IN OUR HEADS
October 10, 2023
Personalization is a hot topic right now, especially for brands that want to scale up. McKinsey & Company research shows that 71% of consumers expect personalized engagements. Businesses able to make that happen may save 50% on lead acquisition and see up to 30% ROI on their spending. However, personalization isn’t easy, especially for companies at the “crawl” phase regarding maturity.
If you’re unfamiliar with that last term, it’s an analogy between corporate identity and human development. Companies that are crawling have moved past infancy but aren’t quite ready to bolt. From a marketing perspective, they’ve laid a lot of the groundwork to move toward personalization but don’t quite have all the sophisticated tactics in place yet to start walking — or running — toward true personalization with their prospect and user bases.
What Does the Crawl Phase Look Like?
It’s important to know that crawling is an essential step. All companies must go through a crawl stage to be ready to move forward. That said, many organizations aren’t sure if they’re crawling. If you’re wondering the same thing, you can quickly evaluate your business’s maturity phase by considering your marketing.
For example, have you done the initial work to develop go-to-market strategies for your key audiences, personas, or cohorts? Have you activated them digitally? Do you need data and technology maturity roadmaps and architecture plans before you can fully support personalization across your digital channels? Are you seeking partners to assist you in creating initial website experiences targeting your core groups so you can eventually leverage those experiences for broader omnichannel campaigns?
These are all indicators that you’re probably in the crawl phase, at least when it comes to your customer personalization maturity curve.
Essentially, most crawling organizations have begun delving into foundational audience segmentation with the intent to provide many personalized user experiences. Their marketers just need a digital maturity boost to their ecosystem to get their personalization efforts from zero to 60!
Moving Past the Crawl Stage With RAPP
Once these foundational elements are in place, we can help businesses like yours mature by leveraging existing technology and measurement models to develop precise, proven personalization tactics.
For instance, we might work with a more mature business to leverage predictive modeling to create personalized landing pages and user journeys at scale. Of course, we’re always conscientious about ensuring any solutions are operational and cost-efficient — those are must-haves for businesses scaling up digital marketing personalization.
Above all else, RAPP operates as an extension of our clients’ teams. Our role is to make sure the client gets the most out of any in-place foundational work or capabilities. Whether a marketing team has already implemented foundational audience-specific journeys or leveraged advanced martech capacities, the objective should be to lean into those current tools, technologies, and processes to take digital marketing personalization up a notch. After all, why reinvent the wheel?
Tips and Suggestions for Getting to Maturity
If you believe your business is ready to deliver personalized experiences and could use some tips to accelerate your efforts, try these suggestions.
- Develop a measurement plan.
You and your team need to understand and make the best use of the data you’re capturing. Now is the moment to construct a measurement plan that outlines what structured and unstructured data you have at your fingertips and how it can be leveraged to drive further personalization.
- Identify “low-hanging fruit” personalization techniques.
Chances are strong that you already have some capabilities built into your martech stack. Which ones could be beneficial for your personalization goals? Are there any gaps you lack, such as software or enhanced functionality? Develop pilots that you can implement using the tech you have, and talk about bringing in other technologies that will enable future personalization efforts.
- Flesh out a digital personalization roadmap.
Until you have your strategy for leveraging your data, tools, and tactics in a written format that anyone can follow, you won’t fully move past your crawl phase. You and your team need a roadmap. If you’re having trouble developing this piece of the puzzle, you may want to contact RAPP. Our teams can work alongside you on market research, persona development, and other essential work. We can also create omnichannel personalized experiences to test.
Consumers want a digital journey that includes ever-higher degrees of personalization between them and the brands they’re considering. Get in touch if you’re having difficulty meeting customer demands and elevating UX personalization and targeting. We love moving companies from the crawl to the sprint stage.
