Boost Sales with Personalized Marketing Strategies: 3 Proven Tactics

All good marketers know that content which connects with consumers is content that sells products. The trouble is, we don’t all “connect” to the same things.

What causes one person to remember an advert, to click on a social post, or scroll through to the buy button can leave another consumer cold.

Culture, aesthetics, needs, priorities, and expectations: these all influence our behaviour and inform our tastes. A company might think that it has perfected a central message that appeals to everyone, but if that message isn’t tailored to meet our tastes and preferences, it’s much less likely to hit home.

That is the reason that adapting content for different localities is such an important part of any global sales and marketing campaign. With the help of “localization”, you retain your central message but adapt it in appreciation of the very real differences that exist between regions.

Adaptation based on the user’s location is a key element of delivering this all-important personalized marketing touch.

Here’s a closer look at how this type of adapted approach can help you boost your sales revenue.

80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that provides a personalized experience.

Brands can invest huge amounts in creating amazing global campaigns. The very smartest of those brands will thoroughly test their content to ensure it resonates in different locations.

Sometimes, making a relatively small adjustment can make a huge difference – especially when it comes to presentation. For instance, stock imagery specialists Shutterstock points to the fact that KitKat’s US marketing material is dominated by oversized photography. Over on its UK site, however, it’s much more subdued. Likewise, Coca-Cola’s Instagram pages for Brazil and Japan each have a very different look and feel. In Japan, the emphasis tends to be on colorful images featuring the product itself while on the Brazil page, more candid imagery and videos feature heavily. Such differences are not accidental: they are dictated by what resonates best in those respective locations.

Experimentation to determine what does and doesn’t work is a vital part of customization. 71% of marketers report that less than 50% of their content is getting consumed due to its ineffectiveness for local and mobile audiences. Potentially, that’s a lot of waste. This combination of customization with market-specific testing can help you stem it – ensuring that your budget is put to the best possible use.

We are much more likely to respond to content that we can relate to – and this includes being able to see “people like us” and the places we recognize represented.

This means that relatively simple contextual adaptations to content can help to make it more effective (e.g. representing the Space Needle in material catering for your Seattle market as opposed to The Golden Gate Bridge for your California audience).

Going beyond basic imagery, you might also want to consider rolling out location-specific case studies for different audiences. This brings twin benefits: as well as offering a stronger context for potential customers to relate to, it can also help to strengthen your reputation – it shows you are very much part of the local market landscape and not just an anonymous global player.

71% of marketers report that less than 50% of their content is getting consumed due to its ineffectiveness for local and mobile audiences

Who should be assigned the role of adapting brand content for local markets? We would suggest that local teams themselves are best placed for this. After all, these are the people who know those markets better than anyone else in the organization.

It’s often the little things that can make the difference between success and failure: things like nuances in taste and tone and an appreciation of the cultural connotations of certain types of imagery. Your people on the ground are best able to pick up on this.

Locally based sales staff can offer additional insights here. From their experience of building relationships with customers in their localities, they should have ample appreciation of their specific needs and preferences. From this, they will know how to tweak your central message to speak directly to those customers.

Targeting your content through adaptation should maximize the impact of your sales and marketing materials in each of your target market locations.

So are those local teams equipped to carry out this role? With the right platform and templating tools, the creation of compelling local versions of a centrally created campaign becomes one less challenge to overcome. The end result should be the boost in sales revenue you are looking for – along with the ability to keep on top of the content production process.

We’d love to tell you more. Contact us for a chat.