Creating Personalized Moments at Scale

By Nina Butler on November 30, 2021

In September we hosted our annual virtual event YOUniverse and heard from some of the biggest brands in MarTech about how using the right technology for automation helps to scale personalized moments throughout the customer journey.

Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Ops Manager at AWS, moderated an amazing panel which included:

• Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing & Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard
• Courtney Smith, Head of ABX at 6sense
• Mark Jung, VP of Marketing at Dooly, and
• Austin Hitchcock, Director of Account Development at Highspot

With so many sales and marketing tools out there, how can you ensure that your teams are using this technology properly to build personalized moments for each buyer – and not just creating more automated touches?

Start with personas

Personalization and technology can work together to help you scale the reach and impact of your marketing efforts. But this only works if you first understand your:

1. target audience
2. desired outcomes, and
3. how your product provides value to specific personas

It’s easy to get caught up in, “trying to create hacks that are not always in the best interest of the buyer,” said Tyler. It’s important to ask yourself, “is it even creating a better experience?”

Use the data you have to perform A/B testing and get feedback on how well your automated messaging is resonating with your personas.

How to use video messaging

Videos can be a powerful way to connect with prospects, whether included in your automated messaging, or one-off. However, you need to be really smart about it.

Austin recommends identifying where the buyer is within their journey by asking, “do they have no idea what your solution does? Or have they heard of you? If you can get that insight, your personalized video messages can align to what is top of mind for them.”

Videos are most impactful when they are hyper-relevant. However, they should be just one moment in your overall outreach to that account or person. Don’t try to say everything about your product in a 4-minute video. Instead, keep them short and reference another piece of follow on content to the buyer. This increases people’s willingness to open and interact with video content and leaves them wanting more personalized moments.

How to use hyper-personalization

This panel spent a lot of time discussing that not all personalization can, nor should, be automated. There are some very high-touch experiences that require hyper-personalization to land.

Hyper personalization can also be called individualization. This is when a sales rep tailors their message for a prospect based on what they’ve learned from online research and through past engagements and activities. This is typically used in one-to-one communication. Darrel says that realistically your team “probably doesn’t have the bandwidth or the capability to do this at a really large scale.” With the tools we have available, we can’t build an automated and hyper-personalized marketing strategy.

Instead, try creating micro-moments of hyper-personalization. For example, Mark shared a case study about a media company that found out the CEO of a prospective customer was really into Batman. They had custom Batman comics made, featuring the CEO fighting crime and solving problems, and distributed them outside the office building.

Mark says that this is how you deliver hyper-personalized moments, “at a company level. It can be something that cascades down.” It’s still very memorable but lets you scale it to thousands of people.

Want to learn more?

Check out the rest of the YOUniverse sessions, including our keynote with Jay Baer, President at Convince & Convert, about how to create experiences that cause conversations.