Using Technology to Drive Hyper Personalisation

The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses across sectors to rapidly change how they operate, including drastically pivoting marketing and communications strategies. Chief marketing officers (CMOs) faced immense pressure to shift approaches with reduced budgets while demonstrating sensitivity to customers’ evolving realities.

In the wake of COVID-19, organisations recognise the need to enhance customer experiences and evolve marketing programs to be more digital, targeted, precise, and personalised. Mass campaigns grouping customers by segment no longer resonate. With cost-consciousness still top-of-mind, optimising marketing to contextually target relevant, personalised offers is essential.

Responding to shifting consumer perceptions and market dynamics requires granularly leveraging customer data across platforms like e-commerce, marketing automation, and customer engagement. As recovery from the crisis begins, hyper-personalisation will be critical to provide context to every interaction. A segment-of-one approach allows optimising target messaging and offers through appropriate channels, also understanding when an offer may be ill-timed.

Customers now expect treatment as individuals facing challenging times, seeking to work with companies that grasp their evolving realities. Adopting an analytics and AI-powered hyper-personalised marketing strategy gives real-time customer insights and adaptability to meet rising expectations of personalisation.

The Challenges Facing Modern CMOs

Today’s CMOs face various interrelated challenges in how they approach marketing strategies:

• Pivoting to Digital-First Mindsets: Traditional marketing models are increasingly outdated. CMOs need to lead adoption of new digital strategies and tools to drive growth and reduce costs through personalised targeting and campaigns.
• Leveraging AI for Authentic Consumer Interactions: To meet escalating consumer expectations, brands must tap data and analytics to deeply understand customers and enable AI to facilitate meaningful personalised interactions.
• Capitalising on Data and Technology for Actionable Insights: With data increasingly available across once-siloed sources, marketers must effectively harness information and AI to accelerate data-driven decision making and hyper-personalised experiences.

The Solution: AI-Powered Hyper-Personalised Marketing

As marketing leaders become more customer-centric and data-driven, AI-powered hyper-personalisation emerges as an essential strategy. Hyper-personalisation uses data, analytics, AI and automation to create tailored, targeted marketing communications and experiences for individual customers in the right contexts. This level of personalisation builds loyalty, satisfaction and marketing effectiveness.

Financial Services: Personalising Financial Advice

For financial institutions facing fierce competition, personalisation improves customer-centricity. Strategies include tailored products, advice, pricing, communications and servicing. Voice analytics and natural language processing help capture customer sentiments to predict demands. Expect banks to keep personalising through advanced analytics to meet unique financial needs.

Retail: Personalising Shopping with Relevant Recommendations and Pricing

Customer data allows creating personalised brand exposure, attracting consumers with the highest conversion potential. Personalisation also customises in-store experiences through virtual assistants and product recommendations based on factors like past purchases. Retailers can even apply dynamic pricing powered by modelling technology to increase conversion.

Public Sector: Improving Access to Personalised Services

With vast citisen data, governments can better streamline operations while appropriately tailoring services to segments. Communicating insights to the right bodies can increase efficiency in addressing distinct needs. Personalisation promises to smooth public access to tailored information and supports across sectors.

Health Care: Enabling Individualised Care and Doctor-Patient Relationships  

As technology expands health care capabilities, so too does the depth of patient interactions and need for personalised treatment courses. Voice-to-insight algorithms help physicians reduce documentation burdens and tap comprehensive records to enable more informed, tailored diagnostics based on individual priorities over time. The future promises seamless, 360-degree personalised care.

Where To Begin Implementing Hyper-Personalised Marketing

While forms of personalisation vary across the customer journey, pursuing it as an evolving, embedded practice across campaigns promises progressively deeper customer connections. Key steps for beginning implementation include:

1. Identifying Customer Needs: Gather multidimensional data on individual customer needs, motivations and behaviours as a foundation for tailored messaging.
2. Evaluating Existing Data and Technology: Assess current analytics capabilities and data sources’ ability to enable goals for personalisation maturity. Develop future roadmaps addressing gaps.
3. Building a Strategic Roadmap: Prioritise personalisation initiatives balancing potential business impact and implementation costs. Recognise need for phased approaches addressing quick wins and longer-term vision.

The marketplace increasingly expects personalised interactions. Data, analytics and AI allow brands to forge deeper Dialogue customer bonds. By taking an AI-powered, hyper-personalised approach, organisations can drive growth through reimagined, tailored experiences that exceed rising expectations. The time has come to start taking personalisation seriously.

For more information, please contact Sean Devlin on sean.devlin@ballardsllp.com or call 01905 794 504.

Disclaimer. This article has been prepared for information purposes only. Formal professional advice is strongly recommended before making decisions on the topics discussed in this release. No responsibility for any loss to any person acting, or not acting, as a result of this release can be accepted by us, or any person affiliated with us.