The power of personalisation for brand marketing in 2024

“Personalisation – it’s not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.” – Dan Jak

No customer wants to feel like a stranger or a number. They want the brands they engage with to understand them – their needs, their pain points, their goals. They want to be seen as individuals.

That is what creating personalised content is all about. It’s about tailoring customer experiences around specific consumers. It’s about building trust through more focused, familiar interactions. And ultimately, it’s about making sure customers feel special.

Better brand personalisation should be a goal in any organisation, and thanks to the tools available today, achieving this is more attainable than ever. Yet, a recent Papirfly poll found that just 25% of respondents classed their marketing efforts as highly personalised and on-brand globally and locally.

More must be done to deliver the personalised experiences modern consumers want. Here we’ll explore the benefits and challenges of personalised brand marketing, and how you can add a personal touch to your campaigns on a global or local scale.

What is personalisation in brand marketing?

Personalisation is when you adapt your brand marketing around the information you know about your customers. Their interests, preferred products or services, shopping habits, pain points – anything that enables you to speak directly to your customers on a one-to-one level.

Personalisation isn’t a new concept. In 18th century London, customers at Lock & Co. Hatters, the world’s oldest hat shop, would simply shout “hat” outside the shop, and the staff would deliver a new hat to them, matching their size and style preferences.

But in the digital marketing age, the ability to understand customer preferences through data and analytics has never been greater. How often have you searched for a product on Google or Amazon, and suddenly seen that same product appearing in your emails, social feeds and banner ads when you next hop online?

With the right tools and ethical techniques, you can gather the data to craft messages for specific target audiences, with the potential only limited by time and resources.

Is brand personalisation only relevant for e-commerce businesses?

Absolutely not. While personalisation is rightly attached to e-commerce and the wider retail industry, this approach is relevant for any organisation looking to generate more sales and loyalty from their target markets.

5 reasons brand personalisation is so important

1. Modern customers want and expect personalised experiences

Firstly and most importantly, customers expect campaigns to be tailored around them.

87% of marketing professionals say consumers desire personalised content from their preferred brands, while 76% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from brands that deliver these personalised experiences.

While there’s always a risk of entering “creepy” territory – by and large, customers want to be presented with personalised products and offers.

2. Personalised brand marketing boosts revenue

With today’s consumers more inclined to buy from brands that personalise their campaigns, naturally this approach encourages more sales. It just makes sense – if you as a customer are presented with a bespoke offer or discount based on your interests, you’re likely going to take it (or at least consider it).

In fact, it’s estimated companies generate up to 40% more revenue from personalised content, while personalised calls-to-action (CTAs) deliver over 200% more conversions than generic ones.

3. Personalisation improves the ROI of your marketing campaigns

Beyond revenue, personalisation can also noticeably improve the ROI of your marketing. By targeting customers with content and offers tailored to their wants and needs, you remove a lot of the speculation associated with less focused, generalised campaigns.

If you speak your customer’s language and understand their wishes, you’re more likely to secure an efficient conversion. That’s why 89% of marketers say they achieve a positive ROI when their campaigns are personalised.

4. Personalisation leads to more effective customer retargeting

Retargeting is crucial in today’s landscape to keep your message in front of your audience amidst a tidal wave of advertising and content. Personalisation and effective use of customer data enables you to customise your retargeting campaigns around your marketing segments.

This achieves better results, builds brand awareness and leads to more satisfying, familiar customer interactions.

5. Personalisation encourages stronger brand loyalty, recognition and equity

Finally, personalisation supports your brand marketing in ways that are difficult to measure, but still hold value. 

For instance, more personalised, positive experiences for your customers encourage loyalty and repeat business. 78% of consumers say personalisation makes them more likely to repurchase from the same brand, and loyal customers offer much more value to your business.

This more engaging content also enhances brand recognition among your core audiences, which in turn raises your brand equity and allows you to sell your products and services for a premium value.

What challenges do brands face in implementing effective personalisation strategies?

Although personalisation in brand marketing is more attainable than ever, numerous challenges can hinder your efforts: 

• Capturing customer data can be difficult due to strict GDPR and protection guidelines
• Becoming too familiar with your audience can put off prospective customers
• Bringing individual customer data together to form distinct buyer personas can be challenging
• Customer data silos in your organisation can lead to duplicate messages or prevent useful knowledge from reaching your marketing teams

Strong brand management can help you overcome these hurdles, and give your teams the power to personalise your customer journeys with speed and precision.

How to deliver personalised experiences across your customers’ journeys

If you are keen to unlock the full potential of personalisation in your marketing efforts, here are our key pieces of advice you need to consider:

Conduct market research and collect customer data

The heart of any brand personalisation strategy is solid, well-researched customer data. How can you tailor your messages if you don’t understand who you’re talking to?

Collect, analyse and scrutinise everything from demographics and past purchases, to preferences, behaviours and beyond. Carry out surveys to understand the specific wants of your target audiences better. By recognising the characteristics of your customers, your personalisation efforts become more relevant and powerful.

Segment your target audiences based on the information you gather

Once you have a bank of data, use this to segment your audience appropriately. Particularly for larger, global organisations, it’s unfeasible to meet the precise needs of every individual customer. Strong market segmentation is the next best approach.

Dividing your customers by their shared characteristics empowers you to produce personalised content and experiences that connect with a select group really well, which should encourage purchases.

Invest in tools for real-time asset creation and customisation

Agility is essential for effective personalised campaigns. With your knowledge of your target audiences, you must be prepared to capitalise on any event or opportunity in your marketing. 

Internally, you must also demonstrate agility by organising teams around specific customer segments or journeys with efficient collaboration.

Identifying and investing in brand management solutions and technology is key to achieving the flexibility your personalisation efforts require. In particular, prioritise on-brand asset creation software that makes it faster and simpler for your teams to personalise your global assets, and Digital Asset Management (DAM) to give people instant access to relevant content.

Centralise your brand identity in one accessible location

Personalisation should never come at the expense of your identity – brand consistency must be at the foundation to ensure a harmonious experience for your customers.

With this in mind, it’s useful to establish a centralised brand hub that your teams worldwide can access and refer to at all times. Brand guidelines, tone of voice, colour palettes – by containing everything in one location, your professionals can comfortably personalise materials knowing they can never stray from your core identity.

Develop distinct personalisation strategies for each stage of the customer journey

It can take many steps to capture a customer, so you should aim to personalise each part of their journey.

Measure and refine your personalisation efforts

Our final tip is to keep your personalised marketing from stagnating. Conduct A/B testing on your communications, track the performance of your campaigns and encourage customer feedback to see where your personalisation efforts could be improved.

Useful metrics to measure the success of your personalised content include:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Brand differentiation
• Campaign ROI
• Customer lifetime value

Perfecting personalisation both globally and locally

A personalised approach to brand marketing is especially important for global brands with numerous local outlets. With variances in languages, cultures, backgrounds, environments and beyond, a one-size-fits-all marketing approach simply cannot work.

Take Rabobank as an example. Headquartered in the Netherlands, this cooperative bank today has locations in over 20 countries across all continents. This means they must adapt content for each region to resonate with customers and promote relevant services, while keeping their global brand identity intact.

To overcome this challenge, Rabobank employs effective brand management technology that allows them to:

• Build a dedicated home for their branding to maintain consistency across all channels and locations
• Access on-brand assets from one central DAM system, with user permissions based on an employee’s position, region or country
• Streamline on-brand asset production so their teams can execute in minutes, enabling them to stay agile and customise content at scale
• Improve campaign execution to capitalise on industry trends with personalised content that engages audiences in real-time

With the right platform in place, Rabobank is making personalisation achievable in every market, while simultaneously strengthening its overall brand presence.

4 brands who personalise with passion

1. Amazon

As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has constantly refined its algorithm to present personalised product recommendations to shoppers. This understanding ensures that Amazon is always pointing customers towards compelling offers, resulting in more positive experiences and an increased likelihood of conversions.

2. Coca-Cola

The famous “Share a Coke” campaign was a masterstroke in personalised marketing. Allowing people to customise bottles with whatever name they wanted, this was a campaign that could resonate in every country and culture.

It did more than personalise products, it tailored the entire customer experience and encouraged people to share their bottles on social media with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

3. Shutterfly

Shutterfly’s approach is all about personalisation, allowing its customers to create custom gifts using their photos. To do this, a customer simply downloads the Shutterfly app, permits it to access their photos, and the app automatically identifies images with faces to place on items. 

This bespoke product is then sent to the customer, encouraging them to complete the purchase.

4. Matsmart

Through a series of highly segmented, dynamic Facebook ad campaigns, Swedish food retailer Matsmart achieved an 84% increase in website revenue in just three months, as well as a 4x ROI on the campaign over six months.

This example makes Matsmart a pioneer of how serving the right content to the right person at the right time can maximise your sales potential – something many brands have adopted since.

Ready to reap the rewards of personalised brand marketing?

Personalisation is one of the most powerful ways modern marketers can connect with customers and build loyal, engaged fan bases. As customers’ expectations grow year on year, having the tools and knowledge in place to adapt your content for specific locations, generations and audience segments is key to maximise the ROI of your campaigns.

We cannot stress enough the value of branded design templates in achieving this aim. Creating personalised content can massively drain costs, time and resources when attempted manually, especially against the demands of multichannel marketing. 

Make this your priority, and crafting messages that speak to your audiences directly will soon be a seamless, painless process – one with the power to make a huge impression on the success of your campaigns.