Creating an Effective Personalization Strategy

February 20, 2017 By BJ Cook,

Personalized Strategy? We can DO that!

As marketers, we all know that the easiest way to reach all of our customers at once is to use one generic, cookie-cutter strategy across multiple devices and platforms for many different industries, right? Wrong! (But we all knew that) This would be a great strategy if we didn’t want to connect with any of our customers on a personal level. Here at Digital Operative, we use an extremely personalized approach to understand your business, your goals, and your current and potential audience to help create a more connected brand ecosystem. Chris Goward and Optimizely have defined a roadmap for creating a personalized strategy that touches on many of the processes that we at Digital Operative have instilled into our practice for developing highly-personalized strategies for all of our clients.

Step 1: Defining Personalization

They begin with realizing the difference between segmentation and personalization. Segmentation is to aggregate similar groups together where personalization represents the ultimate goal of customizing the customer’s experience to their individual needs and desires based on in-depth information and insights gathered from extensive research. We pride ourselves on scouring the market through primary and secondary research to learn the how, what, who, when, and where of your business. Our strategy and planning begin with gathering essential information and data needed to asses your current position. Every insight we find brings us closer reaching your audience on a personal level.

Step 2: Is personalization right for you?

Goward invites you to ask yourself three questions to help determine your eligibility for creating a personalized strategy.

Do you have enough data about your customers?
Do you have the resources to effectively personalize?
Do you have a process for validating personalization ideas?

Strategically speaking, Digital Operative utilizes a personalized mix of branding, human feedback, and data to create a unique strategy that will allow us to understand who your customers are, what type of resources are needed to effectively reach them, and the most effective process for validating our insights. We use a refined approach to select only those insights that produce value. A lot of data and research is great, but can be worthless without a sound process for finding how such data can be of value.

Step 3: Personalization ideation

Once we have collected the necessary research and data and boiled it all down to valuable insights, we then need to take a look at how to create customized ideas and messaging that will resonate positively with your audience. Below we list Goward’s comments on the use of three different methods for exploring personalized insights.

Deductive research, which begins with your assumptions about how your customers will respond to messaging based on existing theories
Inductive research, which is driven by insights from your existing A/B testing, that as you test, will materialize into personalized insights
Customer self-selection, where you ask your users to self-identify, segmenting themselves, which triggers specific messaging based on how they respond

Here at Digital Operative, we dive into market research, customer feedback, and competitive landscaping to begin building a personalized Customer Journey Map that shows where your customers are, where they are headed, and what they are doing to create messaging that will resonate with them the most. In alignment with your goals, the Customer Journey Map dictates the most effective digital media mix, creative messaging, technology platforms, and marketing channels. Our audience development strategy utilizes an audience-centric approach that chooses segments based on your business fundamentals. We develop personalized personas based on the insights we gathered that uniquely identify all the different audience segments that lead to creating more personalized messaging in which customers can relate. I know the implementation of a personalized strategy can be a daunting task, but Digital Operative has the resources and and creative minds to understand your customer’s needs, develop a personalized Customer Journey Map, and keep up-to-date with all industry research to ensure proper execution throughout the process. Still have questions? Reach out, we’d love to chat strategy and planning with you!