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What does it take to develop personalized marketing strategies that truly resonate? Marketing expert Kelly Heilpern discusses the key ingredients of successful marketing personalization, staring with using a single-minded proposition to help guide your decisions.
Crafting Personalized Marketing Strategies for Your Brand Summary
Key Takeaways
- Strategic Briefs Simplified: Kelly explains the importance of creating a focused single-minded proposition to ensure all marketing efforts align with your brand’s core objectives.
- Maximizing Free Research: Kelly shares how to leverage free tools like Google Analytics and customer interviews to gain valuable consumer insights without breaking the bank.
- Personalized Marketing on a Budget: Learn how small businesses can create personalized marketing messages for different target audiences without overspending.
- Data-Driven Campaigns: Discover how to align your marketing KPIs with business objectives to avoid “vanity metrics” and measure real success.
- The Role of AI in Marketing: Kelly discusses how Ammunition uses AI to streamline processes and improve efficiency in data analysis, but emphasizes the importance of the human touch for meaningful insights.
Crafting Personalized Marketing Strategies That Drive Results
1. Start With a Strategic Brief
Before you even think about launching a campaign, you need to get your strategic brief in order. Think of it as your marketing North Star – everything else should revolve around it. A solid strategic brief answers the essential questions: Who are you targeting? What are you trying to achieve? And most importantly, what change do you want to see in your audience’s behavior?
A single-minded proposition should be at the core of this brief. If you can boil down your objective into one clear, concise sentence, it’s easier to ensure that every aspect of your campaign aligns with that goal. This approach ensures that you’re not overwhelming your audience with conflicting messages but delivering one clear, targeted message.
2. Leverage Consumer Insights to Drive Strategy
Your marketing strategy will only be as effective as the data you’re using to fuel it. Consumer insights are key to understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. These insights help you move from guesswork to precision when developing your marketing plan.
You can start by utilizing Google Analytics to uncover demographic details such as age, gender, location, and device usage. This data gives you a real-time snapshot of who’s interacting with your brand. Additionally, customer interviews, both with loyal customers and those you’ve lost, can reveal valuable information about why people choose (or don’t choose) your brand over others. Even simple tools like following up on lost leads can provide a wealth of insights.
3. Personalize Your Marketing Campaigns
Once you have your consumer insights in hand, it’s time to personalize your marketing strategies. Personalization isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a way to increase engagement, build trust, and ultimately drive conversions. Whether you’re targeting Gen Z on TikTok or Boomers through email, you need to understand what motivates each group to take action.
Even if you’re working with a limited budget, personalization is within reach. Start small by segmenting your audience based on demographic data, purchase history, or even online behavior. Then, craft customized messages that speak directly to each group’s needs. You don’t need a massive advertising budget to make an impact; personalized email campaigns or targeted social ads can yield significant results with minimal spend.
4. Align KPIs With Your Business Goals
Too often, marketers get caught up in vanity metrics—like impressions or clicks—that don’t tell the full story. While these numbers may look good on paper, they don’t always reflect the actual success of your campaign. To avoid this trap, you need to align your KPIs with your overall business objectives.
If your goal is to increase sales by 15% in the next quarter, then your KPIs should reflect that. Track things like conversion rates, revenue, and return on ad spend (ROAS), not just top-of-the-funnel metrics like traffic. Being specific about what you want to achieve allows you to measure success more accurately and make adjustments as needed.
5. The Role of AI in Marketing Efficiency
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a valuable tool in marketing, particularly for data-driven marketing. From analyzing large datasets to automating processes like note-taking and content summarization, AI can help marketers be more efficient without sacrificing quality.
But here’s the catch: AI is best used as a supplement, not a replacement. Human insight is still crucial when it comes to understanding the deeper “why” behind the numbers. AI can help streamline the research process, but you need that human touch to make sense of the results and turn them into actionable strategies.
Conclusion: Transform Data Into Action
Marketing is no longer about throwing messages at a wall to see what sticks. By taking a data-driven approach and using consumer insights to guide your efforts, you can create personalized campaigns that not only resonate with your audience but also drive real business results. Remember to always align your KPIs with your business objectives, and don’t be afraid to integrate tools like AI to improve efficiency.
In today’s competitive landscape, personalized marketing strategies aren’t just a nice-to-have—they’re a must-have. With the right insights and a well-crafted strategic brief, you can create campaigns that cut through the noise and move the needle for your brand.
Crafting Personalized Marketing Strategies for Your Brand Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is Ammunition‘s Chief Strategy Officer, who spearheads digital transformation and media planning while crafting innovative strategies for clients. With a background in both agency and brand side marketing, her expertise shapes the agency’s direction, fuels its growth, and ensures success for clients and internal teams.
Beginning her career managing agencies on the brand side, she quickly adapted to the agile environment of agencies. She joined Ammunition in 2017 as its first employee. And since then, the agency has rapidly grown, earning recognition as one of the Southeast’s fastest growing agencies by Inc. Magazine, and in Atlanta by the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
I’m excited to talk about how you can craft personalized marketing strategies with Kelly Heilpern. Kelly, welcome to the podcast.
Kelly: Thanks for having me.
Rich: So Kelly, let’s start with right at the beginning. Let’s start with creating a strategic brief to uncover consumer insights. Can you walk us through the process that you use at Ammunition? What does it look like, and what are the key elements that should be included in those briefs?
Kelly: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think it’s really dependent on what we call the change that the client or the brand is trying to enable. So maybe it’s that we’re trying to generate some brand awareness or you’re trying to take over some new market share as a brand. You’re trying to increase sales this quarter. I think that those objectives can be very different based on what the brand is trying to accomplish.
But we try and write the brief really starting to understand what is that change or objective that we’re trying to drive, because then everything should come out of that idea. So who we’re talking to what’s going to be most effective, the best places in which we can connect and reach them in order to drive that measurable impact.
And we really start with that who, what, when, where, why type questions that you probably reflect back to in elementary school days, right? And then we dive deeper into each of those questions in order to make sure that we have as granular of insights as we can in order to ensure that connectivity is happening with the audience that we’re trying to reach in order to drive that measurable change.
And that could really be, again, obviously impacted by the objective that we’re trying to meet, right? But if that’s a millennial home buyer, that’s going to be very different than trying to drive revenue sales on TikTok amongst Gen Z. So I think you have to really look at it through the lens of, who is our audience? What are we trying to get them to do today or tomorrow that they’re not doing today? And so then what can we craft from a strategic perspective in order to drive that change in behavior?
Rich: Talk to me a little bit about how you gather all this data. Like obviously you’re going to talk to your client who’s the business, but you also do research and do interviews with the client’s customer base. And what does some of that research look like? And what are you looking to uncover during that process?
Kelly: Yeah. Again, very specific based on the needs. But I think that clients and the brand itself. Internal stakeholders are a wealth of knowledge, whether it be someone C-suite and sales, from customer service. Someone who’s on the front lines a really great, strong customer that you have as a brand is a great resource to understand Why did you choose us? Why do you stick with us? Why would you select us over other competitors in the space?
And similarly, potentially clients that you’ve lost or that didn’t select you, if you have a CRM where you could follow up with those kind of lost leads. Those are great free ways to create some research and insights via a network that’s already at your fingertips.
I would say the good old World Wide Web is another great resource for that for us, and doing what we would call kind of desk research. What can we uncover that’s already out there in order to understand what’s going on in the industry as it relates to trends and insights? Keyword tracking within Google monitoring. Those types of things are really helpful and kind of forecasting. Is there seasonality we need to be mindful of? What are customers looking for from an inquiry-based perspective? How could that glean into the research and insights that we’re putting together?
And then, yes, we do actually do the actual resource component of it as well. Or, we are sourcing the research respondents and then hosting those more qualitative and quantitative research studies through surveys and then customer interviews as well.
Rich: When you’re doing this research, there could be different age groups or different demographics that the client thinks that they serve. Are they ever myopic, for lack of a better word? Are they ever not aware that maybe boomers or millennials are actually really good clients for them? And if so, how do we make sure that we capture that data from demographics that we may not have known that we’re even serving?
Kelly: Yeah, I think a really great kind of resource for that is if the website’s connected to Google Analytics. That’s always a great starting point in understanding what your demographics really are. You can uncover a lot of information just literally from the demographics tab within that resource. It will show you the most common age group, the most common kind of gender, where they’re located, is it a major DMA type audience, are we talking more rural? Are they engaging via a tablet? Mobile? What kind of browser setting are they using? Those are really helpful indicators and understanding and uncovering who your audience is.
And yes, there are cases where our clients will say, I didn’t realize that this young audience was engaging or that boomers are still very much included in our target audience. And I think that we live in a world today, because of the digital environment, where you can really see a very wide range from an age perspective. And that has really lended itself into the user experience of websites that we’re seeing today in offering not only a phone number for folks who definitely want to still pick up the phone and talk to a human being. But AI chatbots and FAQ sections on resources of websites, you start to see how preferences by age group or demographic come to life in a digital space.
Rich: Awesome. And I’m guessing beyond just GA4 reports, we could also be looking at our social media, which also could be giving us some insight into what the different demographics are that are engaging with us on those different platforms as well.
Kelly: Absolutely. Yeah, it really depends what you’re doing from an advertising and marketing standpoint and where you’re plugged in. The social platforms, Meta has a lot of demographic research that you can tap into. LinkedIn does as well. So dependent on where you’re connected, from an analytics standpoint, there are certainly some free platforms where you can start to uncover or at least get an initial perspective as to who your target audience is today.
If it’s not who you want it to be, then that’s your first insight, right? And maybe we want to expand as it relates to who we’re reaching and who we ultimately want to bring into the fold from a targeting standpoint. But you can get a solid picture of what does our audience look like today. And if we want to change that tomorrow, then that becomes part of that objective within the strategic brief.
Rich: And obviously, there’s been a lot of push in the last few years towards privacy. And we see this on Apple. We see this coming from Europe and California to giving people more control over how their data is being shared.
You’ve been doing this since at least 2017 with Ammunition, been probably doing it before that. What changes have you seen that is either making your job easier or making it more difficult and you’re having to make more assumptions, as there has been this move towards data protection and privacy over the past few years?
Kelly: I may be an outlier in the media community, but I am a huge believer in the data and privacy laws. I think that for our audience to feel protected of their data, for me as a mom to feel safe with data that’s out there, I think it’s important for users to be able to control what information is readily available.
And ultimately what we’re trying to do as brands is try and aid the customer in making the right decision for them. And we obviously believe that our brand, our product, our service is the right decision for them by using those targeting parameters. I think that those targeting parameters are now smarter now based on the user getting involved to say yes, this is the type of website service platform that I want to share my information with, so that I can be fed recommendations that suit my needs or can potentially solve problems for me.
I think it makes media more effective if we’re now serving impressions that are falling on eyes that are ready to consume that type of media for the thing that we’re trying to push, then it’s more actively accepted. Just versus a ton of media waste. So I think having that control has certainly changed things. Certain platforms targeting parameters have changed quite a bit where others have tightened. I would say others have brought in new opportunities around contextual search and making sure that, again, we’re really meeting people where they are and where they want to be served content that’s going to be useful for them, versus interruptive.
Rich: All right. Now we’ve talked a little bit about how we can gather a lot of this data to give us a better picture. Once we’ve gathered these consumer insights, what’s the process for turning that information into an actionable marketing plan?
Kelly: That is the tricky question, isn’t it? So I think that we use a phrase internally called a ‘single-minded proposition’. And we try and bury everything into one sentence, and that’s what we hand off to the creative team in order to kick off messaging or the actual creative execution of a campaign. Whatever is going to be put out into the market needs to come from this one objective statement. And if you can boil down what you’re trying to accomplish within one statement, it’s not that I’m throwing 12 tennis balls at you at once and expecting you to catch all 12. If I throw one at you, you’re most likely to catch it.
Certainly there’s the kind of reasons to believe that will then support that single minded proposition. And we kind of start there. What is the laundry list of reasons that I might support this brand or why it’s the right choice, why it’s the right choice today and it wasn’t yesterday. And then how can I start to eliminate those things based on another competitor can also say the same thing? Or maybe we’re not the best at representing customer service, so we’re not going to go with that first because we know that’s not our single leg to stand on.
But when we go through it and we start to uncover, this is the one thing that we can say, do, and represent better than anybody else, that becomes this North star for the brand and the strategic brief that then the creative team, the brand, whoever is executing. Then the next step can always go back to this one statement and say, this is our North star.
Rich: We’ve talked about that many brands may have multiple audiences, and just to use age groups, it could be Boomers versus Gen X versus Gen Z. Is that one message, that single minded proposition, is that good for all these groups? Or are we crafting that single minded proposition, that North Star, for each one of our core audiences?
Kelly: We think when done effectively, it should really serve for everything. So let’s pretend that the single-minded proposition is, “Agents of Change is the very best podcast that ever existed. And if you miss an episode, you’re going to be lost in the industry today.” So then that message might be curated for a marketer and for an agency leader versus someone emerging into the industry that’s trying to get up to speed on the latest and greatest.
So the messaging from what might come into a LinkedIn post versus a TikTok video versus what someone sees on AdAge.com, that message might change. The creative that might lead them to exploring the podcast and subscribing, that’s the part that gets curated. But ultimately it’s all laddering back up to that SMP, regardless of audience, regardless of placement.
Rich: All right. Makes sense. So you work with large brands, but obviously there’s a lot of small business owners and the marketers who work for them tuning in. How can they target or create marketing messages from multiple target audiences, Boomers versus Gen Z, within a limited marketing budget and within limited time that they have to run their businesses? Any tips there?
Kelly: Yeah. I think that we hear a lot from an agency perspective, and then we communicate a lot with the brands that we work with that creative, that fatigue is a thing, right? So when you’re in the mindset of strategic planning for the next fiscal year, your next calendar year, however that works for your brand, I would really think about what are the kind of key influencers in the process.
And if you can boil that down to the top three, top five, in order to make sure that it really is going to be the most effective group of people for your brand and then your kind of problem to solve, that’s a great place to start.
And for us, because we work in a lot of home and building spaces, I think the homeowner needs to hear a different message than the contractor than the builder. And if we can create a circle of trust with each audience group in a net neutral way, but meaningful to each of them, all laddering back up to that SMP, that’s really going to make what we say and do effective.
And I think you can templatize your approach. Let’s pretend it’s an email follow up to them visiting your place of business. You can say, “thank you so much builder”, and it’s customized with these three resource links where that’s going to make a lot of sense for them to see spec sheets and CADs and whatever that might be. And for a homeowner, it might be beautiful product design brochures.
So just really thinking from the user’s mindset of what’s going to be most effective or useful to them. And I think that little touch of personalization, even if you take it through a templated approach, is really helpful in creating that deeper connection and engagement with the brand.
Rich: All right. Now we’ve talked about changes like privacy, and then of course there’s the evolution of AI, and there’s just always something going on. So I’m guessing that these briefs are not set it and forget it, they’re not written in stone. Is there a right time that we should go back and take a look at our briefs and say, is this still serving me or do I need to go back out and interview more of my clients, more of my customers, or do additional desk-based research?
Kelly: Always. I think that we look back at the brief at every step of a deliverable. So whether that be we’re using a brief in order to drive a new sales deck. Okay, great. Do we feel like now that the sales deck has been produced, is delivering against the objective of the brief. Amazing. And then a quarter later, once the sales team has really used it in order to enable the new sales process, do we feel like it is effective?
I think it’s really important to have that perspective and doing what we were trying to accomplish, not in just what the brief says, but the business objectives that are listed within the brief. Is it driving 10 percent net new sales closure, or whatever that might have been called out? So I think that looking at back at the brief on a regular basis in order to hold it accountable to the objective that you’re trying to solve is a frequent and often visited process.
And then once that objective has been met, that’s the next time to refresh and say, hey, now as a business, or maybe it happens before things change like that, right? Where you say, we’ve got a new business objective. We either need to scratch this brief, or we need a new brief that’s going to help us accomplish a new objective. Now how can we write a brief that can help us really set after that goal.
Rich: Do you have any tips on how we can take these briefs and these North Star messages, or the single-minded proposition, and make sure that everybody on the team, both internally and externally, are playing from the same playbook? Because sometimes we may have this great idea in our head, but it’s not necessarily being repeated by all the frontline employees.
Kelly: Yeah. I think internal connection is a huge thing. And organizations that we see most successful, the sales and marketing team work really well together. When done effectively, the marketing team should really fuel the sales funnel. And if sales sees that value and they can give the feedback into what is quality and what’s working well and what’s not, that creates a really predictable sales model and a really effective working relationship.
So I would say for brands big and small, just making sure that all of the kind of internal stakeholders are aligned to what is the objective that we’re trying to meet? What are those key business objectives? What are the marketing objectives and what are the customer objectives? And can we draw a dotted line between each of those in order to make sure that they all feel like they’re working from the same playbook. That’s when we see internal and external communications and teams functioning best together.
Rich: All right. Now I know that you, Ammunition, tends to work with larger brands. Could you share an example of how you’ve leveraged some of these consumer insights and created maybe a more personalized or impactful marketing campaign with one of your clients? You don’t have to share their name or anything, but just to give us an idea of how that might work.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a really big insurance company and they actually have a SaaS product that they use with their contractor builder network that helps them get to estimates much quicker after, as part of filing an insurance claim. And they came to us with a nice media budget and an opportunity to say, we want to convert this group of folks from a standard subscription to a pro subscription to drive some increased sales. And we were able to come back to them and say we would think the best strategy here is really to use email marketing of your existing list. Let’s not put any money behind it. Let’s use what we have in order to create an upgrade type campaign, a special limited time offer for your existing network. And we were able to double their sales goals and half the amount of time that they were aiming to do so.
So I think the case there is really just looking at what’s available to you from a resource perspective as a marketer, as a brand. What’s free? We talked about Google Analytics as being a research tool, that’s really easy to hook up into your website. And once you’ve got a string to pull on, I would encourage brands and leaders to really look for opportunities in order to pull at those strings until they reach a dead end, and effectively create some change or uncover the variables that they need to dig in deeper with those cost-effective strategies and metrics before you go into a big research project. Because I think you can get a lot of those insights just on the offset.
Rich: Nice. And probably any benefits can go to fund some of those bigger research projects. What KPI should we be tracking to monitor the effectiveness of this kind of work?
Kelly: Rich, you’re not going to like this one because it’s just so custom for everything. So I think that there are a lot of brands, there’s a lot of agencies that use what I call ‘vanity metrics’ in order to make their media plans look really great. You can garner 60 million impressions, but if those impressions didn’t do anything, then it doesn’t really feel meaningful.
So I think that aligning KPIs within the brief from the offset is a really good way of ensuring that your project or whatever you’re setting to accomplish is effective. If you want to increase sales, don’t just say that. Increase sales by 15 percent by quarter three. Be very straightforward as to what you’re trying to do.
Because whether you’re working with internal teams in order to accomplish that, or you’re working with your agency, there become pacing reports, there become very clear signals when things are working and not working. And that allows you to be most effective as a marketer and a change maker in order to say, we need to pull some different levers, we need to call an audible on this component of the marketing strategy because it’s not holding us accountable for the goals that we’re trying to meet, or this component of the plan is working so well we’re going to reallocate these funds that aren’t working as effectively and put it into a funnel that is really driving success for the brand and helping us meet those goals.
So I would just say from a KPI perspective, it could be clicks, it could be impressions, it could be CTR. It could be leads generated, leads closed, sales, row ads, it could really be anything. I would just make sure that whatever it is, it’s very specific and it’s time-based so that you can really hold yourself accountable to meeting them.
Rich: Nice. All right. Kelly, what are some of the common pitfalls that you see businesses make when they’re trying to implement this data driven insights focused marketing approach?
Kelly: Okay, I would say probably just using those vanity metrics, right? So when you’re trying to really, I think, transform into a digital space, there’s just a lot of overwhelming potential tactics and platforms to explore. And there is a little bit of a gold rush to the bright and shiny things.
There’s AI. Now we have to have AI incorporated on the website in some way. Maybe not. I think that for brands that are looking for ways to potentially tap into trends, tap into a digital infrastructure, I would try and look at each of those elements and say, what is the business objective that this campaign, this idea from the agency, is really going to drive. And if you can answer that question, then great, you should run it down. You should absolutely then hold it accountable to that goal.
But I think that the pitfalls right now that we’re seeing from an agency point of view is really just the chasing after shiny things without understanding really what is it going to do in order to support the business. And I think that’s where budgets get cut. I think that’s where brand leaders get into hot water is when they can’t show what they were able to do from a change standpoint in driving success for the brand.
Rich: All right. And I will say guilty as charged when it comes to chasing shiny objects. That actually leads into, I’m curious to know how or if you’ve implemented AI into this. Because I know that AI can be great for finding patterns, especially in big data sets. Are you finding that you and your team in Ammunition are leveraging AI for some of these, or are you still doing more things by hand? And what other evolutions do you see coming down the line when it comes to this type of work?
Kelly: That’s a big question. Yes, we’ve got an AI committee at the agency, which I’m sure everyone has a fun kind of use of AI at the agency space at this time. But for us, I think that we really started using AI to look for ways that we could be more efficient in what we’re doing.
So instead of potentially having someone taking notes in a meeting, we have a note taker that then synthesizes those notes. And then that started to be useful in research interviews where we could look for patterns and insights that are coming through in order to create some patterns and understand where there’s similarities and differences as part of that research process.
So we’re using it as a playground in finding how can we take what started as potential efficiency opportunities and then work that into spaces where there’s alignment. And from a research perspective, I think that AI is really good at synthesizing. But from our researchers and analysts, all of that work is still done really manually. I think it’s important for that human touch to weigh in on the data and the metrics and understand the why behind certain numbers and metrics changing. But when it comes to, summarize this PDF and give me the cliff notes that I might need in order to understand the gist of what we’re trying to accomplish here, we found that to be super effective.
We have an in-house production team. They’re using it quite a bit to get through all video content. And I think that’s made video much more approachable from both a cost and implementation standpoint in the world of short form video. We’re really using it across the agency in a multitude of ways.
But I think for clients to use it most effectively, really look for those easy ways of what are simple tasks that could be done a lot faster if I didn’t have to do it by touch, and then find similarities between writing an email, taking notes type opportunities, and work that into your typical workflow.
Rich: Awesome. Kelly, this has been very insightful and very helpful. If people want to learn more about you, if they want to learn more about ammunition, where can we send them?
Kelly: You can find us at ammunition. Agency. You can also find us on LinkedIn at @AmmunitionAgency, and you can find me on LinkedIn, @KellyHeilpern.
Rich: Excellent. And Kelly’s links will be in the show notes. And I want to thank you very much, Kelly, for coming by today.
Kelly: Thank you for having me. It was great talking to you.
Show Notes:
As Chief Strategy Officer at Ammunition, Kelly Heilpern knows exactly how to increase online visibility and engagement with a digital-first strategy. Connect with her on LinkedIn so you never miss her insightful tips, strategies, and advice.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.