Posted by: Mark Bainbridge
A short ramble along the shore of personalised content...
Delivering content and creating dwell time with audiences increasingly demands the ability to grab attention and demand/earn the right to a bit of quality time with your customers. It's a no brainer but offering really well targeted and considered content and information aligning audience and proposition is how the leading publishers are achieving their phenomenal dwell times and uplifting their own and their client's sales.
I firmly believe the most important words in any language are probably your name...I also think one of the fundamentals of marketing is about aligning propositions with individual's not just segments - easy to say a lot less easy to do...
But take a moment to think about how you respond when you hear your name spoken or see the words in print. From experience, personalisation is one of the most effective ways of creating engagement and transaction, so why don't we use it more in our content - maybe we should and to do this well we have to spend a bit more time looking at things from the customer end of the telescope. Not just using research to validate what we already do and what we think consumers want; but really understanding the needs of our consumers and build our solutions around them.
So, I am a sucker for personalised marketing...both our current waggon's I bought (excepting the horse trailer - which was the result of wear down marketing tactics from the off-spring) were the result of marketing which targeted me by name and behaviour - and as consumers are controlling more of their own content agenda our greatest challenge is work out how to personalise content efficiently, but deliver through mass media - but, and it's a big but...personalised content needs to be w whole lot more than a top and tailed email templates which is something of a staple for B2B marketing, and there's got to be a hint of magic involved.
I think it was Derren Brown who interviewed a group of Grads and then wrote for each of them a unique insight into their profiles and prospects - which each of them individually thought was absolutely them to a "T"...of course they were all identical. There's always been a bit of magic and sleight of hand involved in marketing its part of the creative process - not just metrics and end to end processes...the key is not allowing the hand of the marketer to be seen.
Now off for a bit of fizz in prep for the next great challenge...
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1 Comment on "Remember my name"
Interesting and insightful Mr Bainbridge.