OPINION
Reduces marketing costs. Reduced costs mean potentially higher return on your investment and reduced overheads.
How do you personalise marketing? Much of what I refer to here is aimed at brick-and-mortar stores, but personalised marketing is often associated with online marketing alone. This is far from the reality, though. Whilst it is true that much personalisation is possible and encouraged with email marketing and online, it is equally important in the physical retail environment. Online marketing is a whole separate subject, but in a nutshell, your website will allow you to track and monitor consumer behaviour in a very detailed way, allowing you to adapt your website content and structure to meet those consumer preferences quite easily. Care must always be taken to ensure data capture management and security is on point and retargeting of consumers is within set parameters. But that, as stated, is a subject all its own for another day. So, back to the physical store and personalising your
marketing. Communications are not just written and verbal. They are experiences, too, and this is what I will concentrate on here. Experiences communicate your brand and service
equally, in my opinion. How a customer feels when they interact with you, how they perceive service levels and how they feel when others talk about you on the local club ride, which they will if you’re doing this marketing lark correctly, are all important factors to consider. These need to be personalised to what your customer base truly wants and then delivered and communicated in a manner that makes the customer feel special and the centre of your attention. The way you interact at events, on club nights, ride outs, and in store – they all matter equally. If one is ‘off’, it sullies the others. Consistency is key. Consider this as a point of difference. A web-only retailer can offer great customer service and purchase experiences online, but it is much harder for them to offer that personal in-store ‘human’ experience, that feeling
52 | July 2025
of community and belonging or that feeling of seeing old friends and talking bikes. Connection creates loyalty, which leads to sales. Maximise this. Let me tell you a story. I am a member of two gyms (I am a very serious athlete, clearly). One is slick, closer to home, well equipped with loads of expensive machines and has loads of space to throw heavy things around in. It’s very posh. The other is small, less polished, is targeted to what I’m actually training for, makes me feel special every time I train there, and they have created a community of like-minded people who train and compete together. I feel like I belong here in ‘my gym crowd’. Guess which one I’ll be staying with at renewal time? Community matters and personalised experiences create it. Back to bikes, I recently attended the Muck n Mac gravel event in Scotland. Pedal Power – one of the local bike shops was there and they brought café culture to the event with seating areas, a great coffee bar and a range of high-end bike brands to peruse over coffee and cakes. Across the three days, I can safely say that these guys were inundated with new customers, but more importantly, perhaps, their local riders – their community – turned up in force and loved the interaction with ‘their’ bike shop at a third-party event. They sat with Pedal Power and chatted with staff before and after the rides, the owner rode with them, and they made their local market feel connected and part of a community by their event activation. Speaking to some of the riders, they did nothing but praise the community that the shop had helped create – it mattered to them and they felt it was just for them (even though, of course, it was not just for their benefit). Personalised marketing. You don’t need to attend external events as per this example. A shop VIP night and ride out with brand support, or perhaps a new display that helps create the experience your customers crave, are just two ideas of many. Create a personal experience. Remember, marketing is not what many people think it is. It is a business ethos that can help separate OK from great. Get personal, people!
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