No.2 Most Read Article of 2013: Say Goodbye to the Age of Generalizations

This story was originally published on October 14, 2013, and comes in at No. 2 on our countdown of the 10 most popular ClickZ stories of 2013. As ClickZ looks back over the past year, we’re celebrating the best of 2013, as determined by you, our readers. Enjoy!

The emergence of social media and the steady decline of mass media are the two biggest marketing stories of the decade. Both print circulation and TV viewership have been falling consistently since the turn of the century; TV viewership, for instance, is down almost 50% since 2002.

In contrast, social media has reported massive gains since the early days of MySpace, with social media usage among US adults increasing by 800% over the past eight years.

For marketers, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. The rapid transition from mass to social media presents the opportunity to create impactful, relevant marketing messages. This data-powered personalized marketing approach is not only much more effective, but also more cost-efficient and scalable.

Conventional Marketing vs. Personalized Marketing

Conventional marketing is like trying to hit a thousand bullseyes with one arrow. For too long, marketers have accepted absurdly low conversion rates for the deployment of an an email or banner ad, with a singular message for a massive audience. This typically requires significant upfront investment and large-scale deployment, without a guarantee that those marketers are even reaching the most appropriate customers.

Personalized marketing using social data-triggered programmatic techniques, on the other hand, can be scaled from an extremely narrow, niche audience (“18-22 year old males in Portland who like Daft Punk”) to an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands (“18-22 year olds who like electronic music”). By looking at a group of users’ behavior data and social profile, marketers can create tailor messages for higher relevancy and, ultimately, effectiveness.

The Three-Step Personalized Marketing Process

Every personalized marketing campaign is a three-step process:

• Data Collection: The first step to collecting user data is to implement social login. Social Login provides a permission-based way for users to register and sign-in to your web properties via their existing social profiles, so your business can collect and analyze the relevant data points you need to better understand your customers.
• Data Segmentation: Raw data itself is quite meaningless for marketing purposes. Crunching this data and deriving meaning from it is the crucial second step in the personalized marketing process. This includes analyzing the data to identify customer identity and behavior and using it to create powerful personalized marketing campaigns.
• Data Conversion: After data is collected and segmented, it needs to be converted into actionable insight. This means tying the data you’ve collected and analyzed into the marketing platforms you currently use, such as CRM software, advertising networks, email marketing platforms and more.

For far too long, marketers have relied on old technologies and tactics to attract customers and boost conversions. We’ve accepted abysmal conversion rates as the norm, but now we possess the technology and the insight to transform our marketing efforts.

By leveraging deep identity data through technologies like social login, marketers can finally make marketing relevant again and regain control in the age of the connected consumer.