Personalizing Marketing: Experiential Marketing, One to One Marketing

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.

Strategies

One-to-one marketing refers to marketing strategies applied directly to a specific consumer. Having knowledge of the consumer’s preferences, enables suggesting specific products and promotions to each consumer. One-to-one marketing is based on four main steps in order to fulfil its goals: identify, differentiate, interact, and customize.

• Differentiate: To distinguish the customers in terms of their lifetime value to the company, to know them by their priorities in terms of their needs, and segment them into more restricted groups.
• Identify: In this stage, the major concern is to get to know the customers of a company, to collect reliable data about their preferences and how their needs can best be satisfied.
• Interact: In this phase, one needs to know by which communication channel and by what means, contact with the client is best made. It is necessary to get the customer’s attention by engaging with him/her in ways that are known as being the ones that he/she enjoys the most.
• Customize: One needs to personalize the product or service to the customer individually. The knowledge that a company has about a customer, needs to be put into practice and the information held has to be taken into account in order to be able to give the client exactly what he/she wants.

Future of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is gaining headway and has become a point of popular interest with the emergence of relevant and supportive technologies like DMP, geotargeting, and various forms of social media. Now, many people believe it is the inevitable baseline for the future of marketing strategy and for future business success in competitive markets.

Adapt to technology: For personalized marketing to work the way advocates say it will, companies are going to have to adapt to relevant technologies. They will have to get in touch with the new and popular forms of social media, data-gathering platforms, and other technologies that not all current employees and businesses may be familiar with or can afford. Companies that have been able to afford it, have employed machine learning, big data and AI that make personalization automatic.

Restructuring current business models: Adopting a new marketing system tailored to the most relevant technologies will take time and resources to implement. Organized planning, communication and restructuring within businesses will be required to successfully implement personalized marketing. Some companies will have to accept that their current business and marketing models will change radically, and probably often. They will have to reconsider the ways customer data and information circulate within the company and possibly beyond. Company databases will be flooded with expansive personal information individual’s geographic location, potential buyers’ past purchases, etc., and there may be complications regarding how that information is gathered, circulated internally and externally, and used to increase profits.

Legal liabilities: To address concerns about sensitive information being gathered and utilized without obvious consumer consent, liabilities and legalities have to be set and enforced. Privacy is always an issue, in some countries more than others, so companies have to manage any legal hurdles before personalized marketing can be adopted. Specifically, the EU has passed rigid regulation, known as GDPR, that limits what kind of data marketers can collect on their users, and provide ways in which consumers can suit companies for violation of their privacy. In the US, California has followed suit and passed the CCPA in 2018.

Experiential Marketing

Also called engagement marketing, experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that immerses customers within a product or deeply engages them. In short, experiential marketing enables consumers to not just buy products or services from a brand, but to actually experience the brand. Emotional connections between the brand and the consumer are created through memorable and unique experiences. Experiential marketing not only involves customer engagement, but also often improves it in the process.

Benefits of experiential marketing

• Stronger connection between product and emotion: People want to know what your product does. More importantly, though, the driving force behind why they choose you over your competitor may come down to how your product makes them feel. Your experiential marketing should amplify the feelings that come when they use your product. This is important to them, as customers are 3.7 times more likely to view seamless transitions between channels as important versus unimportant. Strong positive emotions endear customers to brands. Make sure the experience you provide creates a strong positive emotional response.
• Personalized engagement: Customers want to feel a real human connection with your brand. In fact 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. There’s perhaps no better way to treat your customers like people than to immerse them in an exhilarating human experience. Let them see firsthand how your brand elevates them.
• Creation of a positive touchpoint: The more positive touchpoints you can have with your customers, the better. And the more connected those touchpoints, the more powerful and compelling they become. A cohesive experience is key to winning customer loyalty. In fact, 70% of customers say connected processes are very important to winning their business.
• Social shareability: Experiences are compelling and powerful, and it seems people love capturing interesting experiences through video, and then sharing them on social networks. In fact, it’s projected that video traffic will make up 82% of IP traffic by 2022. You may find social media is there to spread the word for you, so long as you have an experience worth sharing. Positioning your brand as the creator of a positive experience is a win when it comes to spreading your brand vision and gaining recognition.

Steps:

1. Observe and gather inspiration

What are other brands doing to foster incredible experiences? In order to create a memorable experience when it comes to experiential marketing, it helps to be observant and understand which current brand experiences are resonating with consumers. Can you remember any particularly insightful experiential campaigns? Keep your eyes open when you’re out in the world. Try to remember a time where you were blown away by something a brand did. Take to social media or check your camera roll.

2. Get to know your customers

What do your customers love most about your brand? What emotions do they associate with you? What products or features do they most enjoy? These are all insights that will help you share the essence of your brand and the emotion behind it. Learn through reviews, social media, and short surveys. Knowing your customers and what they love about you will help you determine how to attract new like-minded ones through emotions and experiences.

3. Know your goal

Why are you carrying out an experiential marketing event? What tangible results do you hope to accomplish? How will you know you’re successful? You’re likely looking to create positive brand sentiment that leads to new customer acquisition and loyalty.

What immediate action do you want people to take as a result of the experience they have with your brand? Do you want them to share a video of their experience on social media? Would you like them to get a free trial of your software or purchase your product? Or do you want them to sign up for emails so you can nurture them and keep them connected with your brand?

Be sure you know what you want to get out of the event and make it clear to participants. Chances are good they’ll be willing to interact with or promote your brand if you provide them with an exceptional and unique experience.

4. Determine the value you’ll provide

What type of value will you give those who are involved in your experiential marketing? Will it be an unforgettable photo or video? Or will it be an amazing experience? Will you give away some of your product? What emotions do you want people to feel? Aim to provide value in as many ways as possible to create memorable experiences worth sharing.

5. Engage as many senses as possible

What do you want people to see, touch, and hear when it comes to your brand experience? What colors will you use? Will you incorporate music? How will you give people a hands-on experience with your brand? Immerse them in a sensory experience that engages more than one of their senses and it’ll likely have more impact.

6. Go to your audience

Your event should take place in a location where your audience already is regularly. If possible, a place in their natural world. Trade shows are great and they provide an easy opportunity to connect and engage, but unexpected experiences in the real world might be even more impactful.

7. Create a unique experience where the spirit of your brand shines

To craft a good experience, you’ll want to take considerable time to really determine what sets your brand apart and how you want it to make people feel and act. A truly impactful experiential marketing event will help others remember your brand and become part of your powerful mission. 

8. Measure, Analyze, and improve

In order to determine how successful your experiential marketing efforts are, you need to have a way to measure effectiveness. Often, social media is a great place to uncover just how far reaching and impactful your experience was. Create some kind of platform where people can easily interact with the experience. Maybe it’s a hashtag, a web page or some other online channel where you can easily measure impact. When you look at the data, you’ll learn a lot about what consumers resonate with and you’ll be able to further delight them in the future and continually deliver incredible experiences.

One to One Marketing

One-to-one marketing is a customer relationship management strategy. It’s centered around personalized interactions with customers. Personalization creates greater customer loyalty. And a better return on marketing efforts. The concept of one-to-one marketing first gained attention in 1994. When Peppers & Roger’s book “The One-to-One Future” was released.

The goal of one-to-one marketing, like all marketing, is to make a sale. One to one marketing communicates directly to the consumer. The person is targeted deliberately. It is a CRM strategy that focuses on personalized interactions.

Personalized marketing and individual marketing are substitute terms for one-to-one marketing. Industry leaders have found that it generates the best return on investment.

Strategies:

Customized CRM Systems

Businesses even in the same industry differ from each other. The size of the company, location, and delivery model varies between businesses. Different styles of operation, products, and needs require unique solutions. Customized CRM software is one of the most sought-after solutions. The right CRM collects accurate and relevant data for businesses. A successful one-to-one marketing campaign starts with a good CRM system.

Customized Live Chat Platforms

It’s no secret that the better customer experiences a company creates, the more loyalty is earned. Live chat software gives businesses a tool to create a better customer experience. Leveraging custom software live chat helps companies decrease operating costs and saves time. When customers can avoid a 15-minute phone call they’re happy.

Customized Websites

A good website is like a showroom to showcase your products and services. A well-designed website with clear messaging benefits both consumers and companies. Find out where your competition is lacking and provide that for your customers. A well-designed and written website makes the customer feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

Customize Your Communication with Customers

Surveys show that email marketing with no personal touch finds its way to the trash folder. Addressing the reader by his/her name, coupled with useful and relevant content, gets attention. When people are getting hundreds of emails every day, the only chance for getting their attention is to make it personal.