Understanding Personal Commerce and How to be an Informed Brand

The marketing game has changed. Now more than ever, buyers are becoming more informed about the products they buy and growing more discerning in what kind of advertising will affect them. In this environment, finding the right products for the right consumers becomes that much more difficult if no steps are taken to adapt. However, adaptations from days past like simple personalization of results may not be as effective as they once were.

In this new, more informed landscape, brands must become as knowledgeable as the customers they serve. This means evolving from a personalized business model into one focused on personal commerce. What is personal commerce? How do you use it to improve and become an informed brand consumers want to buy from? Let’s examine those questions and find the answers.

What is Personal Commerce?

To define our terms, personal commerce is a type of personalization where the consumer helps to actively curate the content they see on a website. This is different from the standard methods where brands and businesses tend to be the only party making decisions on what content someone will see. Rather than passively consuming, a buyer’s actions will actively contribute to what they see and hopefully guide them into purchasing the right products for their needs.

In general, the personal commerce approach has several benefits over more traditional marketing strategies. For starters, consumers will be much more engaged with your website and brand than more passive strategies for collecting data allow. This results in more and better information to better tailor their experiences.

For another, allowing users to co-curate their content allows for much greater personalization and better targeting of results. People can be quite fickle and prone to changing their mind, so a means of curation that accounts for this and can actively change itself based on a user’s preferences will always be more effective than one that cannot. Algorithms will not only know a consumer’s previous purchase history and clicks but will be able to tailor new results based on the feedback of the users, helping them to better understand their own interests and find products they wish to buy more easily.

Additionally, sharing the work with others takes some of the stress and time required for curation off your developers and onto the consumer. It’s no exaggeration to say that a personal commerce approach will not only return better results but require half as much effort on the part of individual workers.

What is Consumer Centralization?

One of the keys to understanding personal commerce and the personalization of brands is the idea of consumer centralization. As the name implies, this means centering the consumer in decisions made by the company, including those made for the consumer. This can manifest in a number of ways depending on the business, though most relevant here is how it relates to marketing and data.

Centralizing your marketing around the consumer means using the data that customers have given you to better tailor their shopping experience. Showing someone advertisements and previews of products related to things they bought previously would be an example of this. Crafting a centralized approach in this regard stands out in a few ways, most notably in that the data collected is actively given by the customer rather than passively collected. This involves the consumer in the personalization process and helps a business better understand what particular buyers are actually interested in rather than simply guessing based on past purchases or behavior.

Methods for Collecting Information

Becoming informed as to what buyers would like from your brand involves collecting data through various channels. For the personal commerce method, you’ll be going straight to the source and collecting this quantified data from your customers.

Collecting data can be done in many ways, most of which you’re surely familiar with already. To list some examples, surveys and buyer history are frequently employed by businesses to predict what different customers would like on both macro and micro levels. You can also try methods like collecting geographical data, as where a person lives will usually give you a better idea as to what they might need.

To target things on the micro-level (the personal level, so to speak), it would also be prudent to see how individual customers interact with a website. Seeing the pages someone visits, as well as their previous purchase history, is fairly standard in this regard. Setting up a website to allow for user-profiles and customization is also an easy way to encourage sharing information, especially when paired with bonuses like discounts or birthday promotions. Additionally, if your buyers link their social media to your site, you can collect information about their purchases and personality from those accounts.

As a general tip, building a strong foundation of information about your customers tends to come in handy. Automatic data collection may not be the crux of personal commerce, but it can serve as a good place to start before you begin co-curating with individual people. The more traditional data collection like those given as examples here and elsewhere would be included in this and can help you better focus on your key demographics, a factor that will assist in narrowing down those most likely to buy and reducing unnecessary data.

Conclusion

Understanding personal commerce is a tricky thing to do. In short, it means making the consumer an active part of your marketing strategy. By collecting data in a more thoughtful way and looking at what your buyers actually want, you can produce better results for both them and your business and become a truly informed brand.

Marketing effectively is much easier said than done, however. If you’re looking for professional guidance on how to best market your business in the digital space, NVISION is here to help. Able to provide comprehensive full-service end-to-end digital marketing solutions for any business’s digital marketing problems, NVISION is your answer to the problems of running a company on the internet. Contact us today and get a quote on our many services.