The Holy Grail of Marketing

1 to 1 marketing or the ability to send your highly-relevant, personalized marketing communications to prospects as if you where speaking to them specifically, is often referred to as “the Holy Grail” of marketing.

This is easier said than done. Traditionally, marketing activities simply targeted a demographic and in recent years specific psychographics, but those days are coming to an end. Traditional TV, Radio and Print media are really in the business of packaging a demographic and selling it to advertisers. Advertisers want more than to speak to a demographic. They want to speak to their ideal customers—personally.

In a recent study conducted by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, alternative advertising spending will increase more than 23 percent from 2006 to 2011, while traditional advertising will have a compound annual growth rate of only a little over 1 percent.

The crusade for the marketing “Holy Grail”

More and more marketers are looking for ways to identify and classify prospective customers and then refine their communications to speak as directly to that prospect as possible. The path to 1 to 1 marketing is one of steadily increasing how personal and relevant those communications are. This begins with off-line activities supporting online activities.

Online activities can be tracked, analyzed and that personalization process can be automated. Take, for instance, the following example:

State Farm’s “Now What” Campaign

Worst Case scenarios, including your car being stolen and driven into a pool, are played out on prime TV spots. Each ad finishes the hook, “Now What? Go to NowWhat.com to see what happens.” The marketing play is one of driving traffic to a campaign-specific flash site demonstrating what can happen and how your insurance company can help.

By driving traffic to this hyper-site State Farm is able to analyze not just the success of their TV campaigns, but also funnels prospects into their sales process (beginning either by finding an agent or by requesting a quote).

For a campaign like this to be 1 to 1, the car featured would be of the same make and model as your car is. The navigation would only display things that you own or used to own. This high level of relevancy and personalization is the “Holy Grail of marketing” and we’re not as far away from this as you might think.