Member Article

Online marketing is stronger with social personalisation

It’s online marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here, Jack Rogers, product marketing manager of Intent HQ, argues the strength of online marketing is in personalisation.

Personalisation is the hot topic for marketers at the moment who want to get more customers to stay on site longer, interact with content and encourage repeat purchases.

Most new online businesses are aware that offering unique, personalised experiences can be key in achieving these goals.

Unfortunately, many current approaches towards personalisation are falling short of the mark. Have you ever been recommended something completely irrelevant because you once purchased a gift for someone who has very different interests to you, or been bombarded with adverts for a product you bought weeks ago?

By really knowing your customers and what matters to each of them, you can deliver more personalised experiences and there is now a way to find out everything you need to know about your customers, without them having to fill out page upon page of questionnaires. For expansive, accurate, timely data, businesses need look no further than their customers’ social media profiles.

Social media data

Our recent survey of 2,000 adult social network users in the UK showed that 53% are willing to share social data from their social media profiles to see products and content relevant to their interests. But what sort of data is available?

More than half of social network users (54%) have shared their relationship status, 50% their interests and hobbies, 30% share information about holidays and 35% share events they’ve attended. In addition to this (and with the express permission of the user) you can also gain insight from every additional update they may make. Every tweet and status update can carry important signals, which can be used to determine a user’s likes, dislikes, hobbies or plans.

Combined together, these can be analysed to determine their ‘interest fingerprint’. The social data that feeds into an ‘interest fingerprint’ is more valuable than any other source of customer data, because it is accurate, real-time data and comes direct from the source.

According to our research, this type of data is becoming increasingly valuable, with two thirds of social network users saying they only follow people or brands they have a genuine interest in.

Around a third (32%) have also become more selective in the information they share about likes and interests on social networks, which is another area where social data has a big part to play.

Share and share alike…

People spend more of their time on social sites than anywhere else on the web, sharing information, intent and interests.

A significant 56% of social network users confirmed they would log into another website using their Facebook or Twitter profile in return for a more personalised experience. Accessing offers and discounts on relevant products is a key driver, cited by 57%, followed by products based on their interests (41%) and then seeing content that friends and family have engaged with, such as music, videos or articles (34%).

What kind of sites do people share social data with? We found that the most likely are general retailers (39%) and supermarkets (38%), suggesting that personalisation is most valuable when there is a wide variety of products and content to choose from. Other popular verticals for sharing social data are music, travel and film and TV.

This huge volume of data is incredibly powerful, allowing marketers to go far beyond domain specific information, clickstreams and purchase history when formulating their personalisation strategy, targeting intent as opposed to purely using stagnant data.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jack Rogers .