Businesses that master real-time, mobile-driven mass-personalization will win in today’s social world.
The foundation principle of this is being where your customer is.
Consumers by nature will naturally look for the easiest way to get what they want. For businesses to provide relevance and value, you need to make it easy for them to reach you and be there when they need you. This means making it easy for them to search, engage, assess, buy and measure in a highly personalized way.
It also requires businesses of all sizes to know more about their customers. To know what is of interest to them, what they are engaging with today, and then to personalize and serve up relevant content and offers based on each customer’s declared interests, life stages and activities.
This is much more than simplistic monitoring of social media posts, this is live insights actioning.
Those that adopt this approach to selling and marketing see significantly greater results. And since consumers always vote either with their feet (and wallets), those who do this well will win.
This has been talked about over the past few years, but few companies do this, and those that are early adopters here tend to be large enterprises.
Small and medium businesses deserve to benefit as well, and they can more and more as real-time technology that analyses the social web and serves personalized content through social channels in real-time becomes available.
However it needs to start with the desire first to create great customer experiences and using the large amount of data on social to do what we have always wanted to do as marketers. That is to get the right message to the right person at the right time using the right channel. The wide adoption and real time sharing and engaging nature of social allows for this.
Those who harness the power of this data source for personalization and creating great experiences will win.
This article is also published on LinkedIn.