Wikipedia defines personalization as “tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals.” At present, personalization is one of the hottest trends in marketing. Enterprises combine digital communication tools and data analytics solutions to influence customers and prospects by offering individualized product offerings and brand messages.

Why is Personalization in Marketing Extremely Important?

Many surveys have highlighted the ineffectiveness of old-fashioned marketing strategies in influencing customers and prospects. In the digital age, no brand can boost customer acquisition by basting generic advertising messages at regular intervals. Customers and prospects these days expect brands to provide personalized experiences.

Leading brands have already switched from traditional marketing to personalized marketing. They meet the expectations of prospects and customers by implementing personalization in marketing in various ways. Here are some important statistics that depict the huge significance of personalization in marketing.

• 90% of consumers in the USA find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing.
• 80% of consumers prefer brands that provide personalized experiences.
• 91% of consumers shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.
• 72% of consumers engage only with personalized messaging.
• 63% of consumers abandon brands that use poor personalization tactics.

At the same time, a significant percentage of consumers are ready to share personal behavioral data, purchase history, and preferences with brands to get personalized experiences. That is why; no business can drive customer acquisition and customer retention without investing in personalization in marketing. They must create individualized experiences for prospects to convert them into customers.

How Brands Implement Personalization in Marketing?

Leading brands already boost customer acquisition and revenue growth by running personalized marketing campaigns. Ecommerce companies recommend relevant products to customers based on their purchase history and preferences. Likewise, streaming platforms use recommendation engines to increase subscription renewals.

However, every enterprise implements personalization in marketing in a distinct way. They invest in data analytics tools to plan and execute personalized marketing campaigns based on real-time data. We can understand how brands improve personalization in marketing by discussing some of their strategies and best practices.

Data Collection and Analysis

The outcome of personalized marketing campaigns depends on meeting customers’ needs and expectations. Brands need to identify potential customers along with answering important questions like what they have done, what they want, and what they expect. Marketers answer these important questions using specialized software like data management platforms and data analytics solutions.

Data management platforms help them collect real-time information about customers and marketing campaigns. At the same time, data analytics solutions help them gain insights and detect trends by analyzing large volumes of customer data. These personalized solutions make it easier for marketers to send the right message to the right prospect/customer at the right time.

Buyer Persona Creation

The real-time data creates opportunities for marketers to represent the ideal customers in a semi-fictional way by creating buyer personas. Buyer personas help marketers answer important questions like what customers do, what they like to do, and how they spend their time. Hence, it becomes easier for marketers to know the ideal customer and personalize marketing messages according to her needs and preferences.

Audience Segmentation

While planning marketing campaigns, brands target customers with varying needs and preferences. They divide customers into multiple segments based on their interests, needs, and preferences.  Marketers often segment customers according to their current position in the buyer’s journey. The segmentation makes it easier for them to send messages and content tailored according to customers’ interests and preferences.

Web Behavior Monitoring

Brands divert visitors to their websites by running multichannel marketing campaigns. Websites create opportunities for them to monitor and understand the behavioral pattern of customers and prospects. There are many tools that help marketers collect and analyze information about website visitors. These tools help marketers understand customer behavior using important metrics like time spent on the website, pages visited, and bounce rate.

Location-Based Targeting

Sending the right message to the right customer through the right channel is the basic principle of personalization in marketing. Brands make marketing messages more impactful by focusing on deciding the right time of the day and the right day of the week to send them. International brands consider time zones when deciding when to send the marketing message. They send messages to customers at the right time using location-based targeting techniques.

Targeted Email Campaigns

Most websites request customers to share personal information using sign-up forms. The information shared by a prospect helps marketers understand a prospect’s needs and expectations. Marketers leverage this information to influence potential customers by sending personalized email messages. They deliver a variety of content to the prospect according to her position in the buyers’ journey. Brands invest in email marketing automation tools to send individualized emails to customers at the right time.

Custom Video Messaging

Modern consumers spend most of their digital media time watching videos. The massive popularity of online videos creates opportunities for brands to engage potential customers by sending videos with custom messaging. The personalized message makes the prospect connect with the brand and remember it while placing orders. But businesses have to invest in additional resources to scale customer video messaging campaigns.

Social Media Marketing

Social networks create opportunities for brands to collect customer information along with keeping the customer engaged. A brand can keep prospects and customers engaged by posting a variety of content. At the same time, marketers can send personalized messages to customers on social media. They continue the conversation as customers respond to the messages. The information collected from social networking platforms helps marketers deliver personalized messages to customers through other marketing channels.

Conclusion

Personalization is currently one of the hottest marketing trends. Businesses personalize various marketing campaigns to improve customer experience, influence purchase decisions, and drive sales conversion. But a brand can implement personalization in marketing in a variety of ways. Every brand should decide the right way to personalize marketing campaigns by understanding customers and prospects based on real-time data collected from diverse sources.

While making a purchase decision, consumers compare multiple options. They finalize two options after conducting a cost-benefit analysis. But they often change their preferences when they are presented with a third option that is less attractive than the two options. Decoy effective marketing focuses on making a customer choose the most-expensive option by presenting a less-attractive option.

According to Wikipedia,

“In marketing, the decoy effect (or attraction effect or asymmetric dominance effect) is the phenomenon whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.”

Most retailers these days increase sales revenue by introducing decoy products. Leading academics have shown how companies boost the sale of products and services by introducing decoy products. They use decoy effect marketing strategies to make consumers choose a more expensive or profitable option by changing their performance.

How Does Decoy Effect Marketing Work?

Decoy effect marketing focuses on changing a consumer’s preferences by introducing an inferior third option. We can understand how decoy effect marketing works based on the often-cited example of popcorn. For instance, a consumer is comparing a large bag of popcorn and a small bag of popcorn.

The large bag of popcorn costs $6.5 while the small bag of popcorn costs $5. The consumer will opt for the small bag of popcorn to save $1. But the seller will make her buy the large bag of popcorn by introducing a medium bag of popcorn that costs $6.

The medium bag of popcorn will make the consumer feel that he becomes profitable by buying the large bag of popcorn. Hence, the decoy effect is a psychological pricing strategy that makes consumers consider price instead of value while buying a product or service.

How Do Businesses Use Decoy Effect Marketing?

Enterprises from various sectors use decoy effect marketing techniques to increase sales revenue. They launch decoy products that appear similar to high-value products but differ in a single feature like volume or price. But every company uses these psychological pricing strategies in a specific way.

For instance, some businesses introduce a single decoy product to keep a consumer’s decision-making process simple and fast. At the same time, many companies introduce multiple decoy products to make the consumer feel that she is buying the most-expensive product at a good price.

While planning decoy effect marketing campaigns, decision-makers focus on choosing the best-suited price and offering it at the right price. In addition to considering the prices of other products in the set, they review the pricing strategy of competitors.

What are the Major Advantages of Decoy Effect Marketing?

At present, leading e-commerce companies and cloud-based software providers leverage decoy effect marketing to get incremental revenue. At the same time, decoy effect marketing techniques are used widely by enterprises from various sectors to make consumers buy profitable products. Hence, decoy effect marketing helps businesses leverage a slew of benefits.

Reduces Available Options

Too many options often make a customer’s decision-making process complex. Also, additional options increase the chances of a consumer abandoning the profitable product. Decoy effect marketing helps brands reduce the number of options available to a buyer. At the same time, the brand can influence the consumer’s preferences by offering limited and selected options.

Boosts Sale of Profitable Products

Businesses do not expect consumers to purchase decoy products. Instead, they launch decoy products as a psychological pricing strategy to make customers buy more-expensive products. Hence, decoy marketing strategies help businesses increase revenue and profit simultaneously by boosting the sale of profitable products.

Sell Low-Performing Products

Multiple products launched by the same company differ from each other in the category of sales numbers. Businesses find it challenging to increase the sale of certain products despite running multichannel marketing campaigns.

They can boost the sales number of such products using decoy effect marketing techniques. They can make consumers buy the underperforming products by showing decoy products with higher price tags.

Increase Sales Revenue

Brands use decoy effective marketing techniques to boost the sale of high-performing and poorly-performing products. They can make customers buy profitable products by introducing decoy products. Likewise, they can boost the sale of poorly-performing products by increasing the price of decoy products. Leading ecommerce companies leverage decoy effect marketing to increase sales revenue consistently.

What are the Major Disadvantages of Decoy Effect Marketing?

Leading brands use decoy effect marketing strategies to boost the sale of their products and services. But businesses can leverage this psychological pricing strategy only by overcoming some of the major disadvantages of decoy effect marketing.

May Impact Customer Experience

While creating decoy products, companies often prioritize price over value. They make consumers opt for more-expensive products by influencing their subconscious minds. But consumers expect additional benefits or values while paying more for a product.

Some consumers further impact brand reputation by posting negative comments and reviews. Hence, a business cannot retain customers without adding more features to high-value products. Its decoy effect pricing strategy must focus on value and pricing simultaneously.

Needs Solid Strategizing

As noted earlier, the decoy effect is a psychological pricing strategy. The strategy will fail when a business does not set the price of decoy products inaccurately. A business can leverage the strategy only by determining the right prices.

Decision-makers need to review their own and competitors’ pricing strategies to ensure that the decoy product will make the consumer choose the most expensive option. Hence, businesses have to invest in sophisticated tools to make data-driven decisions while launching a decoy product.

Conclusion

Decoy effect marketing focuses on making consumers choose a more expensive product by presenting them with a less attractive option. Companies and startups across sectors use decoy effect marketing techniques to increase revenue and profits.

But decoy effect marketing, like other marketing strategies, has its advantages and disadvantages. A business can increase sales revenue consistently only by implementing decoy marketing techniques in the right way and under the right circumstances.

Also, it needs the pricing strategy regularly to influence consumers psychologically to buy profitable products. Leading brands ensure that decoy effective marketing techniques boost sales without affecting customer experience and customer loyalty.

Digital marketing methods create opportunities for your business or startup to communicate with existing and potential customers in a cost-effective and measurable way. But consumers these days interact with your business or brand using multiple channels and touchpoints.

Your business can boost lead generation and sales conversion only by delivering the right message to the target audience through the top digital marketing channels. Hence, you can streamline communication and marketing activities across channels and touchpoints by implementing a digital marketing strategy.

In addition to boosting lead generation and conversion, the digital marketing strategy will help your business accomplish multiple goals – enhancing online presence, reaching a wider audience, growing market share, improving brand recognition, and gaining a competitive edge.

Before making a digital marketing strategy, you must answer important questions like who is the ideal customer, what your ideal customer wants, where to find ideal customers, and how to influence their purchase decision. At the same time, you should create a solid strategy by integrating crucial components of a digital marketing strategy.

9 Critical Components You Must Integrate to Create a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy

1. SMART Marketing Goals

Your digital marketing strategy can drive lead generation and sales conversion only by covering multiple channels and touchpoints. Hence, you must set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals.

The specific and measurable marketing goals will help you plan the tasks and activities to be performed by digital marketers. Also, you can schedule marketing campaigns to achieve predefined goals in a specific timeframe. 

2. Competition Analysis

In addition to engaging customers, the digital marketing strategy must focus on outperforming competitors. While making the strategy, you must conduct research to identify the channels and strategies used by your online competitors to acquire and retain customers.

You can make the marketing strategy more effective by emulating the tactics that work for competitors. However, it is also important to outperform competitors by refining their strategies based on the latest data and emerging trends.

3. Buyer Persona

You can influence and engage customers more effectively only by understanding their purchase behavior, buying patterns, and paying capacity. For instance, you can decide the time a customer takes to make a buying decision based on her buying behavior.

Likewise, you can understand why and how a customer purchases by understanding her buying pattern. That is why; your digital marketing strategy must focus on identifying and depicting the ideal customer based on real-time data and market research.

You can identify the ideal customer for your product or service by creating detailed buyer personas. As a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer, the buyer persona will help you identify and define the ideal customer based on important information like age, gender, marital status, education level, location, household income, preferences, and pain points.

Also, you can use the buyer persona as a tool to decide where to find ideal customers, how to communicate with them, and how to influence their purchase decisions by delivering the right content and message.

4. Channels and Touchpoints

Customers these days interact with a brand using various channels, touchpoints, and devices. Your digital marketing strategy must focus on connecting and communicating with the target audience through their preferred channels.

It is always important to communicate with customers using multiple channels – organic search, social media, paid ads, and online forums. At the same time, your strategy must focus on delivering messages to the target audience at the right time and through the right channel.

5. Website

The digital marketing strategy will focus on diverting more traffic to your website. But you can convert the website visitors into leads and customers only when your website keeps them engaged. While creating the digital marketing strategy must focus on boosting the website’s user experience consistently.

In addition to making the website easy to access and navigate, you must create high-quality website content. Also, you should test the website regularly to identify and fix the issues affecting its user experience and digital marketing performance.

6. Data

Businesses these days operate in volatile environments where market trends and customer preferences change frequently. You can make a digital marketing strategy successful only by meeting the existing and emerging needs of customers.

You must make the digital marketing strategy data-driven using data analytics. Data analytics tools identify patterns and detect trends by analyzing large volumes of historical and real-time data. They make it easier for you to refine digital marketing strategies by providing actionable insights.

7. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

You can never predict the outcome of a digital marketing campaign accurately in an evolving digital environment. You can know what is working and what is not working only by measuring the performance of individual digital marketing campaigns regularly and accurately.

Your strategy should define the KPIs to be used for measuring the performance of digital marketing campaigns. For instance, the strategy should define different sets of KPIs for SEO campaigns and paid advertisement campaigns.

8. Budget

Some digital marketing campaigns are more expensive than others. For instance, you have to incur additional expenses to run paid advertisement campaigns than search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing campaigns.

Hence, you need to combine the right digital marketing methods by conducting a cost-and-benefit analysis. Your digital marketing strategy must focus on combining the right digital marketing methods to achieve goals without going over budget.

9. Automation

You have to deploy skilled content creators and experienced digital marketers to perform communication and marketing activities. Also, you have to focus on boosting their productivity and creativity consistently to boost digital marketing campaigns. Your organization can save both resources and costs through digital marketing automation.

In addition to automating routine tasks, digital marketing tools help you plan and build campaigns based on real-time data. Also, you can use the tools to get higher returns by tracking, measuring, and refining digital marketing campaigns regularly.

Conclusion

A formal digital marketing strategy will help your company or startup accomplish SMART marketing goals. But you can make the digital marketing strategy more effective by leveraging cutting-edge technologies and real-time customer data. Also, you must keep the digital marketing strategy flexible enough to adopt emerging trends and new channels.

Eminent researchers believe that the world economy is headed for a recession in 2023. The global recession will decline the valuation of startups. Also, the huge funding crunch will make it challenging for startups to sustain business growth. Entrepreneurs and founders can overcome the funding crunch only by achieving profitability.

They will try to survive the funding crunch by accelerating customer acquisition and increasing sales revenue consistently. Likewise, they will try to maintain a positive cash flow by curtailing upfront and ongoing costs. Hence, startups will explore ways to promote and sell their products/services aggressively without escalating marketing costs.

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you should focus on interacting with existing and potential customers using multiple channels and touchpoints.  But your digital marketing strategy for startups must curtail costs and increase returns by combining a slew of low-cost and budget-friendly marketing tactics.

15 Tactics to Consider While Making a Startup Marketing Strategy for 2023

1. Website Optimization

You can divert visitors to the start-up’s website using many digital marketing tactics. But the digital marketing strategies cannot convert visitors into leads and customers if the website does not deliver an optimal user experience. You need to ensure that users can access the startup’s website seamlessly on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

At the same time, your strategy should focus on improving the key factors affecting the website’s user experience – speed, usability, content, security, and credibility. Also, you have to implement the latest search engine guidelines to increase search engine traffic to the website organically. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must make user experience optimization an ongoing process.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the digital marketing tactics that help businesses reduce customer acquisition costs significantly. In addition to reaching out to a wider audience, SEO tactics boost a website’s online reputation and credibility. Your startup marketing strategy must boost the website’s search visibility using on-page, off-page, and technical SEO techniques.

However, you must remember that Google and Bing these days update their search algorithms frequently to boost search experiences. Hence, you must keep the SEO strategy flexible enough to accommodate the changes required to boost customer acquisition. In addition to using different forms of content, you must optimize the content for textual search, image search, voice search, and video search.

3. Social Media Promotion

The average time spent by internet users on various social networking platforms has increased to 2 hours and 29 minutes in 2022. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must include an organic social media plan. You can promote the startup on social networks organically by posting and sharing a variety of content – posts, stories, memes, photos, and videos.

However, your strategy must focus on posting the right type of content on the right social networking platform at the right time. In addition to posting content regularly, you need to optimize the content and engage with the target audience. Audience engagement is essential to enhance your brand recognition and visibility and produce user-generated content.

4. Influencer Marketing

Many individuals and enterprises have become social media influencers by establishing reputation and credibility in a specific sector. They help businesses promote their products and services on social media through posts, mentions, and endorsements. Your startup marketing strategy must consider this distinct form of social media marketing to promote products/services to a wider audience.

You can leverage this marketing tactic fully by long-term partnering with the right influencers. The partnership will result in the publication of authentic influencer content according to your marketing strategy. However, you must allow creative freedom to enable the influencer to create content that keeps the audience engaged and deliver your marketing message.

5. Content Marketing

In addition to connecting startups with the target audience in a cost-efficient way, content marketing boosts the performance of SEO and social media marketing campaigns. Your marketing strategy for 2023 must make the creation, distribution, and promotion of multi-form content an ongoing process.

But the startup can win customers’ trust and build long-term relationships with them only by producing relevant, valuable, and consistent content. Hence, this marketing tactic requires startups to produce high-quality content by deploying seasoned content creators. Your strategy must leverage real-time data to produce content that the target audience wants and prefers.

You must publish and promote the content strategically to ensure that the target audience can consume the content using their preferred channel and devices. At the same time, you should identify the high-performing content and focus on optimizing the underperforming content by monitoring the performance of each form of content.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the tried and tested digital marketing strategies. Over 87% of marketers distribute various forms of content organically using email marketing. In addition to connecting with the target audience, email marketing helps startups keep recipients engaged and influence their purchase decisions.

While making a startup marketing strategy, you should opt for email marketing as a low-budget marketing budget to build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships. But your email marketing strategy must focus on sending the right message to the customers at the right time. Also, you can get better results by combining email marketing and SEO.

7. Video Marketing

This marketing strategy requires startups to incur video costs. Also, startups have to spend more to improve video quality. But you must remember that 54% of consumers want brands to publish video content regularly. Hence, a startup cannot meet the expectations of consumers without investing in video marketing.

However, your marketing strategy for startups must focus on controlling video marketing costs by adopting best practices like keeping videos short, producing videos in-house, procuring economical equipment, and spending time on pre-production. At the same time, you must increase ROI by implementing a slew of video marketing strategies.

8. User-Generated Content

Consumers find user-generated content more authentic and impactful than brand-generated content. Your startup marketing strategy can influence the purchase decision of consumers by using brand-specific content created by consumers in various marketing campaigns.

You can boost brand loyalty and brand growth in a cost-efficient way by posting positive reviews on websites, social networks, and online forums. However, your strategy must make it easier for consumers to create brand-specific content by providing clear instructions.

9. Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtag marketing is a form of social media marketing. As the name suggests, this marketing tactic enhances the visibility of content on social media by embedding hashtags. Your startup marketing strategy should consider hashtag campaigns to create brand awareness, build communities, and promote products/services.

But you can make the hashtag marketing strategy impactful only by selecting the appropriate hashtag for a campaign and posting content featuring the hashtag. You also have the option to use multiple hashtags according to precise marketing goals. At the same time, you need to ensure that the target audience can interact with the hashtag seamlessly.

10. Referral Programs

This marketing strategy drives customer acquisition and sales conversion by encouraging and incentivizing existing customers to recommend products/services. While making referral programs for startups, you should focus on converting happy and loyal customers into brand advocates.

The existing customers will help the startup acquire new customers by recommending products/services to their friends, coworkers, and family. But the startup can persuade existing customers to recommend only by giving incentives like a surprise gift, option to upgrade, or attractive discounts.

11. Cross-Promotion

This marketing tactic emphasizes brands promoting each other’s products/services by marketing partnership. A startup can promote its product/service in a cost-efficient way by forming marketing partnerships with similar or relevant businesses.

The strategy will make another business promote the startup’s product/service to its customer base. But the startup has to promote the product/service of the partner to its customer base in return. Hence, cross-promotion creates a win-win situation for both partners without escalating marketing costs.

12. Business Awards

Many governmental and non-governmental organizations these days recognize the outstanding achievements of startups by giving awards. These awards enhance the reputation and credibility of winners in a short amount of time.

A startup can use the award as a cost-efficient marketing tool to attract new customers and retain existing customers. It can impress and influence visitors by displaying the awards on its website. But a startup can leverage this marketing tactic only after winning business awards.

13. Network Events

In addition to enhancing brand awareness, network events create opportunities for entrepreneurs to make connections in the industry. Startup founders can leverage this low-cost marketing tactic by organizing local events as well as attending network events.

While attending business networking events, entrepreneurs should showcase their expertise by participating in genuine discussions. At the same time, they must build business connections by sharing their contact information and staying in touch with other participants.

14. Personal Branding

Many entrepreneurs and founders have become celebrities in a short amount of time thanks to Social networking platforms and business reality TV shows. Likewise, many founders enhance brand recognition and customer acquisition through personal branding.

While making marketing strategies for startups, you focus on branding both founders and startups. Your personal branding strategy for entrepreneurs should focus on highlighting their struggles, past experiences, success stories, failures, and future plans.

At the same time, you should enhance the founder’s personal brand by distributing a variety of digital content – articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, case studies, and infographics – across customer communication channels and touchpoints.

15. Low-Budget PPC Campaigns

PPC is not one of the low-budget digital marketing strategies for startups. But no startup can garner instant results without running paid advertisement campaigns. While making a startup marketing strategy, you should focus on controlling costs by running low-budget PPC campaigns.

Leading search engines and social media enable you to control PPC campaign costs in a variety of ways. For instance, you can control PPC marketing costs by targeting the best keywords, opting for manual bidding, and targeting limited locations. However, you must monitor and refine the PPC campaign performance regularly to get better results.

Final Thought

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you can overcome budgetary constraints by combining a slew of low-budget digital marketing techniques. But your strategy can increase ROI only by focusing on two important factors – digital marketing automation and digital marketing performance measurement.

Digital Marketing Performance Monitoring

Your digital marketing strategy for 2023 must define the metrics or KPIs for monitoring digital marketing performance. The KPIs will show the performance and outcome of digital marketing campaigns in numbers. Hence, it becomes easier for you to know which digital marketing techniques are working and which are not.

You can make the strategy more effective by increasing budgetary allocation for high-performing digital marketing campaigns. Also, you can achieve predefined marketing goals by improving the performance of underperforming digital marketing campaigns by making data-driven decisions.

Digital Marketing Automation

You curtail the manpower and resources required to run multichannel digital marketing campaigns only through automation. The digital marketing tool will help you control staffing costs by automating routine communication and marketing activities. Also, you can use the tool to generate, nurture, and retarget leads more efficiently.

At the same time, the software will provide you with actionable insights by analyzing large volumes of customer and marketing data collected from various sources. You can generate automated reports to boost digital marketing performance by making the right decision at the right time. Hence, you can power up the startup marketing strategy for 2023 by investing in the right digital marketing tool.