Personalization is becoming a bit of an overused term in digital marketing today. Every marketer talks about wanting to achieve personalization, but most are still struggling to do it effectively. Econsultancy recently reported that only 5% of marketers are doing personalization at a sophisticated level. It’s certainly not because there is a lack of data available to target people. Marketers now have access to more information than ever about us as consumers – age, gender, purchase history, online behaviors, interests, location, marital status, etc., so “audiences” in many ways have become harder to differentiate. The challenge for marketers is now less about whom to target, but more about how to target them with the right message and context to achieve the best results.
Most marketers think about format or technique when they consider the how of targeting – whether it’s using video, user-generated content, programmatic buying, etc. And although this is very important, these examples are more about the approach than the actual message itself. The how we are referring to is about a message connecting with a person’s specific emotional drivers – their real-time sentiment or their personality type, and nowhere is this more accessible and effective than through social media. Within social media, marketers are able to draw on real-time sentiment to capitalize on opportunities to help, empathize, or educate when the moment presents itself, even when they are not talking directly to the brand. Tapping into posts shared by those very people seeking conversation presents opportunities to humanize the brand and make it more authentic. It reveals a genuine voice of the brand and leads to premium reach through the sharing of rich content.
But knowing sentiment alone is not always enough. Pairing sentiment with personality traits can now enable a form of personalization that hits the mark while still avoiding the “creep factor.” IBM has conducted several recent studies that have substantiated the impact of messaging personality type within campaigns. For example, it was determined that people who scored high on openness and low on neuroticism were more likely to respond favorably to opportunities to click on an ad or follow a brand on social media. To demonstrate this, they ran a targeted campaign to these users that resulted in increases in click rate from 6.8% to 11.3% and in a follow rate from 4.7% to 8.8%, almost doubling the perfomance of the campaign in both cases. In another study done by IBM, it showed that people who scored high on orderliness, self-discipline, and cautionness but low on immoderation were 40% more likely to respond to coupons than the random population.
Marketers that leverage new social media tools that provide this real-time insight on personality type and marry it with the right message type, can expect to see better results with both paid and organic campaigns through social media. They can personalize without being creepy and be effective by being relevant to a particular type of person. Knowing those people who score high on a personality trait like altruism can help inform who to target with a campaign about giving back or about social good. Similarly, identifying those people who might score high on a personality trait like practicality can help inform who would be more inclinced to take action on messages related to saving money or other incentive-based campaigns.
When we think about the how and what this means, it challenges the conventional thinking on the format of the creative. Do all people really want promotional messages from the brand or do some want to have actual conversations with the brand? Do they want to hear about benefits of a product or do they want to learn something from a brand that will help them at that moment? As consumers, we all think and operate differently and our real-time scenarios and personality types become important parts of the equation for brands to really get personalization right.
David Rush (@davidmrush) is the founder and CEO of Earshot, a precision-based social media marketing platform that is changing how brands can discover and acquire new customers through social media. Learn more about Earshot at earshotinc.com and follow us on Twitter @earshotinc.