digiflowz
[ad_1]
The Gist
- Strategy shift. Personalized marketing strategies offer a way out of the “spray and pray” tactics that overwhelm consumers and dilute messaging.
- Communication focus. Personalized communications can significantly improve customer engagement, fostering loyalty amid the noise.
- Tech leverage. Utilizing AI in marketing enables hyper-targeted, ultra-personalized approaches, enhancing customer experience and ROI.
“Spray and pray” marketing has proliferated over the past decade, largely due to the rapid increase in the number of communications channels available. Instead of just out-of-home (OOH) advertising and email, there’s now a plethora of other platforms that marketing teams can use to communicate with people. As a result, 85% of marketing teams are bombarding their customers with between 11 and 25 communications every week, according to Plinc research.
With so many channels available, there’s significant pressure on marketing teams to do everything, everywhere, all at once. This pressure is often applied by business leaders who believe that these channels should be fully utilized. This is especially true in multi-category businesses, where underperforming teams seek greater visibility for their products and content through personalized marketing strategies.
However, the problem is that marketers are already overwhelmed with their regular business operations to make meaningful changes. Substantial budgets are stretched thin across too many channels, often sacrificing quality, targeted, and personalized communication. This approach risks exhausting customers and jeopardizing their loyalty.
Related Article: 3 Ways Ecommerce Brands Can Use AI for Personalization
The Problem With ‘Spray and Pray’ Marketing & Need for Personalized Marketing Strategies
One problem with this approach is that every major brand seems to be taking it. And as a result, the noise of communications becomes overbearing. This relates somewhat to the “Loudness Wars,” which refers to the phenomenon that music has, over time, become louder as musicians attempt to drown their competitors out with sound waves — literally. In business, marketing teams have been doing the same thing with communications. In the end, though, when every company is sending as many messages as the other, the customer only becomes confused and frustrated. It’s a race to the bottom, one that personalized marketing strategies aim to avoid.
Marketers Drive Consumers Away With Messaging Onslaught
There’s another major problem with marketing’s messaging war. Consumers are feeling overwhelmed by the constant barrage of communication from all sides. Similar to the Loudness Wars, where relentless loud music left listeners fatigued, this excessive messaging is wearing down consumers. One recording engineer put it like this: “When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”
The same phenomenon is affecting people who receive hundreds of messages from various brands daily. Customers and potential customers are growing tired of the sheer volume of these communications. Rather than drawing customers in, businesses are driving them away as people seek to escape the onslaught.
Related Article: AI in Ecommerce: True One-on-One Personalization Is Coming
Personalized Marketing Strategies: A New, Targeted Way Forward
As brands vie for attention across all available channels, the quality of their communications has noticeably declined. Their budgets simply can’t cover everything. In fact, 46% of marketing professionals feel their teams are underfunded. With limited budgets, marketing teams are stretching themselves too thin, leading to compromised performance and results.
This underscores the importance of efficiently allocating resources to foster engagement and loyalty through personalized marketing strategies. Marketers should embrace a targeted, personalized approach, even if it entails communicating less frequently or through fewer channels. Customers are more likely to respond positively to pop-ups, emails, loyalty rewards and social media content that are tailored to their specific interests and preferences.
While some marketers may see this as an insurmountable task, achieving hyper-personalization becomes feasible when resources are allocated more judiciously. The first critical step toward more personalized marketing strategies is to integrate real-time customer data from both online and offline activities into a comprehensive 360-degree “single customer view” (SCV). Marketing teams are amassing more customer data than ever, but it’s frequently stored in separate locations. By consolidating this data, marketers can begin to understand individual customer behaviors.
With a complete view of individual customer behavior established, ultra-personalized customer marketing becomes attainable. Advanced marketing technology can gather information about customers as they engage with a brand, both in-store and online. Utilizing generative AI tools, each marketing communication can then be individually targeted and personalized. Rather than alienating customers weary of the marketing communication onslaught, brands that adopt this approach will offer a refreshing change. Their high-quality messages will distinguish them amid a flood of prolific, yet generic, commercial communications.
What should be evident by now is that marketing teams are inundating potential customers by prioritizing volume over competitors, which only serves to alienate them. The solution is to allocate budgets toward high-quality, personalized marketing strategies. This approach will “cut through the noise,” meet customers’ needs and encourage their return.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
[ad_2]
Source link
