React With Relevance
The truth is inescapable: In the next two or three years, the majority of brand- consumer interactions will take place on a smartphone or tablet (for insight into smartphone use trends, check out Monetate’s infographic at the end of this post). It’s time for marketers to answer the call for more relevant messaging and experiences that truly connect with consumers.
Thanks to innovations in areas such as data mining, behavioral profiling, and contextual targeting, marketers are now able to sift through millions of people and come much closer to matching relevant messages to their target consumer segments across the web.
A significant amount of budget is spent in developing different creative and messaging to appeal to different consumer segments, and frequently more is spent on delivering those messages. But often the destinations that these consumers are being enticed to explore don’t reward the visitor with an equally personalized experience. As a result, websites, landing pages, apps, and other digital experiences do not convert as well as they could.
In an ideal world, every experience could be one-to-one and customized for each consumer. But the costs, time, and development effort are often prohibitive for most organizations, and frequently impractical for campaigns based on experiences with a limited lifespan. However, with the increasing amount of data that can be collected from each touchpoint in the consumer journey, and improved analytics to make sense of it all, marketers can develop more granular consumer segments.
What is even better is that a great deal of this process can be automated by defining triggers tied to behaviors that correspond to these more specific consumer segments. This also enables experiences to become more dynamic, as each consumer touchpoint and destination has the potential to adapt in ways that are highly relevant and meaningful to more consumers, and marketers can go beyond the one-size-fits-all experience.
Creative, messaging, recommendations, and different features and functionality can all be prioritized and presented according to pre-defined rules. This content can be delivered dynamically to the appropriate customer segments, leading to drastically improved dwell times, page views, and conversions that matter.
In case this approach sounds more invasive than innovative, consider that marketers don’t need to know everything about a consumer in order to create this enhanced experience. Relevance can be achieved by adapting the experience based on things as simple as the incoming search term a consumer used prior to arriving at the destination, or by looking at the referring URL, or even the weather around the geographic area where the consumer is located.
Naturally, the more data that can be leveraged, the more granular and personalized the experience can become. The sky is the limit in terms of the variations of creative and messaging that can be tested for these experiences. What is more, it can all be tracked, measured, and optimized in real time.
Marketers who effectively leverage mobile in their overall marketing mix, along with gaining a deep understanding of their customers’ needs, will be better able to develop more relevant marketing messages that resonate with each segment, increase mindshare, and reduce acquisition costs.
Stephen Burke is VP of Mobile for Resource, the largest independent digital marketing agency in the country. With offices in Columbus, San Francisco, Chicago, and Cincinnati, the firm leads Fortune 500 companies and helps them capitalize on today’s digital economy, creating consumer experiences that drive sales for reputable brands.
3d Tablet Computers and Mobile Phone image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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