M&E Brands Can Create Smarter Communications With Deeper Personalization

Media and entertainment companies have a unique challenge: turn once-established experiences—flipping through the newspaper or sitting down in front of the TV—into highly personal digital experiences. A whopping 59% of customers say that personalization influences their purchase decisions. Personalization is the number one mechanism to grow and retain customers.

Not all of your customers are going to be interested in the same communications. People interested in comedies may not want notifications from a cable brand about their newest action/adventure series. Those interested in sports may not be interested in a newspaper’s article about geopolitics. Women may not be interested in a men’s health article. The list goes on for media and entertainment brands—your content won’t be applicable to everyone.

So how can M&E brands leverage digital intelligence to create smarter communications and more relevant personalization?

Many brands think they are already delivering highly personalized experiences. But we’ve found in our research that there is a personalization maturity model where brands move through stages of progressively maturing abilities of personalizing customer engagement. Most brands are in the beginning to mid stages, with a mature model the vision to work toward. The stages are as follows:

• Stage 1: broadcast messaging to all customers
• Stage 2: utilizing one type of data (behavioral or profile) to personalize messaging
• Stage 3: utilizing two factors of data, either both behavioral and profile, or one of those and adding A/B/n testing or liquid messaging
• Stage 4: utilizing both data types, as well as using liquid messaging and A/B testing

Media and entertainment companies are focusing on delivering increasingly personalized experiences as they compete with cloud-native companies to deliver content.

One approach you can take is to use an intelligent framework for personalization that helps ensure you are optimizing personalization at every stage of maturity.

Use these 6Ws to guide your personalization decisions

Many of us were taught the concept of the “6 Ws” for writing school reports: Why, Who, What, When, Where, and hoW. We’ve found these work as a great guideline in crafting personalization in your communications and engagements.

1. Why? Begin by determining the reason for your campaign. What is driving it? The answer to this sets up the rest of the “W”s.
   1. Is your brand trying to promote a new streaming show, article, or other form of content? Are you announcing a new product?
2. Who? This is list segmentation. Think beyond generalized demographics and current definitions of what personalization means at your brand. Consider profile, session, and behavioral information. Also, look at how customers currently engage with your app, what they are interested in, do they trend toward a specific activity or product, how can you help fulfill their needs?
   1. Brands can use data to find the audiences interested in each type of content you produce—those interested in the arts, those between 18—35, interested in sports, or people in Boston? Use different types of data to filter who gets each message
3. What? Decide what specific product you are going to present and the promotional offer you’re going to make. You’ll want a different creative for each message that is tailored to the specific nuances of each segment you’re targeting.
   1. Find the best content, copy and image (or GIF, video, etc) to attract that audience, bonus points for using liquid messaging and A/B testing
4. When? There are 86,400 seconds of opportunities a day to market to people. When is the right time to engage with each segment? Digital intelligence will help you decipher timeframes that are most likely to get your target audience’s attention.
   1. It may not be best to promote a streaming show during the work day. It may be great to promote news articles early in the morning or after work. But each individual is individual and send your message at the best time for each recipient.
5. Where? Get the channel right. Customers have preferred channels. Where do they spend their time? Decide if you’ll use a web push, inbox, app, in-app message, email, or social channel.
   1. Your customers have preferred channels—web push, inbox, app, social media, etc.—and you can  drive engagement by delivering to their personalized channel
6. HoW often? It’s important to communicate with people at the right frequency. People want brands to be helpful and useful, without being annoying. Digital intelligence like Localytics can help you determine the right frequency for different segments.
   1. You don’t want to bombard your customers’ inboxes or send them constant push notifications, but you also don’t want to be too scarce. You can individualize how often each customer receives messages.

The 6Ws framework takes the guesswork out of personalization and gives your team solid checkboxes to tick off as you craft personalized experiences and move up the maturity model. Media and entertainment organizations have the ability to harness digital intelligence to create communications that drive loyalty, offer helpful suggestions and recommendations, and provide the seamless, intuitive customer experiences that delight people.

Learn how we can help deliver the digital intelligence to inform your personalization.