The marketplace of the present time is leaps and bounds away from how it has been just a few years ago. With technology, e-commerce, and even the pandemic affecting the way consumers browse and shop, it is important for businesses—regardless of industry and size—to always be five steps ahead when it comes to digital advertising, marketing, and selling.
Think of it this way: as much as digital technology has pushed the boundaries in terms of selling and marketing, we also now live in an era where the marketplace is at its most saturated in terms of products, services, and advertising messages. The question for all business owners, therefore, is how to make themselves stand out in this sea of choices and noise.
This is where personalization in advertising and marketing comes in, a concept that is very easy to understand and always promises good returns. The rules of it are simple: find the right message and show it to the right person using the best material.
In this article, we’ll talk about the basics of advertising personalization and how you can apply it to your business.
First thing’s first: The benefits
The pros that you can get from personalizing your display advertising approaches are straight to the point. As an entrepreneur, you get a good return on investment on your marketing cost because you’re making good sales with what you put out there. From the side of the consumer, on the other hand, getting targeted advertising makes them feel more seen by a brand. Practicality-wise, it also helps them save time and simplifies their shopping and buying process by being served with the exact information that they need to make a shopping decision.
What you need to personalize your advertising
The simple answer is data. If you’re doing digital advertising, this can come from software and a variety of web tools (like Google Analytics and website cookies) which can give you details like audience demographics, their interests, preferred time to shop, etc. For display and retail advertising, you can glean your information from customer surveys, sales reports, and other tools that can help you get a better view of how your customer behaves and make shopping decisions.
The different types of display advertising personalization
1. User Journey Targeting
This kind of personalization considers the stage of the sales funnel where your customer is in. Are they in the awareness, buying, or retention level? For example, if you want to focus on brand awareness of a product, you can launch a social media campaign focusing on educating the audience about what you’re selling or hold a brand launch event in your physical store to create buzz around it. These strategies will be entirely different if you’re creating a strategy for customer retention since your focus will shift from bringing customers across your door to actually keeping them. This type of targeting requires your first person and customer data for execution.
2. Demographics targeting
From its name, this type of personalization focuses on the demographics of your shopper using first-person data that they hold. Unlike user journey targeting which can sometimes involve different variants of your product or service, this advertising strategy usually involves using the same offer or product and tweaking the message depending on the profile of your target audience. For example, if you’re a travel company trying to market a city, you can have advertising messages targeted towards solo travelers, honeymooners, or even retirees. The advantage of this type of personalization is that you can tap anyone regardless of age and interest as long as you use the right message and approach.
3. Product Targeting
Product targeting is a straightforward approach in personalization that involves choosing the offers or items that you want to push using live or spreadsheet-based data. This is where your monthly or seasonal sales come in, with product campaigns directed towards certain slices of your market. Retail-wise, you can boost the impact of your product targeting efforts by using the best type of display materials during your campaign. For example, if you’re running an end-of-the-season sale, you can install column stands or flat top banners in front of your store to catch some eyeballs.
4. Contextual Targeting
This type of targeting is actually one of the oldest—and most effective—in the book. Executing it is pretty simple: you simply have to place the right ads in the best place for them to be watched, heard, or read. While the concept of contextual targeting is being widely used now in digital strategies (for example, dynamic display ads on browsers or banners on websites), it has long been used on physical store strategies, too.
Say you’re launching a new brand or service, for example. If you want to use contextual targeting, then you know that you’ll have to use display racks to put extra attention on them or install promotion booths at the entrance of your store to catch your new and returning customers.
Personalization of digital and retail display advertising
The discussed personalization techniques above, while mostly used for digital strategies, can also be well applied to your marketing approach for your physical store. Take for example the case of Rebecca Minkoff, an online and luxury physical fashion retailer that combined the use of cutting-edge display technology to enhance the buying journey of their shoppers. Using analytics, big data, and personalization of their display advertising, they decided to install what they call “magic mirrors” on their fitting rooms which let their shoppers choose the pieces they want to try on via interactive screens. Not only does this make the shopping process easier for their customers, but it also gives the brand extra access to data of the pieces that best catch the attention of their audience during their window shopping stage.
True enough, display advertising can be a powerful tool when combined with other advertising and marketing strategies. Need help with your display materials? We here at Brandmaximizers can lend you a hand via our quality display solutions. Just click this link and we can talk about how we can help.
