Today, the marketer’s realm is more chaotic than ever, with a new digital choice nudging its way into the space ostensibly every day. Marketers chasing to capture their customers’ and prospects’ attention and loyalty can face the proverbial challenge of excessive good things. The most seasoned of professionals can be overwhelmed in guiding marketing campaigns. Marketers have to personalize activities across all marketing channels by tailoring to individual penchants and tastes for better customer experience. Determining the target market and acquiring accurate information on prospects may be the most important first steps in developing and managing long-term sales and marketing strategy, but they are also steps worth repeating to ensure your success.
As our world becomes increasingly digital, customers are growing habituated to the personalized experience that Web 2.0 provides. With continuous online access through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, customer demand is beginning to reflect the personalization propagated by the filtering, following, and connection opportunities available on email, Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. Those capabilities allow users to apply their personal preferences to control what they want to hear and from whom. Those techniques have moreover raised the probability that the same level of personalization should be accessible universally.
Delivering only relevant messaging to each customer is the only way marketers can fulfill customers’ increasing demands and cut down on wasting resources. Marketers can save precious budgets and (icing on cake) improve efficiency numbers by not targeting unresponsive customers who will probably snub unsolicited information, or worse, become annoyed by it.
So Are You Doing It Right?
- Data tends to be duplicated and becomes obsolete over a period of time. If as a marketer, you make decisions with data that contains duplicates, obsolete data, or data that’s not normalized then you are guilty of inaccurate segmentation. It is embarrassing to send two different promotions to the same person at the same time!
- Using assumptions to segment for customer profiles or personas is a good starting point, especially when you are just starting out. However, it is imprudent to conclude on segmentation without first doing analysis. Customer data must be analyzed when constructing segments
- Micro-segmentation! A marketer can define goals for each micro-segment. Targeting should be based on goals set for the micro-segments within the business
- A marketer’s perfect segmentation can be based on variables and fields that do not have information as yet. The marketing team should focus on data collection always so that they can evaluate the ideal customer profile
- Customers also tend to have a preference for channels when consuming marketing messages. Not all customers are interested in hearing what the brand has to say from all the various channels the marketer uses. The marketer has to be smart in also identifying the preferred channels and use them to connect to their micro-segments
- Timing! Timing! Timing! Irrespective of micro-segmentation and channel preference for a prospect, it is advisable to add data on already defined segments based on engagement time
- Marketers tend to compare performance between two segments. However, it is an incorrect comparison. A more valuable approach is comparing the same segment over a period of multiple marketing campaigns to conclude whether those campaigns are delivering desired results for the segment. This allows the marketer to track inclusive improvement in connecting to that particular segment with different messages
