Today's online consumers have the world at their disposal. They can choose from a variety of brands, sticking with the one that gives them the optimal benefits in terms of both product and value. In such a competitive environment, the brand that ultimately wins the sale will be the one that offers the best deal for each customer.
Furthermore, studies show that generating business from existing customers yields more profit than trying to acquire new ones. Therefore, it's worthwhile for online brands to get a precise understanding of their customers' unique needs and address them in every brand-consumer interaction.
What is precision marketing?
Precision marketing is an innovative strategy in which marketers analyze the specific wants, needs, interests and behavioral patterns of particular user segments. Because of the improved understanding precision marketing offers, brands are better situated to fulfill the needs of specific groups and significantly increase the success and effectiveness of their marketing communications.
For example, the buying behaviors and product preferences of teenage girls would be completely different from their fathers' buying behaviors. Precision marketing strategies help you to instantly distinguish the differences in behavior and interests of your target demographics so you can make smarter and more tactical business decisions.
How to develop a precision marketing strategy
Precision marketing heavily relies on the ability to analyze and parse information about certain audiences before using that data to carefully tailor a marketing plan. Because of the need for a higher degree of accuracy than other strategies require, precision marketing demands an effective course of action ahead of time.
By doing your homework and taking the right steps, you can create a precision marketing plan that strikes at the heart of your customers' needs. As you meet those needs, you can not only draw new business in, but also work to retain that business for the long term. You can take the following steps on your way to creating your precision marketing strategy.
1. Establish your brand guidelines.
Your brand is one of the most important things your business has. It's how people remember your business. Though your logo and associated colors are some of the most important parts of your brand guidelines, consider your company's values and voice. By establishing what matters to your brand and how you interact with others, you can create a buyer persona for your brand. That buyer persona is exactly what marketers will use to effectively communicate your brand to the audience you're targeting.
2. Pinpoint your audience.
You can't have a precision marketing strategy without establishing which group of people is your proverbial bullseye. Precision marketing lives and dies by how relevant it is to your targeted audience, so the more details you have on your customers, the better.
3. Set goals.
Once you start your marketing campaign, you should have ideal goals in mind. These goals should be as big or as small as you want, but you should keep them realistic. By tracking your successes and challenges, you can create a better precision marketing campaign down the line. Establishing measurable goals is key: Email newsletter subscriptions, advertisements' click-through rates, CTA engagement and website traffic are examples of good metrics for success.
4. Focus on retention.
Having a return customer is always better than a one-time visit, so ensuring customer retention is important in a precision marketing plan. For example, a customer rewards card not only reminds people to come back, but also allows you to collect data on what they like about your business and how much they show up. With that information, you can create an even more accurate marketing plan to cater to certain segments of the customer base, thus repeating the cycle.
Which tools can help?
While the key benefits of precision marketing are easy to comprehend, accessing the data necessary to implement such strategies can be challenging. That's why technologies have been created to help the cause.
Precision marketing tools help you zone in on customers' demographic, behavioral, and emotional differences so you can create long-lasting customer engagement and loyalty quickly and easily. Here are three technology vendors that empower brands to achieve the holy grail of precision marketing:
Optimove
Optimove's cloud-based predictive marketing technology uses big data to gather insights into customer behavior, tendencies, and personal preferences, allowing marketers to attain the emotional intelligence necessary to gain loyalty and increase revenues from existing customers. Optimove gives its clients an array of data-driven insights to boost the effectiveness of every campaign and promotion.
Sysomos
No matter who your customers may be, they are probably on social media. Social media is where people have conversations, promote stories they love, and rant about everything they hate. Obviously, through such insights, you can gain quite a bit of information about your customers.
Sysomos gathers data from leading blogs and social media sites to help you better understand your customers' patterns of behavior. This way, you can send individualized messaging and gain a better perspective on what makes them tick. Since your marketing team will better understand what motivates your target audience, they can touch on their pain points as well as their everyday experiences.
Acoustic
Acoustic gives marketers some important tools to be successful in a precision marketing campaign. Using an open-source platform, Acoustic can integrate with many leading marketing services, often complementing those tried-and-true tools by connecting with data from various sources.
Andrew Martins contributed to the writing in this article.