Just for a moment let your mind escape to a world where everyone wore the same clothes, drove the same cars, listened to the same music, and had the same name. What are your thoughts? Personally, it sounds incredibly boring and lacking some serious innovation.  Creativity would suffer, life would become routine, and we would never have the opportunity to tell our own story.  There would be one story to tell and hundreds of millions of people it would apply to.  That is a lot of people to fit into a single book!

Now, think of a world where we write our own story and they only apply to us! This is more in tune with how the world operates in present day! We carefully select our own clothes (heck some of us even hand make them), we don’t just buy music, some of us write it and tune it to our liking, and we have different careers where we put to use our individual skills to build a career where passion, attitude, talent and knowledge create the perfect storm!

How then if we all have a different story to tell and individual preferences can marketers target us with a single campaign for the masses?

ANSWER: They simply CANNOT! But why?

1. It won’t appeal to everyone
2. If they do it will fail miserably
3. Their ROI will suffer
4. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY….They have only looked at the short-term sale and failed to consider the Lifetime Value of a single customer

Building A User Profile
When you track a user’s activity from click-to-conversion, you are building a database of business intelligence. With this newly acquired intelligence you are discovering the story of each user, determining what they like, what they don’t like, and better yet what they convert on.  To touch on point 4 again, building out the lifetime story of your customer is what leads to customer retention and higher conversion rates.  Without the technology in place it makes tracking the customer’s lifetime journey rather difficult to unfold. Marketers need real-time analytics and the ability to change marketing campaigns on the go to tell the right story to the right user. If you really think about it marketing is all about telling your story to a consumer whose personal story is relatable to your marketing campaign. When these two align the rest is history! Build a strategy around your technology to start unraveling the stories of your customers to find out what really interests them!

Being An Agile Marketer Is Key
The days of “spray and pray” marketing are over. For years, there has been a history of throwing millions of dollars towards a marketing campaign and simply hoping for the best. The technology was not up to market speed that would allow these hopeful marketers to tie revenue back to their marketing campaigns. You can imagine with this tactic, countless profits were unattributed for, wasted and not optimized. We are seeing a shift in the market to the “track it, attack it” model whereby agile marketers are adopting the process of tracking their efforts to better target the campaign in real-time to achieve the highest revenue potential possible. These marketers can make “in flight” decisions to change the direction of the campaign, the creatives, the subject lines, distribution channels etc…to reach the right customers who will convert.  If you remain static and hope for the best with your campaigns, don’t expect to see optimal results in the long haul! Sure you might see a quick boost in revenue in the short-term, but imagine the results you could see when you have fully optimized your campaigns to appeal to the right customer who will continually interact with your brand over a lifetime!

Marketing Efforts Driven By Measurement
Now that you have your database of user stories built out how are your marketing efforts reflecting these users personal preferences? It’s time to start using your analytics to develop your marketing campaigns to better target and ultimately convert these users. Acquiring the business intelligence is only half the battle, once you have it how are you going to effectively use it?

Taking Ownership
So who is responsible for turning the analytics into actionable and profitable items?  Everyone! Marketing must build it into all of their outreach efforts, branding, and strategic messaging. Sales should take into consideration how a user wants to interact with the product or service and highlight how they can do so. You see everyone is written into the story somehow and plays an integral part; it’s just a matter of owning that part!

The short-term sale might immediately boost your numbers, but the real value lies in the lifetime acquisition of a customer as they continue to interact with your product over a lifetime!