How Top Marketers are Winning with Personalization

Marketers, in a professional sense, is there anything more satisfying than having a successful campaign? We get the warm fuzzies, the pats on the back from sales, it's all around pretty great. Now assuming we all enjoy these same feels, we have to get serious about something we're all familiar with. It's personalization.

But for us to dig all the way into it, we've chosen a truly legendary album that's mastered this art. all right team we welcome back our listeners and viewers to our eighth and final episode of season three we have touched on a little bit of everything have we not today team i don't know what else We'd love to talk about in the way of data. Has AI been beaten to death? Perhaps at this point in time.

I'm sure somebody will argue that we have not covered all of our bases yet. But we want to leave today with our lovely friend Stacey Daly joining us for the finale. Who else but Stacey, of course. We want to talk about personalization.

It's thrown around everywhere, but it's rarely talked about in practice. So what does it look like? What's real? What's possible?

And then we want to dive into what happens to be maybe my favorite record of the season yet. Mr. Frank Ocean gives us Blonde, and he allows us to dissect it in the way of personalized experiences and what it meant for his listeners, and better yet, for our viewers as well. So, Mr.

Saka, would you take us through the parallels of this and today's topic? Yeah, I think what we were looking at with this album was really the deeply personal nature of both Frank's story as they were releasing this album. He's a very private individual, right? and it kind of added to that that mystique uh around the album um but then the album itself it was you know kind of a mainstream uh hit talked about uh widely and yet when you listen to it sometimes you feel like you're in his bedroom right on like a four track with some of the recordings Slow, but...

It's brilliant, but it was a level of, like, he could have produced a highly slick R&B record, but he chose something incredibly intimate, and I think his fans appreciated that as well. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Stacey, you've listened to the record, perhaps, in the past. What did you like about it?

Well, I did, but, I mean, first I've got to say, when you said mainstream, did you, like, cringe a little bit inside? A little bit. A little bit of you died? Just half of it.

Yeah, out of this season, this was my favorite album as well. And I even saw Beyonce had a little input into it, too. My girl over there. So, got to love that.

Was it Pink and White? Pink and White, perhaps? Pink and White, yeah. Pink and White's my favorite, yeah.

Yep, yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. That's the way every day goes Every time we've no control I thought the scene, it was just very, I liked the intimate, but it wasn't too much where like, whoa, this is like getting like awkward. I definitely didn't get that feel, but more of like, okay, I'm actually starting to get to know it. Like I never really feel that way about a lot of the music these days, especially.

But I think he did it in a way that wasn't creepy, actually, but like really well done. Yeah, yeah. It's a special moment. Frank gives us a record once every blue moon, it seems rightly.

Like, there's a great distance between Channel Orange and Blonde and then whatever is the next iteration of his career. You're right in the way of the intimacy setting. I think even the fidelity of the records is kind of a peril to it, where he embraced some imperfections. And sonically, you could have pushed things in the way of the mastering and the mixing to say, oh, my God, it just, like, wows you.

But he allowed his message and what he was allowing from instrumentation, which was primarily a lot of guitar and minimalistic elements, to kind of tell that story and to be the canvas for the message itself. I thought it was interesting. It was a list of who's who in the way of, like, heavy hitters. But then also a list of who the heck is this as well.

There were some people I was not familiar with, even some Japanese rappers I don think many of us were familiar with that made some appearances So I found it to be really interesting My highlight of this record was when Andre 3000 joins the party adds a ton of energy to a track that you wouldn have expected on Anytime Andre 3000 approaching 50 gets on the microphone is a gift to us hip hop fans. And he gave us that for this record as well. So I love it. It's, it is a personal experience and we're going to talk about personal experiences look like.

And I'd like to start with what does it look like in practice? There's some misconceptions of what it really means and what people can do. Start us off. Yeah, I think personalization has been kind of a topic for many years now, but I think it's been rather underwhelming in practice, right?

We've personalized on location. We've personalized maybe on device type, but I think the true promise of personalization hasn't yet been realized, and what we're working on and what we're really working towards with the direction of Leadpages is the ability to really meet that promise, where I think it's very underwhelming in the market today. But how do we start to personalize on all of the data that we have access to? So once we're able to enrich our leads, once we have demographic and firmographic information, once we know who our anonymous visitors are, there are so many personalized experiences that we can create from there.

I think there's also been another bottleneck in that to properly personalize, you had to create every single workflow for personalization. Right. So most, I think most of the companies that I've seen trying to do it, they maybe get one or two, maybe three kind of if else statements down the line. Right.

Where you've kind of got a couple experiences to your core personas. But personalization is much more than that. Right. Every customer is way more dynamic than a generalized persona.

So how do you actually speak to them to where they are in that moment? I think that's what marketers are hoping for in personalization, but hasn't yet been realized in the market where there is no one singular product that can say that's how you get it done. And so I think we're kind of on the precipice here where finally the technology is catching up to the promise of it. And I do believe we can get there to a place where we can do true personalization at scale that will move the needle.

I love it. Stace, can we fulfill the promise in practice? Always. All right, there we go.

I think the thing that comes to my mind as you're talking about this is there's a stat, I think, from Salesforce that said 80% of people say that the business experience, kind of how they experience discovering your business and all that is just as important as its product or experience or product or its service. And so with that, 80% majority of people, that just harkens to that people are dying for this personalization. And you see all these personalization stats out there, right?

Like how many people want them, how much more effective it is. But to your point, really what it is right now is it's the landing page or the ad is in your language. Or the other piece would be the device type. Oh, it looks really good on a phone, your landing page.

Like that's really the personalization. It's pretty rudimentary. Yeah, we're talking about. And when we're thinking about a personalized experience, I mean, those are givens, I feel like.

Those are table stakes. It's not like, whoa, I can't believe it looks so great on my phone and it's in English. Hot damn, I better buy. There it is, yeah.

Well, Salesforce reports that consumers are twice as likely to click on a personalized ad and then go into that experience. McKinsey similarly follows up with 71 of consumers expect companies to deliver experiences personalized. And the vast majority of those are frustrated when they're not given it as well. So marketers have marketed it as something they should expect, but it's not delivered on in practice.

So we're falling short a little bit, but solutions are ahead. So the future fast forwards, what is possible in an ideal state? We've talked a little bit about it. Can we go a layer further?

Yeah, so I think what we want from personalization is to be able to speak to the customer where they're at and to who they are. Where do they sit within an organization? How big is that organization? Why are they seeking out your solution?

Like at Leadpages, we've got 15 industries that matter that use it. Each has a very different use case for it. So right now we kind of giving them the big talking points Why do you need a landing page But if we able to then cater to real estate or to health care how much more effective will our campaigns be Because now we're speaking to the actual problem that they're trying to solve versus the generalized problem that we've been stuck with today because that's how we can reach them.

But once we know who's visiting, now we can start to cater to them. And I think it happens at the point of visit, but it also happens throughout the funnels. So what do they do with you? What blog posts are they reading?

Can we pick up on some of their interests? And then can we then cater their journey? And with generative AI and some of the advancements, it feels like that's possible, where we don't need to have every single thing mapped out, but we can start to have AI be that decision engine that we had to set up manually previously, and some of the content creation so that you can really be speaking to the customer's needs and what they've shown us that they're interested in. Yeah, I think the key part for me in that is the efficiency or the speed.

Yeah, it's sounding what you're talking about. It's not like, all right, here is this landing, 15 landing pages for each industry, then the associated ads, and then, okay, if this, this, it's like, nope. The first time they come in, we know that they are in healthcare, so they're going to get this ad and then this landing page. and AI is just, all right, boom, here it goes.

It's not like there's, all right, a workflow going on in the background. Okay, this, this, this, this, this. It takes a little while, but it's that instantaneous, and it just goes off of what the potential customer is doing right then and there. And I think that that speed is the important part.

It's just as important as the personalization, too, because if you have to sit and wait, or, oh, I'm going to get an email tomorrow, or I'm going to see a blog post in the next few days that pertains, oh, I could change. My industry might not change, but maybe where I am in the funnel, maybe I'm more at the consideration stage now because a few days have gone by. But the fact that it can be triggered instantly off of what I'm doing or consuming, to me, that's the huge value. We're only as good as the inputs we put into something, right?

And with third-party data, which most of us all do our personalized experiences on, there's some risk. Data isn't always exactly accurate. Michael, is it worth the risk if we deliver, say, 15% of customer experiences that are actually wrong? Well, I think it depends what those customer experiences are.

Generally, I think if we're crafting our experience so that it can be adaptable, it's probably okay. Yeah. Right? Because are you going to get better conversion than 85%?

Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. Right?

And if 15% needs to be a bit adaptable, oh, we thought we were in real estate, you're actually over here. Okay. We can learn that. Right?

There's ways to collect the information as we go. We made some assumptions. They were wrong. I don't think it's a deal.

I mean, look, if it's 50%, it's probably unacceptable. But if we can get better conversion on 85%, I think it's worth the breakage. Your risk tolerance, Stace. I'm guessing you're similarly a gambler, Robidice.

I just heard I can be wrong 15% of the time, and that's okay. There we go. I mean, I might have heard 20 or 25, 2, somewhere in there. So I'm feeling good about that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm a big believer in maximizing or maximizing your strengths versus shoring up your weaknesses just in life. And I think this is kind of the same motto of let's just go after and get really personal. Yep, we're going to get some wrong along the way, but the gains are going to be so much larger that who cares?

Again, that maximizing your strengths, play to your strengths. I just I think that you're always going to win out. Now, will you have the patience to see that? I don't know.

you probably won't have the patience, but others might. And so that's where I think the trick comes in, is like understanding, do I have to be patient or do we actually have to pivot to something else? Yeah, let me try to revel you another question here. First-party data, we often collect and feel pretty good about it, right?

People come to us from the tent, they give us the things that we require, and we're like, I would personalize all day long on that. But a lot of us are going to have to use third-party data to do this work at scale. So should we put greater emphasis on first-party data collection, knowing that the purity of it and that personalized experience is maybe 100% good, Or, should we say the hell with it and say, give me volume, give me scale, and just take that third party data and ship it out to the best of our abilities and maybe accept that 15%.

There's a weight, right? So, I think the third party data can help you get to the first party data. So if we can better cater their experience it allows us that moment to earn the trust to then get the first data that we need to further the experience I think the relationship isn a single touchpoint right So maybe the first touchpoint is rooted in third-party data because that's what we know at that moment. And now we're more informed than we were before, right?

Before, we knew nothing. This is a visitor. We know nothing about them. Well, now we know a couple things that may be true about them.

Can we start to cater the experience? And then can we learn from them, who are you really? Right? But if we don't earn their trust in that first experience or at least give them a pitch that is relative to them, then we may never get that first party data.

So I think it's a combination. It's a weighted. We can be more assured with that first-party data, but I see no problem leveraging both in order to create that initial experience. I like that.

You manage a few data analysts. You're lost in your story on this. What do you feel? Well, before you get into that, I was actually just thinking of an analogy.

It's like before you go on a date, you stalk them. Yeah, right. Like you're looking at their LinkedIn. Well, some people don't.

Some people don't. I know your husband. I'm going to tell him this. But I think that it's really common.

Or before you interview someone, maybe it's not a date, like knowing a little bit about their background of, oh, look, they grew up in Wisconsin. I'm actually from, like little things like that that you wouldn't know unless you engaged, but knowing, be like, hey, I grew up in Wisconsin too. Like you automatically, there's that connection right away versus like slogging through a really awkward dinner or waiting till that first drink hits. And then you can maybe get into some of that good stuff.

It kind of like just speeds the process. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, yeah. Do we want to use 50 data points to build what we think is the very specific experience they want? Probably not. But I think if we start to look at campaigns, not just as single landing pages, but as the experience a customer has that goes through until conversion, you could be giving your sales team more information about this customer.

You could be pre-qualifying them to see. We have both sales-driven conversions and we have organic conversions. And if we can learn what's the better method, do we want to push this customer into a sales conversation? And can we do that more effectively?

Well, now we're wasting less of our time only spending it with the customers that want that experience. Whereas if people are just kind of on the fence, but they have a higher propensity to convert organically, well, let's lead them down that path. And so I think even those types of decisions can happen further down the funnel. And then you go from third-party data to heavy first-party data in order to cater them.

And it's not just your messaging that we're catering. It could be our cadence of communication, right? Are we writing them every day? Are we writing them weekly or writing them monthly?

Where are they on the buyer cycle? and where do they need to be? Are they decision makers? So do we need to give them information so that they can go tell their boss that they need to hire us?

Or are they able to make that decision, put in the credit card, and go forward? All of that could just cater how we speak to them if we understand who they are, what type of company they're at, and where they sit within the organization. I love that. As we dive into many of these advanced marketing topics, it seems like it's always a crawl, walk, run approach.

iterative, get something in market. Just do something. It's always better than doing nothing. It's that MVP mindset.

Just get something out of it. You will learn. You will better yourself. Chris was just talking about that.

We don't fail. We learn all the time. And this is another exercise for marketers. Just do something to get yourself out of the starting blocks.

You'll find some momentum as you continue to go on. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think we can put a ball on this.

Eight episodes in the third season. Heck of a day. Not too bad. Three episodes with a lovely Dally.

We got to talk about Frank Ocean, Animal Collective, of every data thing ever possibly known to mankind perhaps as well. Is there anything we forgot? I don't think so either. We've ran out of words perhaps to say.

We hope our listeners and our viewers have enjoyed season three of On The Record. We hope to do this much more. Many of things to come. Michael, thank you for your time.

Thank you. Stacey, thank you for your time. And we'll talk for you soon.