Personalized marketing is the next big thing in the arena of social media. By reaching your target audience with tailored personal and individualized messages, you are increasing the engagement rate with your audience on the social media platform.

If you are in the e-commerce business, you might think creating personalized content for every customer is just a big-time hassle. But, and that’s a big “but”, it is worth it.

Your customers will appreciate the efforts you undertake to appeal to them. By sending custom-made messages, you are establishing a personal and human connection with your clients. Every customer is different, possesses distinct characteristics and subjective choices. As a marketer, it is extremely important to realize that and work on it.

How do you execute it though? What goes into personalized marketing on social media? What aspects do you look after whilst sending tailored messages?

Before we move on, if you require professional assistance, our team of Social Media Marketing experts will help you out!

Moving on…

Who’s your target audience?

Knowing the likes, dislikes and personal preferences of the audience you are going to cater to is essential to the success of personalized marketing.  You will be able to develop personalized content for your customers by possessing the knowledge of their requirements and needs.

Analyze your customers in the following areas:

• Their likes, dislikes, and interests on social media.
• Their activities on social media.
• Utilizing surveys and questionnaires.
• Their affiliations with other pages.
• The customer’s journey curve with your brand.

Once you possess this spectrum of information and data pertaining to your customers, you will be able to cultivate individualized and enticing content. Try your best to gather information in the shortest format possible. For example, a yes-or-no or one-word answer format can aid in extracting a substantial amount of data from your target audience.

It’s time to implement the strategies

Now that you have gathered the required data on your target customers, you have to put your personalizing social media marketing tactics and strategies into effect. 

Craft tailor-made content

By creating customized content, your brand appeals to the customers. In order to craft that, you have to choose the right format and topic. 

You have to look at your target customers’ engagement behaviours with the online formats on various social media platforms. What are they interacting with most? Images, videos, links, or articles? By choosing the format accordingly, you ensure that you achieve maximum engagement with your customers. 

That being said, it’s important to note that you have to use as many formats as possible, whilst concentrating on the ones which rake in a high level of engagement. 

Choosing the right topic may be difficult as you have to thoroughly know your audience’s interests, amalgamate it with your strategy and implement it. But by coming up with the correct topics to advertise, you are increasing your engagement rate.

The next step is to use different methods to distribute your personalized content. You can either use 

1. Paid reach: Using various social media platforms’ targeting choices that are based on interests to showcase your personalized content to various customer groups at the same time.
2. Organic reach: You can use this to focus on your largest interest-specific group and distribute tailored content to this group frequently. Send tailored content to the smaller interest-specific groups alternatively. By doing this, you ensure it is appealing to both the segments.

Utilize marketing automation tools

These tools can boost your lead campaigns catering to interest-specific groups. Let’s take the example of a customer buying an accessory from a specific category. You could include him in an email track that’s targeted at that message and address the fact that they have already experienced a part of your content.

To make automation easier and more effective, you have to segment your email database by categorizing marketing persona. After doing this, you can include personalized content in the form of messages in each one. These messages have to hit the core points.

Impart a personal touch to your emails

By making your emails seem more personal rather than mechanical, you create an emotional connection with the customer. This makes the customers aware of the fact that you care about them.

Include the name of a member of your marketing team. You want your emails to look as authentic as possible. It adds credibility to your brand and you, personally.

Additionally, use the recipient’s real name while sending emails with personalized content in them. You will have the required information from any of the source mediums, like subscription forms.

Image Source: yahoo.in

This mail showcases the value and concern for the customer, harboured by Etihad. They directly address the customer by using the first name of the recipient, imparting a personal touch. It also includes a short video from the CEO of Etihad, where he explains the measures taken by them to ensure the customer’s well-being.

This is a great example of a personalized email. You can know more about email automation and its benefits by clicking here.

Personally respond to your customers on social media

Many companies have employees assigned to respond to incoming queries and comments on their social media accounts. Many automate the entire process of response. 

As a marketer who is looking to increase the engagement rate, you have to ensure that you monitor your social media activities on a daily basis so that you can actively respond to your customers. Also, you should be equipped to provide personalized content according to every customer’s needs and requirements.

Image Source: McDonald’s (Instagram)

McDonald’s takes the efforts to reply to every user’s comments on its official Instagram page. By doing this, they are assuring them of the active response and efficient customer service.

Target your audience with retargeting ads

You have to constantly expose your target spectrum of customers to the retargeting ads. By installing Facebook Pixels on your site and using data from your email marketing software, you can keep a track of the various media channels your customers use. 

Image Source: curatti.com

This particular ad of Expedia appeared on the Facebook feed of the customer as they might have explored a similar post in the past. In order to expose the customer to it again, Expedia launched this ad with enticing offers and last-minute deals.

Creating ads that match your customers’ shopping preferences will appeal to them as these cater to their needs, increasing your conversion rates. 

You can also use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences algorithm too. It identifies users who are similar to the ones uploaded in your email list. It segregates, identifies, and exposes them to ads based on their previous purchases.

To know more about improving your retargeting Facebook ad campaigns, click here.

Personalized content and customer journey at par

Both of these aspects have to go hand-in-hand. A customer’s journey curve has many stages and each stage depends on the customers’ familiarity with your brand and its products.

If customers do not know your brand really well, they are just getting aware of it and looking to buy a product that best serves their needs. Here, you have to come up with personalized content to attract their attention and engage with them on social media.

Once they are well-acquainted with your brand, they will consider buying your products or avail your services. It’s a simple strategy. You have to sell your products and explain why they are the best.

This is a great opportunity to do a comparison between the new buyer personas and the old defined ones. You can make changes in your personalized content accordingly.

After this is done, most of the customers are ready to convert i.e. ready to buy your products. You can put hyper-personalization into play here by introducing persona discount coupons, offers, and individualized thank-you messages.

How does personalized social media marketing help your business to grow?

You might think that this strategy is adopted only to cater to a customer’s needs and requirements. But that’s not it. There are many more benefits which you cannot sideline.

Make the bond between customer loyalty and brand affinity stronger

When your brand delivers personalized messages to each and every one of your customers, they feel cared for. Consequently, they usually become loyal to your brand.

The brand awareness is heightened

Once customers start to trust your brand, its products, and services, they will promote it within their personal and social networks. Statistics state that 92% of users believe personal recommendations from family and friends, rather than relying on any other source. It indeed proves to be extremely effective.

Social media engagement rate goes up

When the content becomes individualized, the response and engagement rates increase. For your brand’s marketing content to consistently surface on the feed of the social media platforms, a substantial amount of interaction with the customers is significant. That’s how the algorithm of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook works. Thus, personalized content goes a long way to make sure it does.

A higher number of leads and conversions

The more the customers interact with personalized content, the more it appeals to them, and thus, the higher the chances of them converting. This will increase your social media ROI drastically and broaden the reach of your brand.

Isn’t personalization amazing?

82% of customers have a higher purchase intent when they receive personalized messages from brands and companies. There’s a reason behind it. Brands are successful in developing a personal bond with their customers when they expose them to individualized content. 

Personalization in social media marketing is an aspect which has not been fully explored yet. It’s potential is yet to be harnessed. It massively increases the engagement rate, boosts brand awareness, and widens your brand’s reach. This is clearly a good time to get a head-start on it. 

Go on. Explore it.

Does this sound complicated? You need not worry. We have Social Media Marketing Experts in our team who will do the needful for you.