How much is it growing? It’s estimated that there will be approximately 2.55 billion social network users worldwide by 2018, up from 1.87 billion in 2014.

Real-Time Marketing Personalization

These marketing opportunities are happening in real time. Because it’s instant, you can gain a commercial advantage over your competitors if your processes are quick enough, see: 3 Reasons to Embrace Real-Time Marketing.

According to analyst Bernard Marr, “Big data combined with machine learning algorithms gives marketers the opportunity to personalize their offers to individual customers in real time. Personalize what products and promotions a particular customer sees, even down to sending personalized coupons and offers to a customer’s phone when he walks into a physical location.”

Technology has improved to the point where marketers can gain an insight into user behaviour and preferences at an individual customer level and in real time. The benefit of this is that companies can make their offers much more relevant.

Everyone Is Their Own Marketing Segment

There is no such thing as a Mr or Ms Average. Amalgamating too many people into segments could mean that you serve content that doesn’t really fit any of them.

In the words of Arc Worldwide CEO Ryan Silberman, “Once we understand the different mindsets of the consumers, we can start to communicate with them in different ways.”

It’s all very well targeting your content to a more individualised level but if it fails to get through to those people, then your efforts are wasted. This is where content optimization comes in. The challenge presented by this is being able to see what content is available and using it appropriately. What might have once been categorized manually can be automated, and on the Nexus platform, for example, your collated content is then searchable.

Can this pay off? Microsoft cites the example of a retailer who connected seasonal marketing and promotional messages with localized weather information and saw some product sales increase by 18%.

Data-Driven Content Marketing

The aforementioned use of “big data” means that you can experiment with different kinds of content to see what delivers a better ROI by running tests. Creating personalized messages based on the behaviour patterns of your users and their interests – gleaned from social media – can guide you towards a better return from your content spending.

“Data generates better consumer insight, which opens the door for bespoke impactful brand messaging,” suggested Julian Baring, Adform’s GM of North America, writing in MartechAdvisor. “Tools like data management platforms are instrumental for media planning and executing ad delivery”.

This process can now be significantly automated to improve your ROI. Tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) are playing a greater role and provide the following benefits:

• AI can put together bespoke content combinations at scale
• Machine-learning tools gather and process vast amounts of data
• The software then works out what content suits each user the best
• It can include rich media such as photos or video

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying! Request a demo to find out more on how we can help you.