Truly Personalised Marketing

The marketing and advertising technologies sector has experienced incredibly rapid change in the past few years.

The pace of change is accelerating due to the proliferation of data across multiple channels, which enables marketers to build ever more precise profiles of their customers.

Marketers can now draw on data from search engines, social media, content viewing and more to understand what individuals are interested in and how likely they are to make a purchase. At the same time, the cost of analysing this data in real time has reduced dramatically as cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure compete to attract customers to their huge data centers.

These developments combine to help marketers move ever closer to providing truly personalised marketing – an ideal which has been talked about for long but is now starting to become reality.

As a result of the abundance of data and the ability to process it cheaply and quickly, marketing personalisation has moved from crude lists of marketing leads based on age and wealth profiling, often inaccurate, incomplete or out of date, to real-time behavioral segmentation which predicts when the customer is most likely to engage positively with the brand or to buy the product.

We are moving ever closer to one-on-one marketing with fully tailored messaging, even bespoke content delivered at precisely the right time in the buyer’s journey to a sale. For marketers, personalisation is no longer a “nice to have”, because undifferentiated mass marketing doesn’t even reach the audience any more, due to ad blockers and spam filters.