When it comes to Internet marketing, personalization is a key component.
Understanding one’s audience is one of the first steps to developing a marketing plan and its one of the reasons why Paradigm Digital’s approach is so successful. Through exhaustive research and analysis, we develop an Internet marketing plan for your career college that is unique to your audience.
“Personalization is the process of targeting content to individuals based on one or more of the following: who they are; where they are; when, why, and how they access content; and what device they use to access it, according to Scott P. Abel of The Content Wrangler,” wrote Ann Gynn in an article for the Content Marketing Institute. Gynn adds that nearly 95 percent of all business to business organizations make some attempt to segment their content based on their audience, according to CMI’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing research report.
The same B2B research report states that the “top five ways cited include industry trends, profiles of individual decision-makers, company characteristics, stage in buying cycle, and personalized content preferences.”
However, despite the importance of having a personalized marketing approach, it remains a struggle for many businesses and career colleges.
“Given the complexity of the issue and its best practices, it’s no surprise that many marketers are still struggling with how to apply content personalization effectively,” Gynn writes.
In her article, Gynn offered some tips on personalized marketing, which include:
Gathering data on prospective clients
“Content marketers must have access to information about individuals, not persona groups,” Gynn writes. “It requires content and technology.”
Paradigm Digital takes time to understand your desired audience and tailors its marketing strategy around creating content that targets prospective students for your career college.
Continue to track customer interests
“Use your marketing automation tool to monitor what your audience is interested in and personalize further communication based on this,” Gynn writes.
Its important to not only create a specialized Internet marketing plan, but continue to monitor it in such a way that necessary changes can be quickly made in order to make your marketing plan more effective.
Understand your audience
As previously stated, understanding your audience is a key component.
“What it boils down to with content personalization is knowing your audience,” Gynn writes. “It’s critical for content marketers to understand whom they’re communicating with and what type of content their audience wants to consume. Once that understanding is there, personalization can be applied through different content mediums.”
Gynn also adds that its important to know your customers personally.
“To do this well requires acquiring a deep understanding of your [customers],” she says. “Most efforts fail when personalization is treated as a profiling exercise as opposed to achieving human-centered understanding.”
Achieving a personalized strategy to marketing can be challenging, which is why many career colleges and trade schools and looked to Paradigm Digital to help develop an effective plan. A successful Internet marketing plan means not only getting your message in front of prospective students, but engaging them in such a way that they seek out additional information.
Personalization involves more than just an understanding of stats and trends. It requires an understanding of what your specific goals are and how to connect trends with your goals. At Paradigm Digital we work to create an Internet marketing plan that is unique to your school and helps promote your message to the exact demographics you are trying to reach.
The first step is to understand what your goals are, followed by understanding what demographics you need to reach. That’s followed by a strategy and plan that is specialized for your career college that is designed to get results.