POSTED BY: | June 10, 2016

As we launched into 2016, 91 percent of surveyed consumer-focused organizations plan to use technology to personalize marketing based on learned needs and desired outcomes, yet few possess an ability to build this system, so most are destined to fall short.

Personalized marketing is the use of individual behavioral data to target and/or tailor marketing communications based on likely needs when a consumer is seeking the service or product. This is also referred to as behavioral-based marketing.

Often, consumer reactions to personalized marketing is mixed. Consumers shudder at the idea of anyone tracking their behavior, but when a product or service is presented at a time and place that makes it easy to acquire, they like it! And buy it! It’s hard to execute a perfect big data strategy. Most professionals want to immediately leap from individual visitors on their site to internet-wide data patterns. Four existing strategies can be ranked from easy to difficult:

  •  Behavioral targeting: offline research of patterns to define targets for the ideal start-of-website funnel
  •  Precision micro-segmentation: persona profiling that uses known behavior to develop robust descriptions of targeted audiences.
  • Real-time behavioral targeting: finding what communication they seek at varying points in their online journey.
  • Real-time behavioral targeting: i.e., deciding what segments of the web populace will receive messaging, in real-time, to people who are searching for a specific product/service

It seems that many marketers are attempting to jump the curve by leaping from Behavior targeting to Real-time targeting; in spite of the protracted time and costly development. Ideally, one must learn to speed walk before trying to run a marathon. Many of our clients are realizing success by developing customer Personas, empowered by Consumer Journey Mapping, to craft impactful marketing strategies yielding 4 to 6 percent lifts in sales. Live long and prosper.

This article originally appeared in the June issue of the Hendricks County Business Leaders publication.