The age of mass marketing is over. Today's digital audience expects customized messages tailored to their demographics and needs. Fortunately, through a variety of tools, you can deliver these personalized messages and effectively reach and convince your audience to become customers.
Of course, customizing your marketing can only be successful if you know your audience's behaviors and expectations. To help in that regard, here are 4 ways analytics can help you personalize your marketing strategy.
1. Learn About Your Audience
Above all, and most obviously, analytics can help you develop a more relevant marketing strategy simply because they enable you to learn about your audience demographics. Integrated tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights give marketers information that ranges from users' geographic location and age to the devices and browsers they use to visit your building materials website or follow you on social media.
Savvy marketers can turn that information into marketing success. If you know that the majority of your online visitors comes from mobile devices, for example, you can design content with less text that is easier to read on a smaller screen. Targeting efforts based on specific geographic areas can also be a valuable tool to maximize your success.
2. Determine and Predict Behaviors
Beyond mere demographic information, digital analytics also enable you to determine the behaviors of users while interacting with your online presence. Google Analytics, for example, can give you the pages most likely to lead to sustained visits as well as the pages from which your audience exits most frequently and the links on which most users click.
Other tools take the concept one step further. Heat map tools, for example, visualize how your audience browses and clicks through your website. You can use that user behavior data to organize your building materials website in a way that will appeal to your individual users as well as your audience as a whole.
3. Take Advantage of Connected Devices
Increasingly, users access the internet on more than just their desktop computers, smartphones, or tablets. The internet of things is coming, and with it come numerous connected devices that range from watches to cars.
For your personalized marketing efforts, these devices are an analytics dream. You can use them to analyze audience behaviors and show content based on the specific device preferences and behaviors your audience exhibits. The internet of things has the potential to unlock a new era of personalized marketing, so the time to start paying attention is now.
4. Engage in A/B Testing
Finally, don't forget about the importance of A/B testing as a crucial marketing personalization tool. You may not think of it as one; after all, the goal is to find a single text, headline, layout, image, or another piece of content that works for the majority of your audience. But in reality, it can play a large part in getting you toward a more personalized strategy.
The goal of your marketing efforts is to ultimately drive visitors to your website, who will convert to leads and eventually customers. A/B testing can get you there, especially in connection with customized content.
For example, a test may show that 60% of your audience prefers one headline, while 40% prefer the other. Traditionally, marketers go with the test that most members of your audience will like. But that ignores the 40% who actually like the alternative!
So instead, determine common characteristics of your two segments. Then, use custom content tools to show one segment one version, while the other segment will see the alternative. Just like that, you have personalized your marketing through A/B testing.
Analytics are and should be an integral part of your digital marketing effort. They not only allow you to determine the success of your initiatives but also help personalize your strategy and messaging to match your target audience and buyer personas.
