Adaptive Marketing. It sounds self-explanatory but is it? Isn’t marketing always adapting? We have seen lots of changes since the introduction of the internet and even more, and faster paced changes, since social media’s rise. Adaptive marketing is in essence the opposite of mass marketing, and strives to tailor content to a specific audience. One of the most popular adaptive marketing techniques today is encompassed in the Inbound Marketing Methodology, a popular approach to digital marketing.
Content
Adaptive marketing is all about tailoring or customizing the user experience, leading to consumers that are less likely to switch brands because you provide a buyer’s journey that is personalized and optimizes the brand experience for customers and prospective customers. Through blogging, articles, downloadables, social media and other methods you engage your audience very specifically with content that matters to them, making their search for information much easier, virtually handing it to them on a silver platter. A nice additional benefit of this is less pressure on your pricing as people are often prepared to pay more for personalization.
Fundamentals of Adaptive Marketing
- Collection of Data – We cannot be effective in adaptive marketing if we do not collect detailed information that allows us to tailor the user experience, i.e. “what we show them.
- Urgency – Todays marketing toolbox provides many tools for instant feedback about your customers or prospects behavior while interacting with your brand, whether it is in social media or on your website. Reacting quickly to these interactions greatly increases the chances of a positive outcome, either a sale or customer service opportunity. A good CRM (customer relationship manager) will have many of these tools built in.
- Faith – You can’t watch the news anymore without hearing about data breaches and sensitive consumer information being stolen for nefarious purposes. Your website and your marketing needs to build trust and faith that any information shared will be safe and not used for other than the intended purpose.
- Engagement – Adaptive marketing requires a less invasive approach than traditional “shotgun approach” marketing. It’s much more about providing relevant and engaging content to your target audience than sending a generic message to everyone hoping someone bites.
- Content Delivery – Sending content to your target audience should be regular, but not invasive, and of course, ultra targeted wherever possible. The more you lean about your consumers behavior, the more targeted your messages can be.
- New Media – Most consumers and marketers are now familiar with digital marketing to varying degrees. Adaptive marketing takes that a step further and is a game changer for the relationships between companies, brands and people. The message and the media have changed and will continue to evolve.
- Testing – New platforms and strategies will continue to develop and to be truly effective in adaptive marketing your firm should test the ones that may be important to your audience. Twitter, we find, is often misunderstood and not used for business nearly as much as it should be. What about Snapchat, Instagram etc. Those and others may or may not have a place in your marketing strategy, however, you won’t know until you survey and potentially test. Organizations must be willing to accept new media and technologies when it makes sense.
I will end with one of my favorite quotes:
“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
