Customised inbound marketing solutions are tailor-made digital strategies designed to attract a specific subset of potential customers to your business, thereby increasing conversions and maximising ROI. Put simply, a customised inbound marketing strategy delivers ‘the most bang for every buck spent’ out of all the digital sales approaches currently available. The goal is to engage your audience in a non-disruptive way and build a relationship with them by providing them with timely answers to their search queries, thereby nurturing them into customers over time.
The success of this approach is founded on data and is focused on driving traffic, generating leads, and closing sales, and what makes the approach ‘customised’ is the emphasis on personalisation at every level of your marketing strategy.
Modern inbound marketing is founded on data, and the reason that this is important is that data is the key to personalising your messages and content for maximum relevance and resonance with your target market. The secret to successful personalisation is to intelligently use the data you have about your customers to genuinely understand their individual preferences and needs – if done right, this strategy can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts by making your content more engaging for your buyers.
Content personalisation, or customisation, uses customer insights to deliver more individually relevant content to each user, drawing on information about user preferences, browsing history, and past interactions with your business to create content that speaks directly to each prospect. This content can take the form of blog articles, downloadable e-books, videos, or other types of content. Dynamic marketing tools, such as HubSpot's CMS Hub, can help you tailor content to individual customer profiles and tastes, and publish it in the right way to gain maximum visibility and impact.
Personalisation is the key to success in email marketing, and involves (at minimum) making use of the customer’s name, information about their past purchase history or interactions, and other behavioural data to make your email communications feel more personal and relevant. This maximises your open rate and encourages engagement with your emails, preventing them from coming across as ‘spammy’. Advanced automation tools are now available to segment your email lists based on behavioural or demographic information, or the users’ stage in your buyer journey, allowing you to create highly targeted messages. For example, you might send different emails to prospects who have abandoned their shopping cart than to customers who have recently made a purchase.
Website personalisation, or responsive design, refers to dynamically altering the content or design of a website (from the perspective of the user) based on the individual’s source/location, browser, behaviour, device type, or other factors. This can be as simple as displaying a different home page banner to returning visitors, or as complex as showing different product recommendations based on past purchases, or region-specific content based on the visitor’s country of origin (based on IP address – this only works if the visitor isn’t using a VPN).
Personalising your adverts requires you to customise the content and placement of digital adverts and landing pages based on user data. Most PPC platforms now include a wide range of sophisticated customisation features, such as Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature, that lets you show ads specifically to people who have visited your website in the past, and the Google Ads demographic targeting feature that lets you display different adverts to different age groups within your campaign.
The most sophisticated and potentially the most valuable element of customised inbound marketing is personalising the buyer journey itself. To do this, you need to accurately map out the different stages that a typical customer goes through in your sales cycle, from first learning about your brand to making a purchase, and tailor your interactions at each stage. This might, for example, involve sending different email content to users at different stages of the journey, or offering personalised discounts or incentives to prospects based on past interactions, or the pages they have visited on your website. A good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can be used to track a customer’s journey and facilitate high levels of personalisation, recording all marketing touch points within a single ‘source of truth’.
As inbound marketing and content development specialists, we can help you tailor your entire marketing strategy to the specific needs and purchase motivations of your customers, maximising uptake and conversions. To find out more about how to get stronger results from marketing and a better ROI in 2024, contact JDR today by clicking here.
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