By Sherjan Husainie
Businesses can personalize their brand at scale by creating the right supportive systems and brand-specific frameworks.
Customers want brands to feel personal and real. As the founder of KIRO, my aim is to make chiropractic care feel accessible, modern, and personalized. To achieve that kind of feeling, businesses need to build that culture into their basic design.
Personalizing at scale requires a humanization of your brand, dynamic personalization, creating a feedback loop, and building infrastructure that supports personalization. In this article, I discuss four key ways that any business can design its brand to feel real and human no matter how much the company grows.
Humanize Your Brand
Humanize Your Leadership
The first step to personalizing at scale is humanizing your brand. Start by making your company’s founders and any key leaders the public face of the brand. Customers want to have real faces and names that they can imagine when they think about your brand. Share real stories about each person so that your base feels like they know them.
Try and find behind-the-scenes pictures or videos if you can to supplement the stories. Finally, humanize your top leaders by giving information on ongoing challenges and any lessons they learned.
Showcase Top Employees
Another way to humanize your brand is to showcase your top employees. Highlight the hardest-working and most passionate people on your team. Particularly try to emphasize the employees that are actively solving customer problems.
Just as with leadership, customers will feel like they know your brand if they can associate real employee faces and names with your business. Make sure to showcase top employees on all social media channels and in company newsletters.
Establish Core Values
Lastly, you can humanize your brand by establishing core values and sharing them with your audience. Define two to three things that your business stands for and two to three things that it completely opposes. For example, your brand could be all about bringing more personalized customer service and faster production to your specific industry while standing against common environmental and workforce issues that also plague your industry.
Giving your customer base a polarizing clarity about where your company stands will help build customer loyalty. No matter how big your business gets, customers will still feel like they are supporting the right things and righting certain wrongs.
Implement Dynamic Personalization
Real-Time Triggers
To build a dynamic personalization system, you need to first install real-time triggers. Set up automated, behavior-based messaging that triggers when customers take certain actions. For example, some businesses automatically send messages to customers when they add items to their cart but then abandon their carts before completing checkout. This message feels like the brand is personally checking in with them, even though it’s just a triggered message.
The exact customer behaviors that you want tracked will depend entirely on your specific product and/or services. For each behavior, create messages that fit the tone of your brand and encourage the customers to stay engaged.
Tailored Communication
To make your personalization dynamic, all communication must be tailored to specific customer needs. From automated email sequences to customer service follow-ups, every touchpoint of your business needs to directly address user context and provide benefit-driven value.
Like with real-time triggers, customers don’t want to feel like they are talking to a machine. They want it to feel like real employees are reaching out to them and giving them valuable content. Communication should remain heavily branded while being tailored enough to seem different for each user context.
Create a Feedback Loop
Create Community Platforms
To thoughtfully engage with your customers, your brand should create community platforms. Traditional marketing channels are still very effective, depending on your specific industry, but community platforms are a way to gather customers together in a unique way. Your business can then take part in the platform and discuss both common interests and pain points.
This kind of feedback is much more effective than simply sending out customer surveys and other basic feedback tools. However, community platforms can also be layered onto more traditional systems to get a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative data.
Monitor Audience Feedback
Once you’ve set up both traditional and unique feedback systems, monitor them continuously. Your business should also take a deep look at reviews, popular forum sites, and any direct messages sent to the company through social media channels. Every bit of feedback should be collected and categorized.
Based on the audience feedback you observe, your brand should adjust product features based on what genuinely resonates with your core values. For example, a chiropractic brand might add more symptom explainer articles when they see customers complaining about a lack of knowledge base. Brand narratives should also be routinely adjusted based on how audience feedback shifts over time.
Build Personalization Infrastructure
Create Systems
To fully build personalization infrastructure, your brand needs to create specific systems that help your branding stay consistent. Create an infrastructure with dedicated team members and clear operational frameworks. There should be a designated part of the company that handles brand personalization.
The purpose of such personalization infrastructure is to allow your team to adjust features and narratives as needed without senior management being involved at every step. Every single piece of content and each customer interaction should feel connected to the leadership values without direct leader involvement.
Document Pattern Recognition
Scaling without burning out also requires document pattern recognition. Keep a detailed track record of recurring customer problems as well as past client successes so that you have a clear picture of what has consistently gone right or wrong with your company and its branding.
That kind of historical data will create an educational category that will inform both current and future branding endeavors. Try to keep your document pattern recognition as thorough as possible so that there is a rich set to build from.
Key Takeaways
- Businesses should personalize their brand at scale by building the right frameworks.
- Brands can humanize themselves through well-known leaders, employees and core-values.
- Dynamic personalization structures can automate a lot of your brand’s personalization work while still tailoring communication to user contexts.
- Creating a feedback loop keeps your customer base both engaged and satisfied.
- Specific systems need to be implemented to support full-scale brand personalization.
