Making ‘Real-Time’ Personalization Possible

It’s just as critical to personalize the visual elements of marketing as the message served up with it. Since our brains are hardwired for images, personalizing the visual element of a message offers a major opportunity to add value, says, Gary Ballabio, Director of Business Development, Cloudinary.

According to an early 2019 Gartner studyOpens a new window , two-thirds of B2C marketers said they would be expected to show results from personalization investments in less than a year. Well, time’s up – 2020 is here. Like any other part of the marketing mix, personalization efforts must generate increased salesOpens a new window or deeper loyalty – or whichever KPI an organization is working toward – at a return greater than the time and resources they devote to it. Since we know that personalization is critical to engagement, the question is: “How do you most effectively personalize?”

Context, timing and relevance of a marketing message is important, certainly. But it’s taken the lion’s share of attention at the expense of visual appearance. The imagery and graphics that bring the idea to life can be personalized, too. And since our brains are hardwired for imagesOpens a new window , personalizing the visual element of a message offers a major opportunity to add value.

Retailers have a long list of priorities to work through as the industry evolves, but I believe that visual media prowess will become the true indicator of retail success this year. By creating and delivering personalized visual content, not just the corresponding written messages, companies will be able to drive more meaningful engagement, more than ever before.

Learn More: Bringing Technology to the Forefront of the B2B Customer Experience

Create More Meaningful Connections

Photos, graphics and videos convey things in ways that words simply cannot. Businesses already rely heavily on visuals across websites and social media channels to amplify the intended message for this reason. By personalizing the visual experience at a one-to-one or demographic level, brands create more meaningful connections, deliver more engaged experiences and drive more profitable relationships. When it comes to e-commerce media, we see this executed in a number of ways, from one-to-one experiences to broader segmented personalization.

Amazon was an early leader in drilled-down personalization by using on-site visual recommendations tailored to past purchases or search history – such as “because you bought XYZ, we also recommend…” or “recommended items people also viewed.” Today’s shoppers have come to expect their shopping experience to be as thoughtfully curated as Amazon based on a retailer’s understanding of them.

This idea of “visual media prowess” is all-encompassing of a brand or retailer’s digital presence, but to build up to personalizationOpens a new window at scale, you’ve got to start somewhere. Whether you’ve already begun your personalization journey or are just getting your first initiative off the ground, here are three easy reminders of how to best approach it.

1. Start simple, then get more sophisticated

One-to-one personalization, with the ability to reach an individual with targeted messaging based on a specific quality or attribute, is the dream scenario for marketers today.

But it’s not a zero-sum game. There’s no need to be hyper-personalized from the beginning. Start simple, and as you proceed, you can continue to test and iterate, getting more creative and adding in new layers of personalization as it makes sense for your campaigns.

Small, quick “wins” will start giving you some good momentum, so with that in mind, begin creating more visual content that isn’t necessarily personalized one-to-one but to a specific demographic. This can be targeted to a particular gender, age or locale, or based on a certain lifestyle, such as professional working women, mothers of young children, or empty nesters.

It’s easy to start rolling with content development once you think through what motivates a particular subset of your audience. What does a person in this group think and feel when they’re looking for a product or service like yours? What eye-catching visual would stand out to them in a way that they feel heard and understood? Start there, and then get more sophisticated over time.

2. For easy asset management, don’t delay the organization

Do your future self – and many others in your organization – a favor by getting organized now. This can be as simple as creating categorized folders, so you know exactly where assets are located. If a tagging structure exists in your DAM or another simplistic asset management solution, take advantage of those organizational possibilities. Tag your assets according to the keywords or phrases you’d search for so that a particular photo or video clip can be found in an instant. A real-time personalized marketing future can only be made possible by being intentional about how you manage your assets now.

3. Build agility into your visual creation workflow

A good marketing best practice is to generate visuals ahead of time so they’re near-ready to go for whatever opportune moment might come up. You’ll want the core image, video or graphic to already be available so you can quickly apply a relevant banner or overlay for any scenario.

Being prepared for any “what-if” marketing scenario doesn’t mean you’ll always have exactly the right final asset ready. But having a robust, organized library to choose from allows you to deliver the best combination of visual and text-based media on any channel in any situation. Having all your design elements prepared for quick-add personalization will provide the flexibility needed for real-time personalization.

With these best practices in mind, it’s also important to understand emerging technologies that can further accelerate your personalization efforts.

Learn More: A Marketplace Shift for B2B Leaders: Service is the New Sales

Introduce your data to AI

Shopper data is a treasure trove for retailers and brands to tap into, and it seems that just about every article you read about what’s in store for 2020 speaks to the critical role data will play in marketing effectively to today’s consumer. The data-driven storylinesOpens a new window built around consumer behavior can be powerful, especially for personalized marketing. The better you know your customer, the better equipped you’ll be to create messaging that resonates with them.

This is where AI flexes its muscles, stepping in to automate much of what often trips a retailer up. AI and machine learning technologies not only make sense of all the data, recommending personalization priorities based on what it knows about your customers but can also be leveraged to create and deliver personalized promotional messages, at scale. For example, retailers today are using AI to auto-crop based on each publishing platform’s requirements or using content-aware capabilities to resize and optimize for each channel partner’s e-commerce site.

Winning brands and retailers in the coming decade will be the ones that realize it’s just as critical to personalize the underlying image and visual elements of marketing as the message served up with it. There’s no better time than now – you can do this. You can create and deliver personalized visuals in near real-time, as long as you stay agile and strategic.