RIP Mass Marketing - Long Live 1:1 at Scale
Customers want to be targeted with an individual approach, and automation technology can help marketers achieve this if used properly.
Customers want to be targeted with an individual approach, and automation technology can help marketers achieve this if used properly.
Let’s call it the new form of mass marketing. What we do today is reach individuals at scale. People expect to be treated like people, not anonymous buyers. This shift in consumer expectations requires an overhaul of customer messaging. It’s not just a content challenge – although there is a lot of good old-fashioned brand strategy involved here, it starts with a segmentation challenge. Our segmentation strategies create the language for interpreting and addressing customers’ needs.
Back in the day, a segmentation strategy could work using standard attributes: demographic, geographic, and purchase behavior. The limitations forced marketers to think in terms of brand value, not personal value. We created personas to guide our thinking, but we grouped together people by their relationship to our brand, not by their individual characteristics. Today, advanced data matching and automation technology let us shift to a more individual approach.
As any casual observer of human behavior will tell you, people do not always behave logically – the way their static demographic of past buying data suggests. Emotion plays a pretty big role in purchase – and many customers are craving emotional connections through rich and authentic brand experiences. A good example is the small craft brands in beauty and cleaning products making headway against Procter & Gamble specifically because customers want to interact with real people.
Research from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) and Google found that customers with strong connections to B2B brands have higher rates of consideration, purchase, and willingness to pay a premium. After surveying 3,000 B2B buyers from 36 distinct brands, the CEB found that emotions trump rational motivators by a two-to-one ratio. The report found that “Today’s customer-centric branding appears to be working: most B2B buyers (74 percent) now believe that brands will provide business value.”
This trend seems to be resonating with marketers. About 80 percent of B2B marketers say they can gauge which customers are their most valuable, according to a recent report from Regalix. Some 64 percent say they understand customers’ past purchase behaviors, but only 48 percent say they have an “excellent understanding” of the customer demographics.
If marketers start using more emotion in their messaging, the importance of exact imagery and language grows. That means content has to be aligned to individual preferences, not groupthink. The automation technology can work really hard for us – executing complex segmentations, aligning campaigns to each segment across a dialog or drip marketing approach, scoring leads based on real attributes, and tracking success in to allow rapid course correction.
But technology is nothing without great strategy. There are two key foundations to ensuring your segmentation, campaign management, and automation technology is working hardest for you:
How is emotion affecting your segmentation and marketing automation? Are you adapting your models to connect with high-value individuals, treating them like people first, and buyers second? What is holding you back? Please comment below to share your ideas.