Creating a personalized marketing strategy is a key component in successful marketing. Why? Because humans are human, and they like to feel seen and heard by the brands they do business with. Generic interactions often feel, as could be expected, fake and opportunistic.
Mistakes to Avoid in Personalization Marketing
Though marketing personalization is fairly straightforward, there are plenty of mistakes you can make if you don’t do your due diligence. Below are a few biggies to avoid.
Inconsistency Across Channels
Inconsistency is never attractive, whether it’s in marketing, or in any other aspect of life.
A personalized marketing strategy that doesn’t stay consistent across your different marketing channels - social media, websites, SMS, and email - is bound to fail, sooner or later. Streamlining your marketing strategy is important to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Failing to Know Your Audience
One of the biggest reasons behind failure in any kind of marketing is not knowing your audience.
Almost all marketing strategies – including personalized marketing – sort your audience into different categories and classifications, based on predefined criteria.
However, not all people who live in the same area, or who work in the same profession, like the same things.
That means you must truly fine-tune your customer profiles for effective personalized marketing; after all, if you don’t know your customers inside and out, how can you design a marketing strategy personalized to them?
Incorrectly Defining Personalization
For a well-designed, personalized marketing strategy, every brand needs to come up with its definition of personalized first.
Otherwise, it will either be too broadly done and not feel very personalized at all; or it will be too narrow, which doesn’t leave enough room for growth and actual connection.
Brands should aim to gather data from multiple sources to get a well-rounded persona of the person they’re trying to reach.
Inaccurate Data Usage
When it comes to the data aspect of marketing personalization, there are two potential pitfalls. You might have inaccurate or incomplete data to begin with, which will mess up any decisions you make based on said data.
This might be because you only collected data from a single source; for personalized marketing, data should be taken from a variety of sources, from zero parties, which is data that the customers themselves provide, to the third party, which includes data collected from a source that has no direct relation with the customer.
Devaluing Privacy
In marketing, nearly all companies toe the line between respecting and violating customer privacy. It is important to remember that the goal of personalization is to make the consumer experience easier and simpler, without violating their privacy. Making the most of your zero-party data can be helpful in this regard.
Failing to Optimize
Optimization is pretty much a buzzword in marketing circles these days. However, without it, you run the risk of wasting a lot of resources, both time and money.
You also run the risk of turning customers off. This is true for personalized marketing in particular.
For instance, if you don’t optimize your customer connection processes so that you’re careful to nudge them in the right direction when the time is right, you run the risk of annoying your customer by nudging them too often.
Since that’s obviously not the desired result, continual optimization is necessary.
Going Overboard
Personalized marketing can play a huge role in the customer experience, and boost your company image in the process.
However, doing too much of it can quickly make you lose customers. Some examples to send things south, fast:
- Being over-friendly and too personal
- Reaching out too often and spamming potential customers
- Being insensitive and using real-world situations as a marketing ploy
Are You Making These Personalization Marketing Mistakes?
If you are, time to right the ship! With knowledge, comes power when said knowledge is applied. The time to start is now!
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