When it comes to brands marketing their products, a personalised, tailored approach isn’t new. As highlighted by econsultancy, from the time of the earliest shopkeepers, good retailers would recognise their customers and tailor their pitch according to what they knew about them.

But with the rise of the web and more recently, artificial intelligence (AI), personalisation is taking on a whole new level.

Amazon was the first online retailer to really do web personalisation at scale. We’ll all be familiar with purchasing a book then being shown ‘customers who bought this also bought xyz’, introducing a degree of personalised recommendation based on your previous shopping habits.

Another layer on top of this is the concept of ‘Big Data’. This concept sees huge quantities of information being ‘harvested’ from your web browsing history which is then used to serve bespoke content to you.

In recent years, brands have also started to adopt AI for their core consumer services. According to Marketing Week, Google’s voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook’s DeepFace can recognise faces with a 97% success rate.

This is all well and good in the world of search engines and social media giants. But how can this concept of personalisation be translated into PR and social media? How do you use this concept to reach out to your target audience and really resonate with them?

We spotted this frankly amazing video campaign by the Royal Mail this week, called Realmoji, which we think does exactly that. The campaign’s core message is that with the rise of the emoji, meaningful gestures are on the decline. In this series of videos, which are hosted on Facebook, you see various people receiving real versions of their emojis as gifts. It’s clever because the gifts these people are receiving are personalised – but based on emojis that have been texted to them by friends.

So in terms of a successful PR or social media campaign the concept of personalisation doesn’t need to be overly technological. Simple content, whether it’s a video, PR stunt, a blog or an article, that is relevant to the brand and that resonates with your target audience will win every time.

 

Image sourced from Pixabay