At its core, marketing is the ongoing process of collecting and analyzing large amounts of quality consumer data and then applying that information to design curated experiences that meet consumer expectations…and today’s consumers expect a lot. As digital marketing competition increases, businesses are facing growing pressure to create personalized branding that drives consumer engagement and differentiation in the market.
Capturing the attention of today’s consumer can feel next to impossible, with the average viewer skipping or clicking away from ads after only five seconds. In fact, 63% of consumers dislike generic advertising messages, and 91% prefer personalized experiences with brands that remember them and offer individualized offers and product recommendations. Unless they are pulled into the campaign narrative through sincere engagement or emotional connection, consumers are diverting their attention to the next exciting thought, need, or trend. Setting your business apart from the crowd as a personalized brand may make the difference between a brand that drowns in a sea of competition and a brand that shines within the marketplace. Why duplicate what the industry is doing when you can create standards all your own?
What Is Personalized Branding?
Personalized branding began more than 20 years ago, when innovative marketers of the time began personalizing email campaigns to include customer names in the body of marketing emails. While we have come quite a long way from those early days of personalization, the goal remains the same: getting the right message to the right person at the exact moment they need to encounter it.
Many of today’s leading brand experts believe that personalized branding is the future of marketing. Brands are leveraging first-party consumer data to create robust and personally curated advertising experiences that feel unique to each customer. This type of individualized branding targets consumers based on their past purchase behaviors, social media behavior, website engagement, interests, and preferences, and can lead to longstanding consumer relationships built on connection. In contrast to the brand-centric model of marketing that focuses on telling customers what the brand wants them to know, personalized branding considers individual consumer behavior and needs and then delivers tailored experiences to each consumer.
How To Approach Personalized Branding
As a branding and design agency, (matter) always recommends starting with a solid foundation: put simply, take the time to develop a personalized branding strategy before diving into the work of redesigning and redefining. Personalized branding means more than designing a unique logo or iconic color palette. By pioneering a personalized brand, you can define company structure, customer service, product offerings and more without relying on tired trends. Personalized branding allows you to design your company according to your own goals and desires.
The benefits of personalized branding are undeniable: because it makes your brand more easily identifiable and more cohesive across your digital ecosystem, personalization enables your brand to stand out in a dense sea of competition. It also noticeably increases short-term ROI across your brand’s social channels and websites, which can be measured through user engagement, follows, reach and site traffic, and long-term ROI like establishing your brand as an industry thought leader—and keeps consumers engaged in digital campaigns for longer amounts of time. Personalized branding also leads to increased consumer trust and loyalty because customers like to patronize businesses that make them feel valued and seen. In short, it is a proactive investment in your brand and your consumers.
Like any new component of brand strategy, there are also challenges to implementing personalized branding. Though worthwhile, it may be a daunting journey to begin. It takes considerable resources—internal staff, budget, and time—to create intelligent persona and channel segmentation, as well as to find a suitable personalization engine that can automate and streamline the process. In addition, most personalization is achieved through first-party data collection which, due to Google’s Privacy Sandbox data collection restrictions to no longer allow third-party cookies, means marketers must generate new audience research strategies to collect the first-party data needed.
To create personalized consumer experiences while also capturing target audiences, (matter) has developed an innovative approach to personalized branding. We collaborate with your team to design smart solutions that drive your brand forward. (matter) strives to partner with brands and provide invaluable resources, because we understand that our success is intrinsically connected to yours. We will help your brand flex, stretch, and adapt to create a personalized brand that stands out from the crowd. Connect with (matter) today to discover the key role branding can play in your company’s marketing future. Personalized branding might just be your brand’s ticket to designing video ad campaigns that are simply unskippable.
