“While most marketing leaders continue to strive for one-to-one personalization, achieving this type of tailored messaging falls short, causing most personalization efforts to fail.” So says Gartner, Inc. in a press release earlier this year, following up its marketing personalization survey. The goal of one-to-one personalization in marketing is to create hyper personalized content that resonates with your prospects. Gartner continues to explain that the cost of getting personalization wrong is high. In their survey, more than half of the respondents said they would unsubscribe from a company’s communications and 38 percent will stop doing business with a company due to poor marketing personalization efforts.
Managing Vice President at Gartner, Martha Mathers, confirms that “creating personalized messages and experiences requires intimate knowledge of customer journeys and relevant content that drives action.”
Creating a customized approach
Your program is unique, so your target audience must be, too. However, much to the chagrin of most marketers, segmentation is one of the most challenging aspects of our jobs.
Target marketing is an important activity, and it’s critical to get it right. Energy spent pursuing the wrong audience is simply wasted and creating more content is not necessarily better.
With an efficient account-based marketing (ABM) approach, you can treat each individual account as its own highly specialized marketing opportunity. ABM makes sense, since each company is unique. Industry experts assert that this approach fosters customer loyalty and generates traffic, while reducing reliance on one or two decision-makers.
SimplyDIRECT can help you source an ABM prospecting list, and then put that list to work with a survey campaign. Surveys are the most effective way we have found to generate leads because they can help you customize your approach for each individual in your target audience. They are a great way to get your foot in the door which you can leverage to get into the account.
Crafting the survey for your target audience
When you design the survey for your target audience, you endeavor to find out exactly what their goals, needs, and interests are with a relevant line of questioning. You will learn how likely they are to want what you’re offering and when. You will know exactly how to approach each individual person on your target marketing list.
Imagine you have developed and administered a survey where the answers determine not only each individual respondent’s challenges, initiatives, and capabilities wish list, but also when they’re planning to make a change in the way they’re currently doing things? Having this information will help you prioritize your follow up and know exactly how to approach each person.
For example, “Mr. Prospect, I understand you’re finding x to be a challenge currently, and you indicated that with y capabilities, you’re pretty sure you could accomplish z initiatives. Do you have a few minutes to learn about how my offering could help you accomplish z?”
X, y, and z are pieces of information gleaned from the survey Mr. Prospect took, so how can he say no? Speaking to you about your offering makes perfect sense.
Aside from using the survey results for one-to-one marketing, you can use the research as a key component of your ongoing content strategy to keep your prospects engaged.
We offer several different types of survey programs to help you reach your target audience to design a one to one marketing campaign. Learn more here, or view our 90-second demo.