For years, brands have been trying to market to consumers they know personally instead of strangers but couldn’t succeed in doing so with their digital marketing, but now it appears they have the options to do that and a lot more. They seem to have mastered the processes involved in highly targeted, effective, personalized marketing after they were able to gain insights from an increasingly more precise customer database.
This helps them design and deliver the right messages at the right time to customers across the maximum number of media and channels. Marketers now apply the same amount of effort and automation to create inbound experiences that they have been applying for years to create outbound experiences. Today they are not just focused on creating decent programmatic or email or search but are actually engaging the consumers within a closer range.
Developing lasting and meaningful relationships with consumers by creating steady, special and valuable experiences that make them happy is the objective of people-based marketing. While in outbound marketing, the focus is on targeting, in inbound marketing, it is on real-time decision-making. When a customer visits a website, the offer he sees should be the same that was emailed to him or featured on his Facebook update, or in the display ad that drove him to the particular site. Personalization is what crosses both so they work in concert to orchestrate journeys that will optimize the value of the customer’s relationship with the marketer.
Integration of campaign tactics and the data that enables it makes it possible for marketers to provide this seamless experience and although it is a simple concept, it can be challenging to execute. How do marketers make it work? A 360-degree perspective of the customer can offer three touch points for success in implementing a people-based marketing strategy. Advertising needs to be more addressable, e.g. campaigns should leverage media platforms to target customers personally, efficiently and at scale. Inbound channel interactions need to be managed efficiently, using advanced technology to provide more personal moments that are meaningful to the customer. Achieving better customer relationships by linking inbound and outbound customer experiences, using CRM and loyalty programs to manage lifetime customer value and optimizing marketing investment.