There is a  never been a shortage of marketing advice for business owners. 

Scroll your feed, and you’ll find someone telling you to post more, try another platform, send more emails, make more videos or jump on the latest trend.

It's easy to come away feeling like good marketing is simply about doing more. But what if that's not actually the problem? 

The businesses that consistently hold our attention aren't always the ones producing the most content. More often, they're the ones that make us feel like they're speaking directly to us. 

They understand the challenges we're facing. They answer the questions we're already asking, and they help us see ourselves in what they're sharing. That is why personalisation works. 

Not because it's clever marketing, but because it's relevant. 

Personalisation Is More Than Using Someone’s Name

Personalisation can absolutely be as simple as using someone’s name in an email, remembering what they have purchased before or sending them information based on something they have shown an interest in, but it is also much broader than that.

On social media, for example, you cannot personally address every person who sees your content, but you can create that same feeling by knowing who you are speaking to and writing as though you are having a conversation with that person.

The aim is not necessarily for someone to think, “This was created specifically for Add Name.” It is for them to think, “They understand what I’m dealing with.”

And from that moment, they see you in your marketing and you as the solution provider. 

Not Everyone Is Your Audience

This is an easy mistake to make, and I see it all the time: businesses assuming that everyone is their audience.

They write content that is deliberately broad because they do not want to leave anyone out, but in trying to speak to everybody, they often end up saying very little to the people who are actually most likely to need what they offer.

When you know your audience, you can be much more specific and that creates a marketing gold connection. 

For example, a café could say, “Great coffee and friendly service,” and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that message, but it does not give someone much of a reason to notice it.

Instead, they might say, “Looking for somewhere easy to meet a client before work, with good coffee and space to actually have a conversation?”

A bookkeeper could move beyond “Bookkeeping services for small business” and talk to the business owner who is still doing their invoices at night after everyone else has gone to bed.

A skin clinic could move beyond “Professional skin treatments” and speak to the person who has noticed their skin changing and is finding that the products they have always relied on are no longer working as well as they used to.

None of these businesses needs to change what they offer. They are simply making the message more relevant to the person they want to reach, so they can see themselves buying the product or using the service.

Personalisation Helps Build Trust

That feeling of being seen in the message is important because marketing is not just about getting someone’s attention for a few seconds, but giving them reasons to come back, engage with you, learn from you and eventually trust you enough to take another step.

This thinking sits underneath a lot of what I teach in The Marketing Tree Method. Your marketing works best when you understand who you are talking to, what you stand for and how people can work with you, rather than simply planting content everywhere and hoping someone notices.

In the book, I include your ideal audience within the Brand Tree because understanding who you want to reach helps shape the message, tone and content that follows.

We do not need to turn every piece of marketing into a promotion for our business or our offers, but we do need to know who we are creating it for.

You Don’t Need Complicated Technology to Personalise Your Marketing

Sometimes we hear the word personalisation and immediately think about software, segmentation, automation and data. Those things can absolutely help, particularly with email marketing, but before you add another tool to your business, you can make a significant difference simply by changing the way you think about your message.

Ask yourself who is on the other side of it.

What are they doing when they see this post? What problem are they already thinking about? What would make them stop and think, “That’s me”? What do they need to understand before they are ready to take another step?

These are useful questions whether you are writing a blog, recording a podcast, creating a social media post or putting together an email campaign, because the channel may change but the person you are talking to should still be recognisable.

Social Media Is Where This Really Matters

Personalisation becomes particularly important on social media because there is already an enormous amount of information competing for attention.

You are not just competing with another business offering something similar to you. You are appearing amongst news, family photos, funny videos, advertisements, friends’ updates, recipes, opinions and everything else that fills a feed.

Trying to compete by simply adding more noise is exhausting.

Instead, you want the right person to recognise something in your content that makes them stop.

That might be a question they have been asking themselves, an example that sounds remarkably like their situation or a piece of advice that solves the exact little problem they have been trying to work out.

That moment gives them a reason to pay attention, and over time those moments create familiarity and trust. This reflects the journey I talk about within the Social Media Tree, where someone can move from simply seeing your content to engaging, following, having conversations, and eventually trusting you and your business.

Personalisation Can Make Your Marketing Easier Too

There is another side to personalisation that we sometimes overlook, and it can actually make marketing easier for you.

When you stop trying to create something that appeals to everyone, you have a much stronger starting point for your ideas because you know which examples to use, which questions to answer, which stories will make sense and which topics are likely to be useful.

It also makes repurposing easier because you are no longer reinventing your message every time you create something new.

One strong idea can become a blog, an email, a video and several social posts while still speaking to the same audience in slightly different ways. That gives your marketing a much more connected feel and allows you to get more value from the ideas you already have, rather than constantly feeling pressured to create something new.

Take a Personalisation Look at Your Marketing

Look at your website, your emails, your social posts and the content you are creating and ask whether the person you most want to work with would recognise themselves in it.

Could you make the examples more specific? Could you use the language your customers actually use? Could you answer the questions they are already asking? Could you make the next step feel more relevant to where they are right now?

You do not need to speak to everyone.

You need to understand your audience well enough that when the right person comes across your marketing, they recognise that what you are saying is relevant to them.

And in a very noisy market, that relevance is what helps you cut through.