might be reading industry trade publications instead of visiting ecommerce sites.
Marketers can tap into this extra dimension of context and only serve an ad for, say, Banana Republic during weekday nights and weekends. This product is dimensionalized because the consumer takes different actions at work versus at home. When marketers increase their data sources, they can enhance their targeting and serve personalized, unified messaging.
Brands have been thinking about personalized marketing in terms of data points that they have about the consumer: interactions via call centers, on-site store visits, prior purchasing experiences, etc.. Tapping into additional context from consumer lifestyle, interests and purchase intent can help generate a personalization domino effect, impacting browsing behavior, brand visibility and ultimately, consumer perception. Personalized marketing with the proper context in place will get consumers to build upon these experiences and interactions, an increasingly crucial component in retaining brand awareness and loyalty, driving purchases in today’s market.