In a webinar hosted by the Deputy Editor of PR Week, John Harrington, he outlined nine trends shaping modern PR and began with the statement “we are drowning in information but starved of knowledge.”

This will resonate with most of us and the overarching theme of the webinar was that both B2B and B2C companies need to prioritise personalisation, yet they often struggle because they don’t have the technology, resource or the data.

Why is personalisation so important? As we’re heading towards Christmas, let’s use the analogy of buying a gift – most people are pleased to receive a £100 Amazon voucher but it’s generic and forgettable. The gift that really speaks volumes is the thoughtful one – the one that really makes the recipient feel listened to and understood. It might very well not have cost that much, but it’s value goes far beyond its actual worth. Now, that’s the gift you as a business need to be buying!

As a media consultancy, this is where we can help. Personalisation is underpinned by segmentation and targeting and by serving relevant content to very specific audiences, companies can increase their market share in a cost effective way. Below are three potential methods:

Geo-social advertising – It’s now possible to apply a more location-centric approach to paid social advertising. ‘Geo-social’ enables brands to capitalise on real world consumer behaviours and nuances to improve effectiveness, by utilising mobile location data. This enables us to go far beyond the typical datasets such as CRM, census etc and consider not only where a target group lives but where they work, shop and socialise.

Influencer marketing – Nano-influencers, with fewer than 1,000 followers, have seven times the engagement rate than mega-influencers, with greater than 100,000 followers. By working in partnership with an influencer marketing specialist, we can do all the heavy lifting in terms of identifying and vetting a network of quality, targeted influencers, to drive engagement and help your budget to deliver the optimum results.

Mobile advertising – This allows brands to serve customers, or potential customers, with personalised time and location sensitive information, which in turn helps to change your advertising from being a distraction from what your audience is looking at, to a relevant part of their browsing experience.

When it comes to media spend therefore, less can be more if great content is served to a highly targeted audience. We can support your next campaign to be the perfect gift, as opposed to an Amazon gift voucher (other gift vouchers are of course available!), so why not get in touch to find out more?