[Podcast] How Top Marketers are Winning with Personalization (With Stacy Dally)

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Ryan

Marketers in a professional sense, is there anything more satisfying than having a successful campaign? We get the warm fuzzies, the pats on the back from sales. It's all around pretty great.

Now, assuming we all enjoy these same feels, we have to get serious about something we're all familiar with. It's personalization. But for us to dig all the way into it, we've chosen a truly legendary album that's mastered this art.

All right, team. We welcome back our listeners and viewers to our eighth and final episode of season 3. We have touched on a little bit of everything, have we not today, team?

I don't know what else is left to talk about in the way of data. Has AI been beaten to death? Perhaps at this point in time. I'm sure somebody will argue that we have not covered all of our bases yet.

But we want to leave today with our lovely friend Stacy Dally joining us for the finale. Who else but Stacy, of course, we want to talk about personalization. It's thrown around everywhere, but it's rarely talked about in practice. So, what does it look like? What's real? What's possible?

And then we want to dive into what happens to be maybe my favorite record of the season yet. Mr. Frank Ocean gives us Blond and he allows us to dissect it in the way of personalized experiences and what it meant for his listeners and, better yet, for our viewers as well.

So Mr. Sacca, would you take us through the parallels of this and today's topic?

Michael

Yeah, I think what we were looking at with this album was really the deeply personal nature of both Frank's story as they were releasing this album. He's a very private individual, right? And it kind of added to that mystique around the album.

But then the album itself, it was kind of a mainstream hit talked about widely, and yet when you listen to it, sometimes you feel like you're in his bedroom, right, on like a four-track with some of the recordings.

It's brilliant. But it was a level of, like, he could have produced a highly slick R&B record, but he chose something incredibly intimate. And I think his fans appreciated that as well.

Ryan

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. Stacy, you've listened to the record perhaps in the past. What did you like about it?

Stacy

Well, I did, but I mean, first I got to say when you said mainstream, did you like cringe a little bit inside a little bit of… you die?

Michael

[laughs] Just half of it.

Stacy

Yeah. Out of this season, this was my favorite album as well. And I even saw Beyoncé had a little input into it too, my girl over there. So, got to love that.

Ryan

Was it Pink + White perhaps? Pink + White's my favorite.

Stacy

Yeah. I liked the intimate, but it wasn't too much where I was like, whoa, this is like getting awkward. I definitely didn't get that feel, but more of like, okay, I'm actually starting to get to know him. Like, I never really feel that way about a lot of the music these days, especially. But I think he did it in a way that wasn't creepy, actually, but really well done.

Ryan

Yeah. Yeah. It's a special moment. Frank gives us a record once every blue moon it seems, right? Like there's a great distance between Channel Orange and Blonde and then whatever is the next iteration of his career. You're right in the way of the intimacy setting. I think even the fidelity of the records is kind of a peril to it where he embraced some imperfections, and sonically you could have pushed things in the way of the mastering and the mixing to say, "Oh my god, it just wows you."

But he allowed his message and what he was allowing for instrumentation, which was primarily a lot of guitar and minimalistic elements, to kind of tell that story and to be the canvas for the message itself. I thought it was interesting. It was a list of who's who in the way of heavy hitters, but then also a list of "who the heck is this" as well. There were some people I was not familiar with, even some Japanese rappers I don't think many of us were familiar with, that made some appearances. So I found it to be really interesting. My highlight of this record was when Andre 3000 joins the party. Adds a ton of energy to a track that you wouldn't have expected on. Anytime Andre 3000 approaching 50 gets on the microphone is a gift to us hip-hop fans, and he gave us that for this record as well. So I love it. It is a personal experience, and we're going to talk about personal experiences, and what does it look like? And I'd like to start with, what does it look like in practice? There's some misconceptions of what it really means and what people can do. Start us off.

Michael

Yeah. I think personalization has been kind of a topic for many years now. But I think it's been rather underwhelming in practice, right? We've personalized on location. We've personalized maybe on device type. But I think the true promise of personalization hasn't yet been realized.

And what we're working on and what we're really working towards with the direction of Leadpages is the ability to really meet that promise, which I think is very underwhelming in the market today. But how do we start to personalize on all of the data that we have access to? Once we're able to enrich our leads, once we have demographic and firmographic information, once we know who our anonymous visitors are, there's so many personalized experiences that we can create from there.

I think there's also been another bottleneck in that to properly personalize, you had to create every single workflow for personalization. So most of the companies that I've seen trying to do it, they maybe get one or two, maybe three kind of "if/else" statements down the line, right? Where you've kind of got a couple experiences to your core personas. But personalization is much more than that. Every customer is way more dynamic than a generalized persona.

So how do you actually speak to them where they are in that moment? I think that's what marketers are hoping for, but hasn't yet been realized in the market, where there is no one singular product that can get it done. And so I think what we're on the precipice of here, where finally the technology is catching up to the promise of it, and I do believe we can get there, to a place where we can do true personalization at scale that will move the needle.

Ryan

I love that, Stace. Can we fulfill the promise in practice?

Stacy

Always. I think the thing that comes to my mind as you're talking about this is there was a stat, I think from Salesforce, that said 80% of people say that the business experience – kind of how they experience you discovering your business and all that – is just as important as product or service.

And so with that 80% majority of people, that just hearkens to the fact that people are dying for this personalization. And you see all these personalization stats out there, right? Like how many people want them, how much more effective it is. But to your point, really what it is right now is the landing page or the ad is in your language, or the other piece would be the location or the device type. "Oh, it looks really good on a phone, your landing page." Like that's really the personalization.

Yeah. We're talking about… and when we're thinking about a personalized experience, those are givens. I feel like those are table stakes. It's not like, "Whoa, I can't believe it looks so great on my phone and it's in English. Hot damn, I better buy."

Ryan

There it is. Well, Salesforce reports that consumers are twice as likely to click on a personalized ad and then go into that experience. McKinsey similarly follows up with 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver an experience that is personalized, and the vast majority of those are frustrated when they're not given it as well. So marketers have marketed it as something they should expect, but it's not delivered on in practice. So we're falling short a little bit, but solutions are ahead.

So future fast forward, what is possible in an ideal state? We've talked a little about it. Can we go a layer further?

Michael

Yeah. So I mean, when we're… I think what we want from personalization is to be able to speak to the customer where they're at and to who they are. Where do they sit within an organization? How big is that organization? Why are they seeking out your solution?

At Leadpages, we've got 15 industries that matter that use it. Each has a very different use case for it. So right now, we're kind of giving them the big talking points: "Why do you need a landing page?" But if we're able to then cater to real estate or to healthcare, how much more effective will our campaigns be? Because now we're speaking to the actual problem that they're trying to solve versus the generalized problem that we've been stuck with today.

Once we know who's visiting, now we can start to cater to them. And I think it happens at the point of visit, but it also happens throughout the funnel. So what do they do with you? What blog posts are they reading? Can we pick up on some of their interests? And then can we cater their journey?

With generative AI and some of the advancements, it feels like that's possible where we don't need to have every single thing mapped out. But we can start to have AI be that decision engine that we had to set up manually previously. And some of the content creation too, so you can really speak to the customer's needs and what they've shown us they're interested in.

Stacy

Yeah, I think the key part for me in that is the efficiency or the speed.

Yeah, it's sounding what you're talking about. It's not like, "All right, here are 15 landing pages for each industry, then the associated ads, and then… okay, this, this, this." It's like – nope, the first time they come in, we know they are in healthcare, so they're going to get this ad and then this landing page. And AI is just like – all right, boom, here it goes. It's instantaneous. It just goes off what the customer or potential customer is doing right then and there. And I think that speed is just as important as the personalization too.

Because if you have to sit and wait, "Oh, I'm going to get an email tomorrow, or I'm going to see a blog post in the next few days that pertains…" maybe where I am in the funnel has changed. But the fact that it can be triggered instantly off what I'm doing or consuming, to me that's the huge value.

Ryan

We're only as good as the inputs we put into something, right? And with third-party data, which most of us all do our personalized experiences on, there's some risk. Data isn't always exactly accurate. Michael, is it worth the risk if we deliver, say, 15% of customer experiences that are actually wrong?

Michael

Well, I think it depends what those customer experiences are.

Generally, I think if we're crafting our experience so that it can be adaptable, it's probably okay. Right? Because are you going to get better conversion on the 85%?

Yeah, that's huge. And if 15% needs to be a bit adaptable: "We thought we were in real estate. You're actually over here." Okay, we can learn that, right? There's ways to collect the information as we go. We made some assumptions. They were wrong. I don't think it's a deal killer. If it was 50%, it's probably unacceptable. But if we can get better conversion on 85%, I think it's worth the breakage.

Ryan

I like your risk tolerance, D. I'm guessing you're similarly a gambler.

Stacy

Roll the dice. "Oh, I just heard I can be wrong 15% of the time, and that's okay." I mean, I might have heard 20 or 25 somewhere in there, so I'm feeling good about that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm a big believer in maximizing your strengths versus shoring up your weaknesses, just in life. And I think this is the same motto: Let's just go after it and get really personal. Yep, we're going to get some wrong along the way, but the gains are going to be so much larger that who cares?

Maximize your strengths. Play to your strengths. You're always going to win out. Now, will you have the patience to see that? I don't know. You probably won't have the patience, but others might. And so, that's where I think the trick comes in – understanding, do I have to be patient, or do we have to pivot to something else?

Ryan

Yeah. Uh, let me pose another question here. First-party data we often collect and feel pretty good about it, right? People come to us with intent. They give us the things that we require, and we're like, "I would personalize all day long on that."

But a lot of us have to use third-party data to do this work at scale. So should we put greater emphasis on first-party data collection, knowing that the purity of it and that personalized experience is maybe 100% good? Or should we say, "The hell with it. Give me volume, give me scale," and just take that third-party data and ship it out to the best of our abilities, maybe accepting that 50%?

Michael

There's a way, right? I think third-party data can help you get to the first-party data.

Right. So if we can better cater their experience, it allows us that moment to earn the trust to then get the first-party data that we need to further the experience. The relationship isn't a single touchpoint. Maybe the first touchpoint is rooted in third-party data because that's what we know at that moment.

Now we're more informed than we were before. Before, we knew nothing – this is a visitor, we know nothing about them. Well, now we know a couple things that may be true about them. Can we start to cater the experience? And then can we learn from them: Who are you really? Right?

But if we don't earn their trust in that first experience, or at least give them a pitch that's relative to them, then we may never get that first-party data. So I think it's a combination. It's weighted. We can be more assured with that first-party data. But I see no problem leveraging both to create that initial experience.

Ryan

I like that. You manage a few data analysts, tell your story on this. What do you feel?

Stacy

Well, before we get into that, I was actually just thinking of an analogy. It's like before you go on a date, you stalk them.

Michael

Yeah.

Stacy

Right? Like you're looking at their LinkedIn. Well, some people… some people don't.

Ryan

I know, your husband. I'm going to tell him this.

Stacy

But I think it's really common. Or before you interview someone, maybe it's not a date, like knowing a little bit about their background, "Oh, look, they grew up in Wisconsin. I'm actually from…" little things like that that you wouldn't know unless you engage. But knowing that, you can be like, "Hey, I grew up in Wisconsin too."

You automatically have that connection right away versus slogging through a really awkward dinner or waiting until that first drink hits to maybe get into that good stuff. It kind of just speeds the process.

Michael

Yes. And so, do we want to use 50 data points to build what we think is the very specific experience they want? Probably not. But I think if we start to look at campaigns not just as single landing pages, but as the experience a customer has that goes through until conversion, you could be giving your sales team more information about this customer.

You could be pre-qualifying them to see. We have both sales-driven conversions and organic conversions. And if we can learn what's the better method, do we want to push this customer into a sales conversation? Can we do that more effectively?

Well, now we're wasting less of our time, only spending it with the customers that want that experience. Whereas if people are on the fence but have a higher propensity to convert organically, let's lead them down that path. And so I think even those types of decisions can happen further down the funnel.

And then you go from third-party data to heavy first-party data in order to cater to them. And it's not just your messaging that we're catering.

It could be our cadence of communication, right? Are we writing them every day? Weekly? Monthly? Where are they in the buyer cycle? And where do they need to be? Are they decision-makers? So do we need to give them information so they can go tell their boss that they need to hire us, or are they able to make the decision, put in the credit card, and move forward?

All of that could just cater how we speak to them if we understand who they are, what type of company they're at, and where they sit within the organization.

Ryan

Yeah, I love that. As we dive into many of these advanced marketing topics, it seems like it's always a crawl, walk, run approach. Be iterative. Get something to market. Just do something. It's always better than doing nothing. It's that MVP mindset. Just get something out of it. You will learn. You will better yourself. Chris was just talking about that. We don't fail – we learn all the time. And this is another exercise for marketers. Just do something to get yourself out of the starting blocks. You'll find some momentum as you continue to go on.

Michael

Absolutely.

Ryan

Well, I think we can put a bow on this. Eight episodes in the third season. Heck of a day. Not too bad. Three episodes with a lovely Dally. We got to talk about Frank Ocean, Animal Collective, every data thing ever possibly known to mankind. Perhaps, I don't know, is there anything we forgot?

Michael

Uh…

Ryan

I don't think so either. We've run out of words, perhaps, this day. We hope our listeners and viewers have enjoyed Season 3 of On the Record. We hope you do this much more. Many things to come.

Michael, thank you for your time. Stacy, thank you for your time, and we'll talk very soon.

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