How to Make a Personalized Campaign That Sticks

These days, there’s a lot that inhibits brands from standing out: there’s an onslaught of competing content, user attention spans are shortening and budgets (not to mention time) are tight, making it difficult to rapidly produce and experiment with content that truly sticks.

That latter point is perhaps the most significant, because the biggest indicator of whether or not a user will engage with your content is whether it’s relevant to them. This desire of relevance elevates personalization beyond just a simple business need—in today’s market, it’s expected by users and required from brands.

This results in an imperative for efficient, cost-effective production that cuts through the noise and lands directly in front of the right consumer at the right time. A report recently released by SoDA showed that brands understand the need for personalization, with 83% of global business leaders increasing their investments in it for 2019, and nearly a third increasing their personalization budgets significantly.

People who touch an item feel an increased sense of ownership toward it—and personalized experiences are poised to persuade and push them over the edge of purchasing. Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign was massively popular simply by creating a situation for customers to engage with the brand in a personal and social way. Marmite has taken a similar approach with its personalized jars, which provide a point of identification for the user.

But making strategic use of personalization remains a key challenge, particularly with production of content that benefits from personalization. In the same report, 55% of business leaders cited a clear focus on producing content quicker, and 47% sought greater cost-efficiency in content production.

But producing personalization at scale doesn’t have to be burdensome for brands. Through an integrated production process and technologies that enable dynamic delivery of content, organizations can produce a staggering volume of hyper-targeted content with ease—though it may require them to rethink their creative approach.

Levels of Personalization

Personalization in marketing certainly isn’t new, though most organizations operate on a relatively low level of personalization maturity. Rather than relying on basic data metrics like greeting a user by their name or using rules-based segmentation, brands can achieve best-in-class, highly relevant creative by optimizing content for omnichannel journeys (remembering the user along the way), integrating behavioral recommendations and applying AI to predictive personalization.

Now, don’t get too scared—all of the above likely sounds complicated, especially if you don’t yet have a distinct personalization or data strategy in place. But the good news is that personalization is less about the amount of data that you have, and more about what you do with the data. Minimal personalization can make a big impact.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a great example of an omnichannel campaign that reacts to user behaviors in a way that’s surprising to users, grabbing their attention by speaking directly to them. When Danish gum brand Stimorol decided to branch out into a new form of candy, they needed an awareness campaign that would challenge consumers to likewise extend outside their comfort zones. But how can you challenge someone to try something new without knowing what they habitually do? That’s where the creative opportunity behind personalization emerges.

We solved this problem by producing an integrated campaign that responds to user behaviors. Key to the campaign are YouTube bumper ads that respond to the types of videos that individual consumers are watching. While watching sports videos, for example, users may be treated to an ad that prompts them to try playing sports instead of just watching them.

These bumpers make use of one key data point—the type of content that users are watching—but does so in a clever way that immediately grabs viewer attention and prompts them to identify with the message in a personal way. While they might not be willing to change their own habits, trying a new Stimorol candy sounds like a sweet deal in comparison.

Personalization that Enhances, not Inhibits, Production Quality

Isn’t it unsustainable to produce several variations of content like the kind mentioned above? Not if you have already outlined the variables that differentiate individual pieces of content, or have clearly mapped out the touch points to be supported by an omnichannel campaign. We optimized production for the Stimoroll campaign by limiting it to a single-day shoot at a single location, resulting in over 150 format-ready deliverables capable of greeting the right consumers at the right place and time.

According to Salesforce, 57% of customers are happy to provide personal data in exchange for personalized marketing—which means data can inform awesome content and vice-versa. The key is that the data exchange should provide consumers with obvious value.

With the technology available today, brands can achieve an even greater level of relevance with their content, dynamically stitching together personalized content reactive to several data points. With Google Vogon, for example, brands can automatically translate a single base video into dozens of personalized variations on the fly, resulting in a high volume of unique videos that don’t push film crews to their limits or sacrifice quality.

Our dynamic video content for Booking.com was designed from two base videos: one featuring a giraffe browsing for travel destinations while another focused on a dog doing the same. But the type of animal featured is just one of several variables that enable 54 permutations tailored to hyper-specific segments and interests. These include the target market, different destinations found within those markets and a key passion (like shopping, dining or sightseeing) that provides added inspiration.

Both campaigns discussed above demonstrate how brands can efficiently target key segments of their audiences through personalization. Whether employing just one data point or many, personalization at scale can grab user attention and leave an indelible mark on them, and the right creative and production strategy enables brands to take advantage of these benefits without wearing themselves thin.