Digital marketing is constantly evolving because there is this undying need to enhance the return on investment. The more information a firm can supply a customer with minimal investment the more ongoing business the customer will do with that firm. In the early days of personalization, data was used to group people together based on their personal preferences. But that process still required a certain amount of generalization and guessing on the part of digital marketing professionals.
In recent months, personalization has evolved into the much more efficient individualization. This means that instead of dealing with trying to group a target audience into segments, you are dealing with individuals. Not only has this idea proven to be much easier than personalization, it has also proven to significantly increase ROI.
With personalization, a marketing professional had to wait and see how a group would react to certain content and then speculate on how similar people would react to that same content in different situations. With individualization, the content is delivered to an individual and their response is immediately recorded. There is no guessing and there is no waiting for results. Marketers know right away whether or not a subject likes the content they are reading and how effective the call to action really is.
Before individualization, marketing experts would create promotions that would try to attract certain types of consumers. The problem is that those promotional campaigns were put out to a broad audience to try and appeal to certain parts of the target crowd. With individualization, the marketer already knows what the individual wants and can create promotions that will be much more effective and a lot less costly to the client.
Big data makes it possible to collect valuable information on millions of individuals. With that information, marketers can provide each consumer with a customized shopping experience that will entice the consumer to come back to the retail website and buy more products. By focusing on the individual, marketers can offer much more pertinent information to consumers that gives consumers the options they want without all of the unnecessary extra data.
Marketing professionals know that consumers buy from many different computing platforms, but there was never an effort to focus on a uniform experience across platforms for the individual. With individualization, consumers get customized experiences across all computing platforms that contain information that the consumer wants without forcing the consumer to wade through irrelevant information.
The advent of big data makes it possible for digital marketing professionals to focus their efforts on appealing to individuals instead of market segments. This significantly increases the return on investment for the client, and it makes it possible for digital marketers to put each individual consumer in a world of their own where they see only the products and information that interests them.
