3 Mindset-Shifting Ways To Help Embed Personalization into Your Marketing

If you’re a marketing leader, this means the pressure to personalize is indeed on. According to our research, you’re likely feeling the heat when it comes to mastering your own consumer data to get the insights you need to meet this pressure.

Of the 308 marketing executives at U.S. and European brands with revenues of $250M – $2B per year we asked in our 2022 Chief Marketing Officer Survey, more than 60% told us that their top-priority capabilities for being truly consumer-obsessed were analyzing first-party consumer data in near real-time, extracting deeper insights from it, and utilizing these insights to drive business growth.

Below are three mindset shifts that can help marketers incorporate personalization into their plans.

1. Forget platitudes about consumer obsession. Get obsessed with providing your best consumers with hyper-personalized brand journeys.

Consumer obsession is a nice (if somewhat vague) concept, but it is not enough just to talk about it.

It’s better to be obsessed with crafting something that drives business with your best consumers. Based on our research and experience, that something should be a hyper-personalized brand journey.

A hyper-personalized brand journey is the foundation of what we call an “unfair digital advantage.” It involves using first-party data to zero in on your most valuable existing and future consumers, optimize their journeys for maximum acquisition, conversion, and retention, and measuring the impact of doing so.

2. Start thinking like a Chief Digital Officer and take ownership of your best customers’ entire journeys

To retain your best consumers, it’s crucial that brand journeys are not only personalized but also seamless, flowing smoothly and logically across all touchpoints.

This goal calls for a Chief Digital Officer to lead the digital transformation and orchestration of marketing, IT, service, and all the other business functions behind every type of brand experience your best consumers have.

As your organization takes its journey toward digital maturity, you have an exciting opportunity to step up and fulfill this critical role. According to our 2022 survey, the Chief Digital Officer position was the next career step most commonly cited among the Chief Marketing Officers we interviewed. Nearly a third of respondents envisioned themselves taking on this role with a stronger understanding of and focus on digitalization in marketing over the next few years.

A good starting point for adopting the Chief Digital Officer mindset is to identify and communicate any siloes existing between teams, technologies, and strategies that hinder seamless brand journeys for your best consumers. When the time comes to put someone in charge of addressing these siloes, you will be a natural candidate.

3. Seek out the weakest steps of your best consumers’ journeys and fix them

Any marketing digital transformation involves deciding which challenges to tackle and which new technologies will get the job done.

To facilitate these decisions, skip those shiny slide decks and take a straightforward approach that runs the numbers:

1. Identify the weakest step of your best consumers’ journeys where your conversion rate is hurting the most.
2. Set an improvement target for this step and quantify your objective in terms of revenue gain.
3. Based on your acceptable return on investment, work out the maximum all-in costs you can incur to achieve that with new technology.
4. Introduce whatever new technology you believe gives you your best shot at achieving your objective within your budget.

Project execution, of course, is another story. But this repeatable process will always provide you with a data-driven rationale for prioritizing the projects that can solve your biggest consumer journey pain points – and the technologies offering the value you want for the money you can spend.