By Dmitri Lisitski
Dmitri Lisitski
Your new refrigerator, the 747 of kitchen appliances, has been ordered, delivered, installed and is happily chilling your groceries. You’ve crossed it off your list and moved on to your next project. Unfortunately, your online experience has not quite caught up with your reality. Weeks after the fact, refrigerator ads are still stalking you, lurking around every bend of the internet, on banners, display ads, social feeds – even invading your favorite YouTube channel. You see a full range of refrigerator models and a cornucopia of sales pitches and special incentives, if only you click now.
All that stalking of the refrigerator advertisers is not only unhelpful, but it’s a turn off. And, if you are the advertiser, you’ve not only turned off a prospect, but you’ve wasted your advertising budget.
While personalized ads have gotten a bad rap due to privacy concerns, don’t give up on its potential for good. In fact, there is a blue ocean of opportunity in the personalization space ahead. But to be successful at it, you must shift your thinking and focus on value creation, and then align your strategy and technology accordingly. Here’s how to move your personalized advertising efforts out from the cavern of creepy and unhelpful and into the light of value creation.
How To Effectively Influence Prospects Through Relevance
As an advertiser, your key to keeping your metrics on an upward trend is how relevant you are to your potential buyer. Let’s break it down this way:
Relevance = Personalization - Creepiness
As in the case of the refrigerator, the ad revealed that the advertiser had data on you, indicating you were in the market for a refrigerator. That’s a feeling like you are being watched and it’s creepy. But, what if the ad instead offered you an extended warranty for home appliances instead? That’s relevant and helpful, not so creepy.
How It’s Usually Done: One Dimensional & Impersonal
How advertisers usually personalize is anything but personal. When you think about personalization, you might assume that it’s simply slapping your target company’s logo onto your banner ads, for example. And, if you could put your prospect’s name in the banner or on your landing page, you might think that’s even better.
One example is an advertiser who took their regular, non-personalized landing page and added “Hi John” at the top to address their prospect by name. And yes, while that was technically personalized, it added zero value for the prospect. The only thing a strategy like this does is reveal the fact that you know your prospect’s identity which heightens the creepiness factor but does not engage them with why your value is relevant to them.
How It Should Be Done: Multi-Dimensional & Individualized
In advertising, precision is your friend. Greater precision helps you take the creepiness out of personalization and instead give a customized user experience that actually delivers value. Everything else is spam. How advertisers should personalize their ads is by using three strategies at once:
While many companies may use one or two of these strategies to market to groups or types, using all these strategies in concert enables you to market to individuals — and that’s the key.
To gain that level of precision, you need the right strategy, data, and platform to unleash the power of buying group marketing. But what if there was a better way?
Creating Value Converts To Opportunities
For marketers to better help salespeople, they must treat the customers as individuals — and know who the right individuals are to target. You have to go for specific decision makers and a specific buying team inside every account, just like salespeople do.
An ideal system will share prospects between sales and marketing, down to the name and job title and serve up the ads relevant to those specific people. And the system would tell you precisely who sees which ad. It would tell you when they engage with the ads and how. It would fully integrate with your CRM so the sales team would get that information near real-time with contact scoring that is meaningful.
The Point Of Personalization Is Putting The Customer First
Personalized advertising is successful because it’s relevant, personal and precise, but mostly because when it’s done right, personalized advertising doesn’t forget to put the customer first. When you use an ad to target your market, it’s a good idea to know who precisely it is you are talking to so that you can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. That’s relevancy. That’s value creation. That’s putting the customer first. Now, knock it off with the refrigerators already.
