You finally have more than $500,000 as your marketing budget, and now you have to decide if you invest this money in SEO, Social Media, SEM, or software that will make you more efficient in keeping up with everyone that has seen your content.
With all the monthly fees from Martech companies, and them charging by lead, your $500,000 budget will not be enough for the entire year.
What a tough decision marketing managers and CMOs have to make. Especially knowing that companies lose 38% of their client due to poor personalization strategies.
You may be looking around for personalization software options that fits into everything you want to do and do not go over your new budget. If you are, here is a list Hubspot created for the best 13 software in 2022.
But, if you think that this year will not be the best year to get the help of one of the tools shared due to the high goals you need to drive, we want to help you with steps you can take today that will prepare you for success, show the work you are doing to get a bigger budget next year and prepare your entire marketing team to hit the ground running once you are able to get a hold of any of the tools above.
We want to share these 6 marketing personalization best practices to drive more conversions and lineup MQLs that will soon convert to SQLs.
- Create your buyer personas
- Create winning content that will drive traffic from each profile you want to attract
- Push content with Social Media
- Push content with PPC
- Create a remarketing strategy
- Nurture with email marketing
Before you start, you have to know that you can’t treat all audiences the same. When applying a well-rounded personalization strategy, one size does not fit all.
Personalization organizes your digital marketing by presenting an idea, product, or service to a specific audience across different channels, keeping one message that provides an understanding of what the product or service is and how it will change the clients’ lives or the company’s success.
The greatest benefit of having a personalization strategy is that your entire marketing department will get organized, and it will allow them to seek all information you and your team need to learn the most about the client.
1. Create Buyer Personas
Don’t stop reading just yet; I promise you already have all the initial information for this first step.
It is essential to start here because, from this step forward, it will be required to separate the content that will be shared with each profile.
If you’re an ecommerce or a SaaS business, it’s already a fact that your current clients don’t purchase every item in your store or sign up for all of your monthly services. People select your company because you have that one item or package they need.
Someone who purchases saltwater fishing supplies might not buy freshwater fishing supplies with the same cadence even though you offer both types of products. Showing someone a product over and over again that they don’t use or buy regularly does not mean they will turn into a client. Most likely, they will block your ads, email, and content since they won’t find the information you are sharing as useful.
This is where segmenting your current clients becomes useful. You already know that the people you have as clients like your product, qualify your product as top-of-the-line, and are recurrent users.
It only makes sense to find more clients like them.
To classify your client base, we recommend the following:
- Segment them into three or four different buckets
- Separate them by
- Age
- Product category they repeatedly buy or monthly package they pay.
- Why are they buying?
- Where are they located?
- How and why they started to buy your product or service?
- What influencers do they follow?
- Where do they go when looking for information related to your product?
- What industry do they work in?
- How big is their company?
- What are their most significant challenges and frustrations?
- What are their goals and objectives?
- What challenges do they face in achieving their goals?
- How do they prefer to communicate?
- How do they make decisions?
By creating three to four profiles, it will become easier and faster to produce the content and information you will need to attract a similar audience to your website. More than 3 or 4 buckets will create extra work for your team, so keeping these groups somewhat general to users’ shared experience will help to improve your targeting without unnecessary work.
2. Creating Useful and Appealing Content
Content will be the heart of your strategy and will have two purposes.
One, it will allow you to get closer to the audience you want to attract by feeding them content that will position you as a subject matter expert.
Two, it will allow the traffic to be tagged with remarketing cookies to get them from one stage of the buyer’s funnel to the next.
It is crucial that specific content is created for every profile since we will use the content as a hook and an indicator of when to move traffic in your buyer’s journey.
Don’t think that right from the start you will create 1,000 pieces of content because 10 to 20 pieces of content (videos, blogs, and email sequences) per profile will be enough to begin. You can refine and add more as you analyze the data they bring in.
We recommend creating three different types of content:
First, the AWARENESS content. Start with the content that will give a better perspective of the problem your audience is facing. Remember that most people don’t know they have a problem, or they know that they have a problem but do not know how to solve it or don’t even know a problem exists.
Let’s pretend that you are an e-commerce website that sells gauges. These products are very specific to many different industries. Look for what are the main questions your clients have before purchasing, or use our trick of asking Google.
Type in measurement gauges on the Google search bar and scroll down to the “people also ask” section. Open the first section, and you will start seeing more and more questions come up in that section. As you open more dropdowns, you will have a lot more questions come up that people are asking Google about related products like yours.
Get three to five questions and answer them in detail. You can create a blog, and from that blog, you can create videos. It’s an easy way how to create relevant content quickly and easily.
Second, the CONSIDERATION content. Create content showing your audience how to solve the problem they are having. The content can be in the form of videos, how-to-type blogs, webinars, or whitepapers. Talk about a service or product that will put an end to their problem. Show them how you would do it so that they can be sure that once they buy a product or service similar to yours, they will put an end to the problem.
This is not the stage where you will make an offer, you want to provide a blueprint to solve the problem. Use videos, blogs, and white papers to share the solution to the problem.
Third, the CONVERSION content. Create content and landing pages where you present an offer to the target audience. Make sure you have clear CTAs with the product or service you are offering, testimonials that support the quality of the product or service you provide, and quick access to your sales team through contact forms or checkout pages.
Once the content is ready, strategically showing them will play an essential role in the strategy.
3. Push content with Social Media
Now that you have your content ready to go, it is time to start showing it to the world. By “the world,” we don’t mean to everyone, but to the people that will be targeted by the profiles you build and the options you select as you input the demographic and psychographic information at the ad set level.
For this third step, we will need the help of step number five, so make sure you go back and forth since remarketing will play the role of a bonding agent between the different content created.
Evergreen campaigns will be the star strategy for your first type of content (go back to the second step to know more). The goal is to reach as many profiles seeing your ad every two weeks or every month as possible.
We generally recommend keeping a frequency cap under 2, but for this first stage, look at a frequency cap under 6. Our goal in this stage is to push people to your funnel.
It is a MUST to exclude all members of the custom audiences that belong to the consideration stage.
The best content to use in this stage will be videos or blogs, as they give better remarketing options to drive traffic to the second type of content.
The audience for the consideration and conversion content will be set up by remarketing, and for social media, a custom audience will be created for everyone who watches 50% of a video or clicks on a link that takes them to one of the blogs within the awareness content.
Set up the Ad Set for the consideration content only with the custom audience that contains the list of all members that watched any of the videos from the awareness content more than 50% or clicked a link to any of the awareness blogs. It will be a must to exclude all of the members that belong to the conversions custom audiences.
Set up the Ad Set for the conversion the same way you set up the consideration stage. Only make sure you switch the consideration custom audiences with the conversion custom audiences.
Make sure that you have a custom audience of all the profiles that reach your conversion thank you page. You will add this custom audience to the exclusion section in your Ad Set to stop showing ads to profiles that completed the buyer’s journey.
4. Push content with SEM
It’s Google’s turn now! The setup in this network will be a little different since there are a few more networks to play with.
Just like step three, we want to direct the awareness content to reach as many of your audience that is similar to each of the profiles created in step one.
Use Display and/or YouTube campaigns to place your ads in front of the audience you want to reach. When using display campaigns, keeping track of the traffic that lands on the blogs in the awareness content list is crucial.
YouTube campaigns will allow you to drive traffic to a blog just like Display campaigns, but as well as Facebook, you can also track the number of people that have watched a percentage of a video. Make sure that the videos you create for social media are created with the right dimension for YouTube.
On the audience section of the video ads or display ads, make sure you select any relevantAffinity, in-market, and custom audiences based on the demographic and psychographic data from step one for this first set of campaigns.
As you input your audience information, make sure to exclude custom audiences set for the conversion stage. We want to avoid people that clicked on a link and landed on a blog or watched more than 50% of a video in the awareness content list seeing these initial ads after landing on a blog or watching a video.
With the help of remarketing, more on step five, you will link each stage of the buyer’s journey.
For consideration content, use remarketing audience based on the traffic that landed on blogs coming from the display or video campaigns and all users that watched more than 50% of a video in the awareness content list.
Make sure to exclude the audience in the conversion stage to avoid seeing the consideration ads after landing on a blog or watching a video.
As you are building traffic for the awareness and consideration campaigns, you will need to set up your conversion ads. These ads will have the custom audiences built from traffic that landed on blogs or people that watched more than 50% of a video in your consideration content list.
As this is the final stage of the buyer’s funnel, you will need to exclude everyone that landed on the final thank you page, meaning that the traffic completed the entire buyer’s journey.
5. Create a Remarketing Strategy
Now, this is where the magic will happen and where you will create a multi-channel ad strategy to expand a client’s experience on different digital marketing channels.
Before we start, make sure that all tracking, pixel, event, and any other codes that will track the traffic behavior from your ads to your website and landing pages are installed and ready to track.
Remarketing lists will need to be created following the same structure used in the content and campaigns for Social Media and Google. Awareness, consideration, and conversion remarketing lists will need to be created to link the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Consideration Remarketing Lists
These remarketing lists will need to track all traffic landing on a blog in the awareness content list, spending more than a minute on the page. Make sure you add all of the URLs from the awareness blogs doing the same on the Google and Social media tracking codes to make sure that users coming from social media and from Google are added to all remarketing lists.
For all videos belonging to the awareness content list, create a custom audience or a custom event that tracks everyone that watches 50% of any of the videos.
Conversion Remarketing Lists
These remarketing lists will track traffic landing on blogs that belongs to the consideration content list and spends more than a minute on the pages. Make sure you add all of the URLs that belong to the consideration blogs of this stage on the same custom audience or event.
A custom audience or event will need to be created to track all traffic that watched more than 50% of the videos under the consideration content list.
Completing the Buyer’s Journey
Now that the users have landed on a conversion landing page and submitted their information through a contact form or bought an item through the online store, a custom audience or event will need to be created to track all users that have landed on the final thank you page.
This list will gather all traffic that completed the entire journey. Make sure to remove this list of all conversion ads if the new client does not need to purchase the item or package every month.
6. Nurture with Email Marketing
With 37% of brands increasing their email marketing budget in 2023, it is crucial that you develop a well-rounded strategy around the different buyer’s journey stages.
The success of each email sent is to entice and persuade each contact on the list to open and click on a link in an email to continue moving traffic from one stage of their journey to another.
Develop a three-day email sequence for each stage to increase the possibility of email link clicks to capture or embed video views to continue to move your prospects.
To begin expanding your email list, start by categorizing your email signup with the specific industry the prospect is in. If the email is not a client or the domain does not belong to a company you service or sell, add them as part of the awareness stage email sequence. The objective is to drive them to a blog or video from the same awareness stage to trigger the remarketing list and tag the email contact within your email automation tool.
The email automation tags you create within your email tool will work the same as the remarketing list created in the previous step.
Consideration Email Tags
Every time an email contact opens and clicks on a link from an awareness stage email, a consideration tag will need to be added. Additionally, if any traffic downloads a PDF or whitepaper from any of the awareness content blogs, send it through an email, adding this contact to the consideration tag. Make sure you get full permission from the contact to add their email to receive marketing notifications.
The consideration tag will trigger consideration emails to be sent out the next day using the email sequence section within your email automation tool. As this tag is added, instruct the tool to remove all awareness tags to avoid sending awareness emails to people that no longer belong to this list.
Conversion Email Tags
Every time an email contact opens and clicks on a link from a conversion stage email, a completed tag should be added to the contact, and the conversion tag should be removed.
This stage is where manual work will need to take place. If you do not have a CRM, you will need to cross-reference the information filled in on the contact form or from the checkout page (name, email, phone number) with the information recorded from the email contacts tagged with the completed label to know which email contact filled in the contact form or purchased an item on the online store and which email contact did not.
If the email contact filled in the contact form or purchased an item, this will be the end of the road for the email nurture campaign. If the email contact did not fill in the contact form or purchased an item, enroll them to a second conversion email nurture sequence and add them manually to one of the conversion remarketing lists to enroll them on Social Media and SEM ads.
In Conclusion
By following these 6 marketing personalization best practices, you will have a money-making, evergreen SQL-generating machine while a lead management tool is acquired for your marketing team.
We would love to talk more about any SEM, Social Media, SEO, or Email automation nurturing sequence if you need extra help. Don’t be shy to contact us.
