If you hop on the Apple Store right now and scroll through the top 100 apps you’ll start to notice a trend.
Fam, GroupMe, Marco Polo, Kik, Houseparty, Facebook, Next Door, WeChat, Badoo, Whatsapp. All of these are some of the most popular apps available right now, and do you know what they all have in common?
They’re community apps. Apps focused on connecting people that allow you to send messages, group chat with friends, or meet new (likeminded) people altogether.
Now, out there in that great big sea of information we call the Internet, you can find plenty of marketing blogs that will tell you which of these apps you should be using and why. But there’s another story here that we need to focus on first—especially as we move further into 2017 and beyond.
One of the big themes that you’ll be hearing a lot about from WideNet is hyper-personalization, or, the action of creating extremely targeted messages that resonate and connect with a specific subset of your overall audience.
Hyper-personalization is the act of willfully abandoning broad reach marketing messages and creating multiple different campaigns for multiple different groups of people. And the reason this is such an important concept is because it’s what people want. They want authentic experiences they can actually relate to—something that means something to them.
So what does this have to do with the community based apps mentioned above?
One word: curation.
See, human beings are naturally tribal. We tend to gravitate towards people who think like us and share similar interests and beliefs. Whether we admit it or not, we all want to live in our own little box. And with modern technology, we have more control over who and what we allow into that box.
We can literally customize everything about our day. We control what news we read, what songs we hear, and who we speak to. The reason the apps above are so popular is because they allow people to create their own, portable community in which they can exist and interact.
And since this little community is so curated, your marketing has to fit their mold. It has to live up to their definition of authenticity. If it doesn’t, they’ll either ignore it or miss it completely.
