More and more, marketers are turning to precision marketing to ensure they’re nurturing the relationships they have with current customers. Precision marketing is a marketing technique that prioritizes existing customers over new and suggests successful marketing is to focus on retaining, cross-selling and upselling existing customers. It highlights the later stages of the customer lifecycle, growth, and advocacy, over the early stages, awareness, consideration, and conversion. It encourages the cohesion of a brand story across all channels to drive a current customer toward their individualized best next action.
Precision marketing emphasizes relevancy as part of the technique. Relevancy is determined by combining data and context to understand who and where your users are on their individual customer journeys across your brand. The goal is to drive an increase in lifetime customer value (LCV) while providing a better and more intelligent customer experience.
Let’s take a quick look at relevancy in action for a Consumer-Packaged-Goods (CPG) brand:
A customer purchases a blond hair dye kit from a local convenience store. The next day, the customer is browsing on social media when they are targeted by the CPG brand’s creative. By leveraging relevancy, the brand will stand a better chance to upsell them with a blond dyed hair shampoo than any other product, while ultimately providing a better customer experience.
This example illustrates how two major trends are beginning to collide in enterprise marketing:
- To continue to grow a brand in today’s digital world, delivering the right creative to the right audience at the right time is more important than ever. What makes it the “right” creative? It needs to be designed well, evoke emotion, and compel action; all while staying on brand.
- Consumers often expect, if not demand, that the brand experiences they engage with understand where they’ve been, what they’ve bought, and what they are most likely interested in. In other words, they expect intelligent customer experiences whenever they engage with a brand.
Precision marketing matters because a brand’s desire to build a more meaningful, emotional, and contextual relationship with a consumer is now more aligned then ever with what consumers are demanding for brands to earn their continued business. In today’s customer experience economy, where consumers can choose from a variety of high quality and high-value competitors, brands must take every opportunity to engage in a direct, personal, and intelligent way to drive growth and advocacy. This starts with their digital advertising, and the creative is at the heart of that.
As global brands begin building and delivering hundreds of variations of their digital creative to speak directly to their target audience segments, they must ensure that the brand is represented consistently, and accurately around the world. But It doesn’t stop with the creative. Every experience a customer has with a brand must feel consistent with and contextually aware of all of the others — every interaction, touchpoint, message, and channel. Because of this, brands are realizing that they need more creative control over their advertising in order to tell better stories, ensure brand safety across every interaction and create an emotional connection with their customers.