Creating content to personalize your brand’s digital experience for every customer can seem like a substantial undertaking. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be.
Personalization is predicted to become the prime driver of marketing success by 2024. The benefits including increased engagement, higher conversions, and improved customer loyalty for your brand.
Here are five key elements that will help you see the long view as a content creator, enabling you to effectively plan and deliver content that powers personalized digital experience.
1. Quick wins: Get off the ground fast
Personalization is a bit like physical exercise. You get out of it what you put into it. The key is to just get started, so you can begin to gain the insights you need to make adjustments and fine-tune your efforts.
One of the easiest ways to do that is implement a strategy that will net some quick wins when you’re kicking off content projects. For instance, if your full personalized experience strategy waterfalls into building new web elements, don’t let it be a roadblock. Build out timelines for both short-term and long-tail personalized content. Think about ways you can take those early learnings and then roll them over into other upcoming content projects.
2. Personas: Start with your core audience
As personalization becomes a regular part of your strategic conversations around content, you’ll likely begin discussing how you’re “slicing and dicing” the way you’re serving it up. There are various opportunities to target regions, topics, audience segments, customers vs. first-time visitors, and more.
Your personas provide a clear place to plot your content personalization strategy. Often when we’re talking about personalizing an experience on Sitecore.com, we think about a persona first and expand content personalization with relevant experiences based on where they are on their customer journey. Starting with customer segments helps create a template for content and messaging we can leverage as the personalization strategy expands.
3. Data: Validate and deliver value
Data is the key to developing the strong customer profiles required for taking your personalization to the 1-to-1 level. As customers or first-time visitors interact with the content you created, you can gather more data around their intentions, interests, and browsing history for more effective personalization.
Use your personalization data to evolve and scale. As you deploy early versions of your personalized experiences, validate the content performance so you’re focusing your efforts on creating and serving up more data-driven content that is providing the most value to your target audiences. These behavioral data metrics will support a seamless user experience and eliminate wasted effort by your content team.
You can supplement this data by connecting your content management system with your CRM and other tools. Then increased customer engagement will continue to grow your data collection, allowing you to finetune your personalization to enhance the quality of your customer interactions.
4. Process: Streamline your content lifecycle
Content is still king in your personalization strategy. Over time, personalizing experiences will grow in complexity, so it’s important your teams have the tools and organizational processes in place that will enable them to quickly create content variations and pivot when necessary. The omnichannel digital experience requires relevant content to feel individualized for each customer.
Having a platform that serves as your central hub for content planning, ideation, collaboration, and storage can be a big help in streamlining not just content creation but your end-to-end content lifecycle. It also helps eliminate silos and reduce costs.
Sitecore Content Hub™ allows content creators across our organization to have visibility into available assets. As an example, one of our teams was able to leverage an existing video and create a personalized version for a specific industry. It was a process that took less than a week to finish, as opposed to the possible several weeks it would have taken to build an entirely new video from scratch.
Think less about content creation and more about content repurposing. Targeting many different personas is much less effort when you are working with the same basic content and simply adjusting it.
These content variations enable dynamic content and will be used by AI-powered automation and personalization tools for ongoing testing and optimization in real time.
5. Mindset: Think big, start small
You’ve probably heard the saying “It’s not about volume, it’s about quality”. While that is definitely true, for the modern content marketer, there’s no getting around the fact that you will need to create a lot of content to power your brand’s personalized experience strategy at every touchpoint.
But by having the right mindset, content teams can avoid overthinking the daunting need for fresh content and still meet the demands. It’s better to take your time to ensure you have the right tailored content than serve up bad personalization that doesn’t meet your customers’ expectations or attract the right potential customers. Start small, and scale targeted content as you build on your personalized experiences and hone your marketing strategy.
Examples of content personalization
While your personalization choices will be determined by your customers’ needs and by the customer data available to you, here are some examples of common types of personalization:
- Email subject lines. You don’t have to create a unique email for each segment. Start by customizing simply the subject line and build on your learnings to create more-personalized emails down the road.
- Ecommerce product recommendations. Increase sales with cross-selling, upselling, or simply offering the right product for your visitor’s needs at just the right time, based on customer behavior or past purchases.
- Calls-to-action. You can increase your conversion rates with CTA copy that resonates with each individual customer.
- Content recommendations. Guide visitors down a meaningful path and increase click-through rates by offering personalized recommendations for related content based on their demographic, region, or buying phase.
- Ad landing pages. You want your landing page content to follow from the messaging on the ad that points to it. Instead of creating a unique page for a specific social media or search ad version to point to, personalize an existing webpage to be consistent with it.
- Webpage headlines and images. Start with the most visible elements of your website content: study the effect of dynamic headlines and images on your homepage and top-level pages, to get familiar with your audiences’ browsing behavior.
Whether you use just one or all of these examples of personalization, with these five ingredients in place, your content strategy will be on the right path toward full personalization and digital experience maturity.
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