Customization: the future of marketing

Collect, filter and use. This could summarize what any company needs to develop a personalized marketing strategy.

In the world in which we live, capturing the attention of stimuli is a growing challenge. It is no longer enough to create impressive and novel messages: now it is necessary to communicate with each of our potential clients in a unique way, appealing to their tastes, interests and needs individually. Given this scenario, customization in our offer of products and services is key to success.

Customization is the set of strategies and actions that allow us to offer a range of differentiated products and services for each client. Therefore, focus on the who and not what, giving the prominence of the campaigns to consumers instead of products. In addition, this imperative to adjust the content to each consumer reaches its maximum quota when companies face the Millennials. This generation, whose purchasing power and influence grows every day (accounting for about 24% of the world's population), demonstrates in their responses a greater need to establish a one-to-one relationship with brands, so that they can be sure that they listen and meet their demands.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of a strategy based on personalization is easy, the difficulty comes later, once your need has been established and you begin to plan the actions to be carried out. However, there are four essential steps to develop and implement the marketing plan: identify, differentiate, interact and customize.

Identify: it consists of gathering relevant data about the consumers of a certain brand, about their preferences, their habits and expectations so that they can know how to satisfy their needs. Although not only that, knowing the basic data of each consumer allows you to start carrying out simple but effective personalization campaigns, such as customizing the mails so that the user's name appears or, like Amazon, sending recommendations of similar products or Create web pages adjusted to the latest interactions.

Differentiate: once in possession of the information, it is necessary to shed it, segmenting its consumers according to their priorities in a more detailed way. The more segmented the customer database, the greater its effectiveness. The segmentation allows to offer different contents that can be attractive to the one that receives them. An example of this is LinkedIn, which places different products and services at the service of its users according to their place of residence, the industry in which they work or their position in their company.

Interact: you have to identify the channels through which consumers want to be contacted, adjusting message and medium to their personal preferences. Thus, we can launch the same message through different means depending on who we are going to, exponentially increasing its effectiveness. But for this stage to be really effective, it is necessary that there is collaboration among all the channels, so that the message is uniform and coordinated among them.

Customize: Here come into play the skills to make attractive products and services, personalizing them to the needs of each consumer. In addition, it is also important to adapt the qualities of a brand to those issues or approaches that interest a sector of the population.