Glad to e-Meet You! Personalized Digital Marketing Is a Must for Success

Personalized Digital Marketing Is a Must for Success

In-person interaction is critical for building business success – it’s the relationships you foster on a personal level that often propel your business forward. Top sales professionals believe relationships are the most important part of creating new business.

To support sales, marketing departments must innovate to ensure marketing personalization. And by that, we don’t mean simply sending an email that greets the recipient with “Dear Jane” rather than “Dear customer”. That’s not personalization; it’s simply confirming that you collected customer data but didn’t take the trouble to get to know them on a real level.

The same is true for retargeting in digital ads. Just because a customer browsed a particular category of products or made a purchase, showing them similar or add-on products in ads doesn’t quite fulfill the goal of personalizing ad displays. It merely presents your brand as a pushy salesperson.

Truly personalized marketing, whether digital or traditional or integrated, is primarily about one thing—helping the customer, solving their problems, making life easier by reducing challenges. Gartner puts this succinctly in their study, Winning With Tailored Help: Personalization Showcase for Marketing Leaders. “Personalized messages that consumers perceive as providing help have a significant impact on the Commercial Benefit Index, greater than those solely focused on signaling that the brand knows the consumer well.”

In-Person Interactions Still Matter

Until 2 years ago, every organization that did any form of marketing invested some measure of their budget on in-person client interactions. The pandemic changed that. Suddenly, handshakes, onsite meetings, and business lunches just didn’t seem safe; in fact, they weren’t even permitted during a series of lockdowns. But even as difficult as they are, having a personal relationship is still necessary. Social isolation has impacted many people, and technology doesn’t serve as an equal to those in-person experiences. That’s why it’s critical to find new ways to build personalization into digital marketing. It’s one of the most important ways to reach people and stand out from the noise of every other email, online ad or mixed media messaging.

Get to Know the Buyers

It’s not likely that companies are able to have lunch with an interested client or meet with people for a conversation as easily in person today as it was a few years ago. Yet, this connection is still valuable. Reaching out and getting to know your buyers – the people within the company that are making a purchase – or getting to know your customers is necessary.

How do you do it? There are often some simple ways that you can make personal marketing work for your business.

• Frequent phone calls: This allows you to create a real relationship with people who are your customers. You’ll get to know them on a more personal level.
• Frequent virtual visits: In your digital marketing strategy, make it a point to host video calls or virtual visits with your prospective clients. This allows you to create a voice connection and a visual that can help people remember your company. You can virtually bring more people from your team in front of a customer to show, “I’m not alone; I have a team ready to serve you.”
• Personalized emails: A big part of your communication is likely to email. Make it personal. Add their name in as a first step (a critical step), but then go beyond that and truly personalize the email message to address their needs.
• Video marketing: To reach prospective clients, be sure to incorporate video marketing into your strategy. In the video, people can see who you are and get to know your brand. It creates that important connection in these times when almost everyone is working remotely at one time or another.
• Social media marketing: Let social media do some of the work for you as well. The important goal is to engage with people. Use videos to help tell the story, create a message, and build brand recognition to make an impression on people.

If you are using AI, chatbots, and virtual selling assistance, you’re going down the right path. That’s better than no contact at all. Yet, this may also be an opportunity to see significant improvement in your digital marketing success. There’s no doubt that personalized marketing is going to be the most important strategy in 2022.

WSI helps you build strong digital marketing strategies using personalized marketing. If you’re unsure how digital marketing may contribute to your success, reach out to us to learn more.

Call us at 713-338-3488 to learn more about personalized digital marketing, or contact us online to book a digital strategy consultation.

About the Author

James R Alexander, Digital Marketing Strategist, OMCP, PE, MBA at Expert WSI eMarketing, General Manager for Expert WSI eMarketing’. He and this office are an integral part of WSI’s global team.