Personalized marketing glorified. Rightly so?

Personalized marketing indeed is a buzz word now. Reason of this new topic / technique / theory is same old reason of making marketing investment more fruitful and to make the process more streamlined & effective. But the beauty of marketing is its impact are not bonded or related directly into ROI. That's more of a sales thing, marketing can have its impact but direct sales values (obviously there are few specifically designed campaigns can generate revenue but without a guarantee). Marketing is more of an impact business, and convincing people for your clients. Coming back to the point topic we are here to discuss or dissect.

Before the start, we need to understand what is personalized marketing? It's not a rocket science but science of grass root. It tells about customers who are the very first reason we need marketing. Personalized marketing from its name itself means planning your marketing around each of customers differently. Even you will understand that all your customers are unique in their personalities, business patters, needs, demands, and aspirations. If your each customer is so different from each other how one marketing campaign can create the traction/requirement pull from all over of them. 

So is it something came from any alien planet? is it something we never knew about? Is it an invention or Innovation? Here comes the fact that previously we used to do the same with little more crude way i.e. segmentisized marketing which is again fading because of the very reason of its existence. So how it's different than segmentized marketing and personalized marketing? Personalized marketing is nothing but more refined (market research) and intelligent (statistical analysis) than its forefather. e.g.

Personalized Marketing = Existing Data + Market research + Statistics + Persona + Specialized Campaign Design + Segmentation + Marketing 

In today’s world need more targeted or pinpointed marketing where the concept of segment is each of your customers. One big benefit of this is your customer gets an overall feeling of personal touch in your communication towards them. It creates faith, trust that they will be in a hand who will visualize her/his profits or goods as their own. Problem of their own will be handled with a specific view which is very own to their company.

This concept can be best utilized or followed in B2C business and service industry than a product base environment. The basic reason for that is product is a result of customer requirement and has a static foundation. So the there is a static amount of rigidity comes along like a mobile banking app will not give you a Restaurant review (bluntly). All in all it does what marketing wants to do in the bestest way possible. It creates the visibility, along with trust. It creates brand as if it's your clients own extension. It's will delight your customers and push them to say Wow. Kudos to the concept. But is it viable in today's landscape where cost is still a big thing and companies are fighting a silo slow-downed business?

To understand that let’s talk about the concept in details along with some ground zero implementation part of it and find if it's worthy enough for a shot. I, personally would say yes and no. Why yes will be because it's a new concept, it has all potential to pay you back in near future. It  give you a delighted set of clients who will be happy that you are taking care / helping their business in the best way it can be done. You can have an awesome word of mouth business with the help your delighted customers and a good word about your services can make or break a deal for you. 

But (I hate to say this but word) is it all bed of roses no thrones along? I will say no (toad is making its sound again) there are hidden thrones which you will come to know once you start walking on these roads. Like there is fixed success way/method of doing it, or a ration of traditional / and personalized marketing (yes I am talking about hybrid model because I am skeptical enough to believe it 100%).  The main question of this kind of marketing model will be what’s the cost involved. Because from open play eye it's actually, but virtually impossible to have a campaign for each single of your customers unless you have less than 50 customers (its ball park figure). 

Let’s get into one step deeper; to have this kind of model implemented you need to identify different flags (e.g. Revenue, size, location, vertical, action points, recent actions, infrastructure etc.) of your existing customer base & pipeline. When I say flags it can simple means criteria. The accumulate those criteria s or flags into different division buckets to create a persona (persona is a fictional customer type with given attribute with maximum probability to buy your product. Persona is nothing but a set of customer, remember segmentation?). These personas will be your eyes and ears for whole campaign. 

These persona's will define how your customer will look like, what they do, how they do, how is their business, how you can help them. They will have pain points, happy points and delight points (You must have heard about the first one but the last 2, will have another blog explaining them). And you will build a campaign around each of these personas, why because these personas will have a set of background details and a set of problems attached to them. What you need to do the draw those relationship line, find out the actual issues and fit your product in such a way that your product is bet fit or built only for them. These personas will give you a glimpse of your segmented market and you will divide your target market into those segmented ones by matching those flags into your personas, and there you go. You have reached a level where you can start your personalized campaigns.

Now let’s think about what all channels are best fit for this (as per me digital is the best channel except CSR level contacts in a simple terms cheap is best) like TVC is the worst channel you can think of because of the cost involved. But on the other hand internet / digital / online channel seems to be an almost fit because of low cost quotient.

Let’s do a SWOT analysis of this concept and try to understand the summarized picture, 

Finally does personalized marketing really convince people? I would say being a customer myself, yes it does. For an example, last year I was traveling to my native place for a festival and I booked my tickets from an airline online through a merchant website. Now I didn't know they were tracking my travel, so this year I get a sudden call from the airline that I have a subsidized ticket during this year festival and I can book them within a month of time, with in this one month the ticket price will not change for me. So for personalized marketing there is a fair chance that I will book with the same airlines again. 

This is a personal scribble ground. The opinions expressed here are all personal they do not express any direct or indirect linkage to the organization I am attached to. But I love changes so they might be changing time to time. :o)