Digital Marketing Essential: mapping a Customer Journey.
What is personalised digital marketing?
According to research and digital advertising agencies, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand if it offers a unique tailored experience. This is evidence that customers not only expect personalization, but they also value it. And taking a more personal approach it’s also about reacting to complex shifts in consumer behaviours.
What do we know about today’s consumers?
Half of the online adults are now blocking digital ads on their mobiles and desktops - almost double the number reported at the beginning of 2015.
Online consumers are now opting for a multi-device approach to purchasing.
94% of internet users own a smartphone which means ownership is virtually universal.
3 in 4 adults are purchasing products online each month.
30% of online consumers are using VPNs.
98% of internet users are social networkers, meaning there’s no digital audience that can’t be reached via these platforms.
What does this tell us?
Online consumers are now opting for a multi-device approach to purchasing (touchpoints), which in turn offers another angle to their data and their purchase history, which helps to determine future purchases, connecting online and mobile app usage to traditional marketing & media, and in some cases, physical stores.
Using data to understand an individual’s buying behaviours and preferences is a powerful tool in any brand’s armoury, enabling them to target people on the right channels, via the right device, at the right time.
As consumer expectations change alongside behaviours, businesses have a huge opportunity to use the wealth of information at their fingertips.
Using this to tailor their digital marketing plans to their audience means improving the individual customer experience, increasing engagement, and ultimately, sales by driving ROI (Return-On-Investment).
Personalization Matters
Today, brands have access to deep data that quantifies an individual consumer’s attitudes and behaviours, interests and perceptions, allowing them to go far beyond demographics. While there are key differences that set each generation apart, there are also shared attitudes and interests that bind them.
Smart brands will use deep insights to identify their audiences’ shared interests and attitudes while pinpointing the differences that make them unique. Demographic data that groups people according to age, gender, household income, location and ethnicity no longer provide enough intelligence to connect with consumers through digital marketing.
With AI and machine learning forming a key part of how users are targeted these days, this has helped to enable a deeper level of targeting available throughout digital marketing platforms such as Facebook Ads (Paid Social, Social Media), Google Ads (PPC) and more.
Enter granular-targeting.
Granular-audiences came on the scene as a means of segmenting small groups of like-minded individuals to target and influence their thoughts or actions. It relies on understanding the target audience so well that digital marketers will also have a very good idea as to how these people will respond. From first-party insights into what a consumer has searched for on your site to third-party insights that reveal behaviours and perceptions… Brands can now drill down in as much detail as possible to reach very specific audiences in a microscopic way: this gives them the tools to deliver content that truly resonates.
63% of consumers say they would think more positively of a brand if it gave them digital content that was more valuable, interesting or relevant.
Personalised email messages improve click-through rates (CTR) by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.
High performing businesses use data-driven targeting and segmentation 51% through digital marketing using a digital agency more than underperforming businesses.
Knowing Your Audience
Understanding segmentation
This was once the starting point for every brand striving to better understand their target audience, whereby consumers were split into designated groups based on demographic data to drive more targeted campaigns. But times have changed. With the help of global data collection and platforms that track consumer behaviours and motivations on a massive scale, it’s now possible to create custom audiences within seconds and build accurate audience profiles to be used to build a granular digital marketing plan. These go far beyond demographics, encompassing lifestyles, attitudes, self-perception and interests.
1. Stop segmenting, start profiling
Audience profiling is now the most effective way to define, segment and target consumers in the more personalized digital marketing space. With insights that quantify not only the what, but the why behind consumer behaviours, it’s easier than ever to deliver the right message using digital advertising, to the right audience, in the right way. This kind of profiling - analyzing interests, attitudes, behaviours and perceptions - is what makes personalisation possible in digital marketing. This ensures campaigns are highly targeted and brands are well-positioned to make the most of their ROAS (Return-On-Ad-Spent), informing digital marketing strategy from end to end.
Types of Segmentation
Demographic
Geographic
Perception-based
Behavioural
Psychographic
Interested-based
Attitudinal
Needs-based
2. Creating real-life personas
Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your consumers, created using in-depth insights into your target audience. These are used by digital marketers in every sector and can take various forms, helping to put a face and a personality behind the consumers they want to target, painting a more accurate picture of their lives, needs and wants. Real-life personas add the emotional and behavioural component, helping brands to determine an end goal for each target consumer. This empowers digital marketers with the knowledge they need to get inside the minds of their target audience and build the radical empathy that’s needed to make real connections. Third-party data is invaluable for building out these personas and backing your assumptions with hard facts.
3. Map the Consumer Journey
The customer journey is a combined set of behaviours that customers display when they meet your brand, which grows ever more complex with increasing fragmentation across devices, channels (ie, PPC, Social Media, Digital TV) and behaviours. Customers and potential customers interact with brands in numerous different ways, via many different touchpoints, depending on their needs.
Research reveals that over half of digital consumers are now following brands on social media, and social networks are now the top product research channel among consumers aged 16-24. This shows how social media is now playing a key role in the different stages of the consumer journey, but there are far more touchpoints to be identified by analyzing the buying process of each consumer group.
Many brands will identify and map several different journeys to get a complete understanding of the touchpoints that matter. To identify these journeys, deep insights are used to pinpoint the moments, devices and channels that offer the most potential to put personalization into practice.
Working with data
Audience profiling
Audience profiling is about gathering the insights needed to do this. This is where robust consumer data that quantifies consumer behaviours and perceptions come into play, guiding your brand every step of the way to ensure you stay as close to your consumers as possible. There are a few tools that eliminate the need for guesswork, a digital marketing strategy can meet consumer demand for audience-centric content that’s targeted, personalized and responsive. This can be applied to your entire digital marketing strategy from end to end in the following ways:
Segmentation
Splitting your audience into targeted groups that align with your goals.
Messaging
User consumer insights to shape a message that will have an impact.
Engagement
Identifying where and when to place your creative.
Measurement
Analyzing the metrics that matter to drive greater ROI (Return-On-Investment).
Turning data into insight
Using audience profiling to quantify the perceptions that are blocking or powering repeat purchasing gives you the tools to know what to say. Brands have access to a wealth of data, but giving this data the leverage it needs to drive meaningful creativity lies in the creation of insight. After all, a fact, a finding or a data point without context is worthless. The path to identifying an actionable insight that will drive sales lies in matching your consumers to your objectives and asking the right questions.
1. Quantify current perceptions of your brand.
How can I split my audience into targeted groups that align with my goals?
2. Validate the perception changes that will drive revenue.
Identify the perceptions that will drive or block repeat purchasing.
3. Create a message that will change perceptions.
Define and test a message that will successfully change perceptions among your target audience.
4. Package this message into engaging formats
Turn your message into engaging campaigns that will have an impact.
Questions your data should answer
To put digital marketing that works into practice, you need data that will answer the right questions.
Am I targeting the right audience?
What defines this audience?
What matters to them?
What motivates them?
What interests them?
Who and what do they follow?
Where and when can we reach them?
What are their perceptions of our brand?
Which perceptions drive or block purchasing?
How are they interacting with us?
What does their purchase journey look like?
What are the touchpoints that matter?
What trends can we identify with these consumers?
Getting Personal
1. Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive action. Research shows that content marketing has become an almost universal tactic, with 90% of companies using it in 2016, and even more utilizing it in 2017. Successful content marketing not only carefully considers the target personas in question, but it also relies on both real-time analytics and third-party data to understand what, when, where and how will resonate best. Not only this, today’s consumers expect personalized content. Surrounded by the likes Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ service, these brands are setting the standard when it comes to content. Consumers value content that is useful, relevant and entertaining to them, so the more tailored it is, the better it will perform. Many brands are seeing a stronger ROAS thanks to their personalization efforts overall.
2. Email marketing
Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s playing a more important role than ever in delivering against marketing and wider business targets thanks to a more personalized email marketing approach. But the kind of email marketing that works for today’s consumers is evolving fast. Improved segmentation and targeting enables you to have a more personalized approach and, in turn, drive revenue via conversion and improved open rates, while increasing customer loyalty over time.
3. Retargeting
For many, only between 1-5% of web traffic converts on the first visit to your website. Retargeting is a tactic designed to help brands reach that 98% who don’t convert right away and attract prospective customers. Content retargeting means serving customers with content specific to their needs, interests and journey stage. Tactics can include using website visits and intent data to retarget them cross-channel using, for example, Facebook Ads (Paid Social), Google Ads (PPC) and others. Aligning your content in a personalized way allows you to streamline the customer’s experience of your brand throughout their online journey, whether the goal is to sign up, visit, download something or make an e-Commerce transaction. But while retargeting can prove effective when done right, using unreliable data - solely tied to cookies as opposed to real people - can have a detrimental impact on your brand.
The Authentic Factor
Social media has led the way in forcing companies to be more upfront, to be real, and to listen to their customers. This shift has forced brands to think again, and at the heart of being authentic is being able to demonstrate that you know what your customers think and feel and that you can anticipate their needs. By matching their brand experiences to your data, you can show that you care about what they want. This not only boosts loyalty but offers a human - or authentic - face to the brand experience. For example, some brands try publicity stunts and influencer marketing on social media in an effort to achieve huge reach, but those that use data and apply insights can cleverly create laser-focused content and messages, tailored to a targeted group of people. This audience will respond much more favourably to content they see as genuine, valuable and on-brand. This, in turn, creates lifetime value with the consumer, as they become more loyal customers that enjoy and interact with the brand's content.
People no longer want to be sold to, they want to feel part of a brand’s story. Data that taps into people’s perceptions and behaviours, this current form of marketing personalization is what makes this possible.
Tailored Digital Marketing Key Points
Five key considerations when creating personalized digital marketing campaigns.
Know who you’re targeting by interrogating complex data.
Use consumer data to build out real-life personas of key members of your target audience, and personalize your communications for each group.
Use dynamic content to personalize the customer experience based on customer interests or browsing behaviours.
Find out what your audience wants on social media by using data to discover when they’re likely to be online and what kind of content they engage with.
Bring all your data together to create a single customer view, enabling you to deliver a consistently personalized experience, regardless of touchpoint.
Final Thought
To get it right, you need to understand consumers and your potential buyer from how they interact with your brand to the bigger picture concerning their interests, attitudes, perceptions and behaviours. With this knowledge, you can deliver tailored digital marketing that resonates with the individuals you’re targeting, ultimately impacting your bottom line. And a digital marketing agency will have all this expertise to support you.
To learn more about Digital Marketing Essentials, get in contact today.
