Insider Insights
5 Tips to Improve Your Approach
to Personalization
December 9, 2020 | Katie Arena
Several events throughout this past year have sparked a massive shift in consumer behavior and preferences, from the rise of e-commerce, to the depreciation of third-party cookies, leaving a lasting impact on the customer-brand relationship. While the road ahead for advertisers is paved with uncertainty, the need for personalization has never been more important for brands to resonate with their audience.
Luckily, personalization at scale can be attainable for all- but only with the right partners and processes in place. As 2020 comes to an end, we’ve compiled a list of tips from experienced Clinchers that are sure to help drive success in the year ahead.
Be S.M.A.R.T. About Your Goal Setting Strategy
Jeff Kepler, Creative Strategy Director
When kicking off the creative strategy process for a client, one of the most important ingredients is to have clear goals. Clear goals help reduce back and forth, minimize chances of error, and can help speed up timelines. They are the foundation for building KPIs, audience messaging, marketing channels, and so on. A great way to outline clear goals is to consider them as SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic, and Time-Bound.
Make Your Optimizations Multi-dimensional
Manu Ferrerio, Head of Personalization EMEA
The last letter of the DCO acronym is often the most under looked when talking about dynamic messaging, but arguably the most important. Different audiences respond differently to different messages, so while it’s fine to have 10,000 creative variations, without proper optimization you are only getting half the picture.
Constantly test your assumptions against business metrics and you’ll be surprised about the outcome. Many conversations around optimization focus on design attributes (e.g. does the red button outperform the blue one), however advertisers should also apply optimization to featured products and promotional strategies. Think about which product delivers the most clicks, conversions, and sales-by-audience; as well as product bundles or “often bought together” features. Testing these variants against each other will uncover valuable customer insights that can be used to fuel other paid (social, programmatic, DOOH, CTV) and owned (DMP/CDP) channels and deliver better results.
Bring Your DCO Partner into the Conversation Pre-Production
Eric Anderson, Account Director
You wouldn’t make a grocery list after you’ve already made the trip to the grocery store. And if you do, it’s just going to be for things you forgot to get the first time. Bring your DCO partner into the conversation before you enter the production phase, so that you can first align on your intended creative strategy before “going to the store”. Once you have this alignment, it makes your conversation with the team producing the creative incredibly straightforward and keeps you from forgetting anything important… almost like having a list.
Invest in Omnichannel Integrations..and Speed
Taylor West, Head of Sales
When thinking about activating a personalized omnichannel campaign it’s important to partner with a company that is integrated with every major and emerging buying platform (ie: DV360, The Trade Desk, Facebook/Instagram, Roku, Hulu, Tik Tok, Pinterest, etc.) to ensure maximum distribution.
Speed to market is also an important consideration when choosing a partner. Some personalization companies demand long term commitments and ask for 2 to 3 month set up times. Clinch can be up and running within 10 days from brief to activation.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Rob Dobbler, Senior Ad Operations & Client Success Manager
Before joining the adtech world, I worked in construction, where everyone abides by the cardinal rule: “Measure Twice, Cut Once”. Attention to detail is extremely important. If you cut the last piece of wood too short you could jeopardize the entire project. In a similar fashion, when setting up a Media campaign, it’s crucial that you double/triple check everything…from creative to KPI. One wrong move could jeopardize an entire launch.
