Striking the right balance with audience-smart marketing
May 03, 2022
Written by: Mark Pearson, Vice President, Loyalty Marketing; John Heidel, Content Strategist
(View Author Bio)
Segmentation, targeting and personalization are three powerful tools for crafting your customer's journey. Consider these three important factors for success in your next targeted marketing campaign.
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An audience-smart marketing program or campaign is one that utilizes segmentation, targeting and personalization — three powerful tools with some key differences. Segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups (segments) based on certain characteristics.1 Targeting involves choosing which segment(s) you want to offer your products to.2 Personalization is the practice of using data to deliver content targeted to an individual prospect.3
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These tools can help you reach the right customers but to maximize engagement, your campaign’s content and rewards must be relevant. The goal is to create an idiosyncratic fit, defined as a real or perceived unique advantage, with your audience. This is crucial because a customer’s engagement is based on their assessment of the potential reward relative to the effort required to complete the behavior being asked of them. Relevance can also be increased by focusing on the next best action for each individual customer to the extent possible.
When relevance combines effectively with segmentation, targeting and personalization, an audience-smart campaign can take flight. But before jumping on board, you should carefully consider these important factors.
Weigh the costs and benefits.
Adding a layer of segmentation can significantly increase costs — sometimes exponentially — due to content creation, technology setup, tracking and reporting. It also increases complexity, which may extend timelines and require additional resources. Therefore, it’s important to make sure the benefits of enhanced segmentation and targeting outweigh the elevated costs and complexity.
Understand data requirements.
This is a critical step in audience-smart marketing. Ask yourself these questions:
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Are the required data elements available for a meaningful percentage of customers?
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Are there any issues with the quality or accuracy of the data element or targeting characteristic?
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How volatile is the data characteristic (i.e., how frequently might it change on a customer-specific basis)?