Personalization And Its Effect On Advertising, Content Marketing

I was settling into my seat on a Southwest Airlines flight from Sacramento to John Wayne Airport when Elton John’s “Your Song” started playing on one of my favorite Spotify playlists. After singing the verses (to myself, of course), I found myself wondering if Elton John and Bernie Taupin imagined, back in 1970, a day when ‘personalization’ would be so central to society, in general, and marketing, in particular.

I have been thinking about personalization a lot lately, because of happenings in both the ad market and in content marketing. The fact is, the martech experience no longer starts and stops with advertising. Because of the trend towards personalization, the content marketing business is on fire and we at R2 Media, recognize that fact. While we have been involved in content marketing for years, we have long specialized in short form content.

This past month we created a new content marketing workgroup inside R2 Media dedicated to long form content marketing, including White Papers, EBooks, Podcasts and expanded video content. We will be rolling out the offering to our client base in the weeks ahead. In advance of the client rollout, we began working on long form content for our own promotional use. In fact, last week we launched our first Ebook on Omnichannel Advertising and we will be releasing our second Ebook on Multicultural Marketing in March. In April we will be launching a series of educational video vignettes, on topics including Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, among others.

Content marketing has been a focus of mine because it is hot and getting hotter. According to market research firm, Technivo, the size of the business is estimated to increase by over $580 Billion between 2022 and 2027, that’s a compounded annual growth rate of 16.37%. That’s not too shabby, by any measure. Today, it is critically important for agencies to message at all customer touch points — in-store, media, content, events, even the chatbot on a website — if they want to create and promote dynamic brands.

Companies that know their customers, and use what they know to craft specific messaging, tend to grow faster than their competitors. In fact, according to a McKinsey & Company report on ‘personalization’ published in 2021, “companies that grow faster drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.” The report goes on to say that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76 percent of consumers get frustrated when personalized interactions don’t happen.

From an advertising perspective, R2 Media has been serving personalized interactions for years, making sure we are serving the right ad, to the right person, at the right time. Over the last several quarters we have invested heavily in an ad stack that ensures positive outcomes for our business partners. We have been leaning into data and analytics, investing in rapid activation capabilities, committing to an agile operating model and investing in talent and training. All of these things have paid off for us. But now it is time to close the loop, bringing the same aggressive, customized effort to the content marketing business.

Being a full service agency in 2023 is a lot different then being a full service agency in 2010. Generating creative, and planning and buying media, are still vital to the process, but making sure those messages speak to your customer in a way that is intimate and personal is absolutely necessary. Then, carrying that custom messaging through all marketing interactions with your customer is critical.

As we wrote in our Omnichannel EBook, to maximize the experience for today’s customer, brands must create a seamless series of consumer contact points — marrying different interactions, including advertising and content marketing.