Make it relevant

When we experience the inevitability of opening yet another email attempting to convince us to buy a new product that we don’t need and are likely to never want, our first feelings are often that of disappointment. Irrelevant offers and campaigns are dismissed and rather than just forgotten; consumers are left with a negative sentiment.

The goal of personalisation efforts is to deliver the most relevant message to the right consumers. But often the quest for perfect data and using the most advanced deployment software is prioritised over the insights needed to ensure well-targeted and relevant communications. The benefits of a relevancy-first approach are best not forgotten. In this article we will explain how to successfully deploy a relevancy-based targeting approach that realises the economic advantage of ensuring your message achieves both reach and results.

Making relevant successful

Connecting with a consumer using a relevant and interesting message is a vital component in campaign success. Achieving success with relevancy requires attention to three valuable ingredients:

1. Understand the audience; by speaking to the common category needs of all potential buyers marketers maximise the chances of connection with potential customers. Rich and powerful data driven insight on consumers is vital to drive an appropriately targeted marketing message.
2. Execute at scale; make your targeting the right size to achieve positive return on your marketing investment
3. Be in the right place; understanding where and how your message will be consumed increases the likelihood your message will be heard.

The importance of sending relevant messages is clear when we consider the potential impacts of inappropriate targeting. Receiving an irrelevant, or worse inappropriate, offer is not forgotten just because it was correctly addressed and personalised. The consumer is left with a mixture of frustration and disappointment at receiving marketing that is irrelevant.  Marketers should recognise the necessity in getting to know their consumer, and the importance of tailoring campaigns that appeal to their preferences.

Why Relevancy Matters

The relevancy of an offer matters more than the method of delivery. Understanding consumers’ needs and wants will undoubtedly help a campaign achieve success. But this isn’t an either/or scenario; relevancy doesn’t negate the impact of the other elements of a successful marketing campaign. But the pursuit of personal data at the expense of insight is bound to backfire. Against the backdrop of declining consumer trust, increasing regulation and concerns about data privacy, it seems no surprise that Gartner predicts 80% of marketers will abandon personalisation by 2025 due to lack of ROI ⁽¹⁾.

Of all the compelling reasons why campaigns should prioritise relevancy in campaign design; the most impactful of these involves data. Creating unique individual personalised marketing messages requires correct, verified and consented consumer data. This type of data does not, in and of itself, provide marketers with insight into a consumer’s likely needs or wants. But leveraging this appropriate and available data to develop rich insight into a consumer’s likely interest in your marketing message is undoubtedly a better investment of your marketing resources.

Focus on what matters

Marketers should invest in creative relevancy at scale. Understanding target audience profiles and adjusting the offer and creative to appeal to different audience segments means that your campaigns are not only reaching the right audience in the right way but maintain reach. Maintaining reach and thus achieving scale is essential to minimising inefficiency and controlling any creative and media costs. It is commonly understood by most marketers that audience size matters. Unless there are infinite hyper targeted creatives to accompany every unique and personalised communication then are we truly personalised? Through this lens, the idea of personalisation at scale, is at best an oxymoron.  Using consumer insight to inform relevant creative targeted to the right audience is a better recipe to achieve results.

Instead of chasing near mythical hyper-personalisation, marketers should instead be striving for relevancy at scale. We recommend the following ways to develop actionable insight into audiences and to maximise the relevancy of your marketing efforts:

1. Build a powerful consumer data profiling strategy. By collecting and connecting with consumer data – including customer buying histories, demographic information, location, media engagement metrics, and more.
2. Leverage these insights to build and apply consumer segmentation. A successful segmentation strategy should clearly identify groups of consumers with similar needs and wants, but do so in a way that ensures actionability and scale.
3. Create rich typical customer profiles that describe the preferences these customers exhibit; be it attitudes to price, preferred media channels, typical lifestyles and routines and capacity to buy.
4. Utilise these profiles to target different segments of customers based on common traits, characteristics and behaviours.

The pursuit of personalisation in marketing is seductive but can distract marketers from the importance of relevancy in building campaigns. But personalisation is not just about communicating one to one – but communicating a relevant message that resonates with consumers. The investment required to deploy can far exceed the benefits that marketers are able to realise from their personalisation efforts. Don’t let your personalisation efforts fail by forgetting relevancy.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can segment your customer base to drive relevancy, please reach out below.

References

1. Starita, Laura. Top Marketing Predictions for 2020 Reveal Risks of Influencers and Personalization. Gartner. [Online] December 19th, 2019. https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/top-marketing-predictions-for-2020-reveal-risks-of-influencers-and-personalization.