Responsible Targeting: Finding the Goldilocks Zone of Personalized Marketing
Personalization in marketing is more popular than ever before, with 89% of digital businesses investing in the strategy. There are countless benefits to personalizing your ads and marketing materials — including connecting with your audiences more successfully, tailoring ads more effectively, and optimizing your spending.
The catch is, as personalized and targeted advertising becomes more and more common, the people being targeted are catching on and getting savvier. There’s a growing feeling that targeted ads are creepy, invasive, even unsafe; consumers who openly acknowledge the benefits of targeted ads often still feel this way.
There’s an important balance to strike: how do brands keep delivering the benefits of personalized advertising without losing the trust of their audiences and protecting consumers’ privacy?
A marketing tightrope
Many modern consumers love personalization. 91% of participants surveyed say they’re more likely to shop brands that provide offers and recommendations relevant to them, and 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that caters to them with personalized experiences. In many cases, a lack of personalization can even be a dealbreaker; a stunning 80% of frequent shoppers only patronize brands that employ personalization tactics.
In other words, if you sit out this growing marketing trend completely, you’re turning a huge chunk of your potential customer base away. Unfortunately, personalization comes at a cost. It’s impossible to accurately target ads without large amounts of personal data — the collection and usage of which has left some customers feeling increasingly uneasy.
Out of roughly 500 companies surveyed, 79% admitted to collecting data from people living in the US, and 77% collected the data of EU citizens. It’s no wonder 70% of Americans believe their personal data is less secure now than it was five years ago, and 79% worry about how their data is being used by companies.
Showing your customers that you care about their privacy and the safety of their data — and that you aren’t spying on them or buying their information from someone else — is essential. So how can you still gather enough material to personalize your marketing?
The “Goldilocks Zone” of personalization
Collect your data ethically
There are questionable (even illegal) methods of collecting your audience’s data. One wrong way to go about it would be purchasing data from other companies and third parties. A study by HBR found that customers showed 17% less interest in purchasing a product when the data driving the targeted ad was an inference, rather than familiar, willingly submitted information.
Luckily, there are plenty of valid and ethical ways to gather customer data. The ideal way to collect information is by asking directly; you can employ channels like sign-up forms for gated content, social media surveys, email questionnaires, and other transparent methods to collect your data straight from its source. It’ll be totally reliable, and your audience will feel much better about being targeted using data that they volunteered.
Stay transparent and relevant
Customers don’t mind you making use of their data if you do it responsibly. You should always be clear about why you’re asking for their data, how you intend to use it, and what steps you’ll take to keep it safe.
Make sure to show your customers how this data collection will benefit them. If they can see a clear advantage from your data collection (like better ads, less annoying content, and recommendations tailored to their interests), they’ll be much more open to you learning about them. After all, personalization isn’t ultimately about email tags and hyper-specific advertisements. It needs to provide genuinely useful and relevant information every time you connect with your customers or show up on their radar.
Show a clear understanding of your targets’ problems and signal that you know exactly how to solve them. Prove this a few times and your ads and content will start to be welcomed by your audience as what they were actually looking for.
Skip the sensitive stuff
Customers will accept the collection of some types of data much more readily than others. In particular, data that pertains to health, race, or anything to do with sex is usually a big no-go.
In fact, many platforms like Google go as far as banning ads with this kind of subject matter. Depending on what you’re selling, it can be difficult to avoid such topics in your ads, but customers may get extremely upset if they have reason to believe you’re accessing and using information that they’d rather keep confidential.
Personalizing your marketing and targeting your ads is an essential part of successfully growing your business online. Customers expect that you’re using their data to target your ads and improve your chances of connecting with them, and they’re OK with it, in many cases.
The challenge for a marketer is connecting with your audiences through relevant and valuable content while respecting their privacy and confidentiality. Brands that strike this balance have a major advantage.
Timelapse helps grow brands using hyper-targeted ads that are uniquely tailored to your audience and always created and managed ethically and responsibly. To learn how we can help you do the same, get in touch with our team.
