Here’s a question every marketer I know would love the answer to:
Why do people like what they like?
Why do some movies knock records out of the park and some do a belly flop? Why do some books launch an empire (hello, Harry Potter) while others grow dusty on a back shelf?
Recently, our CTO, Aaron Raddon, took this question on with MarTech Advisor in a piece entitled No, not even Keanu Reeves can save your lame content strategy!
So, what’s the answer? How do we figure out which movies and books and marketing messages will actually appeal to our audiences—and not just to general audiences, but to specific individuals interacting with your brand?
According to Aaron, the answer is customer data.
To get his full take on the subject, check out the article. Or read on for a few highlights.
The failure of too-broad customer data
The movie industry is hit or miss. Sometimes they knock their own expectations out of the park (as in the case of Wonder Woman) and sometimes they don’t recover what they spent (as in the case of The Happytime Murders).
The reason for this? They’re using broad customer segments to make content decisions.
As Aaron explained, “Most customers don’t want seven choices of what to watch, they want seven hundred choices grouped into highly specialized categories that match their exact tastes.”
This is why Netflix is steadily growing while the movie industry’s growth chart has a lot more hills and valleys. Because knowing customers’ exact tastes and curating content for those tastes is what companies like Netflix are best at.
The answer? Customer segments of one.
If the problem here is too-broad customer data, the answer is narrowing in. Not just to small clusters. Not just to segments of “people who like action films” or “romantic comedy watchers.” But narrowing even further in until you have a segment of one.
One person with their specific, unique mish-mash of interests. One person who loves Scary Cult Movies from the 1980s or Showbiz Movies Based on Real Life or Raunchy TV Comedies Featuring a Strong Female Lead (those are all real Netflix categories, by the way). One person who you can target with the things you already know they love.
But wait…how do we serve segments of one?
Of course, the idea of serving individuals as individuals is pretty compelling. But if your customer base is 10,000 or 100,000 or 10 million—treating people as individuals sounds like a tricky prospect.
So, how do you serve people based on their unique interests in real-time on the channels they prefer with the right messages?
The answer is a best-in-breed Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Lytics, which collects your data, uses built-in data science to understand your customers and deliver insights about what they want, and allows you to automate the process so that your marketing team of two or 10 or 200 can serve personalized experiences to millions.
If that sounds like the dream (it is), we’d love to show you how.
