Can I shake up your mindset on personalisation?

#DataHQIDEAS

I’d argue that personalisation has become one of those terms that can make us all glaze over.

We’ve read so many articles on it. We all get that our customers want to have a human connection at every touchpoint, and that we need to be better story tellers.

So let me ask you two questions?

1. Why do some salespeople, business owners and marketers feel uncomfortable with personal engagement on platforms like LinkedIn? Are we expecting our marketers to provide this human experience whilst the rest of the business carries on operating the way it always has?
2. Why is it that whilst 70% of organisations consider themselves experts in personalisation, at the last count 32% didn’t have the senior team buy-in, and 36% didn’t have the technology platforms to upscale?

Here’s an idea for you…

Personalisation isn’t just about your website or mobile app. It’s an organisational mindset that is critical for making your brand more customer-centric than your competitors.

I call it i2i, Individual 2 Individual marketing.

And that’s every individual within your business and how they walk the digital corridors of todays workplace.

It’s not an official term but can I trademark this?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you would have noticed more personal content on LinkedIn over the last few years. The days of stuffy business posts getting traction are over. We might make flippant remarks about selfies and dog posts but connecting with the individual in a business is as or maybe even more important as hearing what your business does.

This is because advertising and marketing has become a lot more personal. Data suggests that personal content on LinkedIn gets 6-7 times more engagement compared to pure business content. It’s probably one of the best places for people in your business to live and breath personalisation approach themselves.

In my view, success in personalisation would come more readily with a twinned strategy of:

• Company i2i mindset, starting with your own.
  
  Is personalisation something you deliver as just a functional strategy to customers, or something you embody and lead by example in the way you conduct yourself at work? How do you help your colleagues to connect to you as a person and how do you bring your marketing plan to life for them through story telling? Does your sales team expect to be provided with content that they share without adding any of their own viewpoint or personality? Can you conduct a quick temperature check of your company mindset in the key teams at the front face of customer experience?
  
• Technology investment, the only real way to scale the experience.
  
  Technology is coming down in price all the time making things like segmenting people into groups with common interest, dynamic content, and personalised journeys something even the smallest marketing teams can be doing at scale.

I read that 44% of marketers were finding their goal of “improving customer experience” a challenge and I can’t help but wonder if this too is a human challenge.

We can get so sucked into the tech and its magical functionality that we underestimate the people onboarding process.

When we launched our own lead nurturing platform Dynamo, it wasn’t hard to get people to say yes to sign-up. We quickly learned, that what really made it successful was how we supported them through the campaign set up phase. Many people are building journeys for the first time. Doing this alongside another person with deep experience is simply faster and more fun than trying to self teach using a tool and online support.

The platform has a ton of automation, but a bit of i2i human handholding works brilliantly at the start, and when we’re reviewing the results and making optimisation decisions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn to see how I’m embracing it, or you can read more about it here

Saj Mughal
Business Development Director
You can email me here if you need some help
Connect with me on LinkedIN for more #DataHQIDEAS