Remember the last time you mistook a person for someone else? Or simply couldn’t seem to remember their name? Everyone has these moments that then lead to an awkward reintroduction or impersonal conversation, all because you simply didn’t know or had forgotten someone’s background. This kind of awkward interaction happens all the time to marketers when you forget that the consumer is, in fact, a human—a human that doesn’t want to have an awkward handshake or a disconnected conversation with a brand.
Today’s marketer is constantly striving to build meaningful relationships with vast audiences of consumers who behave differently, use different devices, and increasingly expect personalized communications. But to accomplish this kind of personalization at scale, marketers need to have a strong grasp of consumer identity. And identity goes beyond just knowing a consumer’s age or hometown. It needs to take into account far broader contextual data to provide an accurate persona that can make interactions truly personalized.
Getting personalization right is a journey all brands must go on, because only after personalization is achieved will true identity be accomplished.
Four components of personalization
So how do you achieve “true personalization” to ultimately understand a consumer’s identity? As a former brand-side CMO—and now as a CEO on the technology side—I’ve realized true personalization comes down to four key elements:
Resolution: This refers to identity resolution, i.e. how granularly you’re able to identify a consumer within a particular market segment.
Reach: This covers the additional insight you’re able to achieve beyond the keyhole, with the perfect result being your ability to identify customer behavior and usage across all platforms. While reach is necessary to engage an extended audience, it’s also important to understand that being able to scale will lead the way to uncovering net new customers.
Content: What message are you sharing with each prospect? For example, what prices or pricing options are being displayed based on the prospect’s profile?
Creative: Consider how the creative changes based on the consumer’s profile. Today’s technology can perform these creative alterations automatically, using A/B testing to determine what the finished ad should look like (e.g. colors, type of product, size of visual, font etc.)
While these four components may seem straightforward, creating a cohesive strategy that incorporates each to its full potential can be difficult. To consolidate and refine the wealth of information you’ll gain from having access to resolution and reach, you’ll need a tool that can uncover a consumer’s behavior and determine what content and creative they prefer, where and when.
A singular customer view
This is why more brands are investing in customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs enable brands to break down internal silos and present a singular view of their customers allowing them to stitch together the top four elements of personalization.
For example, in APAC, the Telenor Group was looking to identify existing high average revenue per user (ARPU) customers that had owned a phone for 12 months. Utilizing the Tapad CDP, Telenor was able to segment these existing customers by phone model, gaining a more in-depth resolution. Telenor then used the Tapad Graph for amplified reach to get outside of the keyhole and look at competitors’ customers (potential client acquisition). This is only the first half of a successful identity-driven strategy, however.
The combination of the last two elements—content and creative—ultimately led to Telenor’s campaign success in APAC. After identifying the resolution and reach, Telenor ran multiple ads for iPhone versus Samsung customers and used micro-segments with personalized content and creative for different audience types, based on phone model and pricing. For a Facebook-only campaign with just eight total variants, Telenor achieved ROI seven times’ higher than previous non-personalized campaigning efforts.
This year will be a telling one as brand marketers are put to the test to unravel and rebuild their current strategies to make way for a more “consumer-approved” approach. Utilizing the above elements for true personalization is essential to capturing a consumer’s identity in a way that shows you are ready to have a conversation. Don’t get trapped in the awkward handshake. Create new opportunities for your brand by having the right tools in place that will guarantee an authentic and welcomed conversation with your consumers.
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Sigvart Voss Eriksen has been CEO of Tapad since June 2017. He has nearly 20 years’ experience in digital advertising, including more than 10 years of senior leadership roles within Tapad’s parent company, Telenor Group, where he was most recently head of advertising technology.
