A guy walks into a bar…

No, this isn’t the beginning of a lame joke.  Or it shouldn’t be.  It could be the beginning of a long, fruitful relationship – between the bar and the customer.  That is, if the bar’s marketing is effective.

The world we live in today is highly personalized – we’re being shown ads in our Gmail based on the content of our messages, our Facebook newsfeed is tailored so that we see posts from the people we’re most interested in, Amazon can recommend books, music, movies, and other products we might like based on our past purchases and the pages we visit on their site.  But none of those things would be possible without the application of each system’s knowledge about us. 

So back to the guy at the bar, how could the bar personalize their marketing to him?  Well, they’re going to need one key thing:

"To deliver a highly personalized Amazon-style experience, one of the things you need as a marketer is one centralized database ... If your email database is separated from your leads & contacts database which is separated from your analytics, and all that stuff is apart, you really can't pull off a personalized experience. “- Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot founder

If the bar doesn’t know what the guy likes to drink, how often he comes, if he’s “Liked” the bar on Facebook, if he comes for happy hour during the week or for wings & beer during football games on the weekends, how can they tailor their messaging and brand experience to suit the customer’s needs? Or, if the bartender knows what the guy likes to drink, the owner knows he’s an evening regular, and the social media manager knows he occasionally comments on their Facebook posts, but none of the three parties are talking to each other about it, what use is that to the business?

We know that people buy from people that they like. What better way to get someone to like you but to make it all about them – to make them feel like they’re not an anonymous face, but that you know who they are and that they are important to you?

When the guy walks out of the bar, let’s make sure he comes back again and again.