Content Personalization Currently, not a few customers expect to get a more personal experience (personalized marketing) when interacting with certain brands (brand communication). This condition led to the emergence of the concept of content personalization, which is specifically for B2B and B2C businesses that carry out content marketing strategies. Although its application is increasingly popular among marketers, this content personalization strategy is not easy. Because, basically marketers need to understand the desires (demand generation) and needs of customers or prospect customers (customer acknowledgment). Then personalize content to meet customer expectations (customer delight) and position the company brand (brand positioning) as the best choice for customers (brand authority). So, what are the best steps in implementing a content personalization strategy?
What is Content Personalization?
Before going deeper into content personalization strategies, you need to understand the basic concepts. According to The Hoth website, content personalization is the practice of creating, delivering or offering content that is unique and relevant, according to the interests, preferences or insights, and behavior of the target audience (consumer behavior) in the buying cycle. For example, if a customer has browsed to a certain product category in e-commerce, then you can make that category more prominent on your e-commerce homepage.
Apart from that, this personalized content is also often found in the form of blog posts, newsletters, retargeting ads, case studies, personalized emails, headlines, call-to-action (CTA), interactive quizzes, and other customer touchpoints which are also commonly used by content marketers.
This personalization concept is very important for business marketing operations because it can help companies in:
- Increasing business competitive advantage and unique brand value proposition.
- Increase customer loyalty to certain brands (brand loyalty).
- Motivate customers to make repeat purchases after interacting with personalized content. Thus, the company can generate a higher return on sales.
- Completion of marketing campaigns that include promotional advertisements (ads campaign).
- Increasing the conversion rate (CRO concept) as well as customer engagement to the business (brand engagement).
- Encouraging user experience as a business customer (customer experience) and better product differentiation.
- Optimizing brand image and brand reputation.
- Creating closer relationships with customers (customer relations).
- Optimizing lead nurturing efforts in every sales cycle.
Difference between Content Personalization and Customization
You need to understand that the concept of content personalization is different from content customization. Although both are efforts to customize content based on customer interests. This is because content personalization does not need to ask customer preferences directly for content planning, creating content pillars, or content auditing.
Meanwhile, content customization requires this strategy. For example, Spotify uses a content personalization strategy to display multiple playlists to its users. Their personalization algorithm creates or suggests playlists for the user according to the songs the user has liked and listened to before. On the other hand, Nike offers customization services so that its customers can customize existing shoe styles by selecting the colors and materials according to their wishes.
Stages of Implementing Content Personalization
In connection with the question at the beginning of the article, in the following we explain the best stages or steps in implementing a content personalization strategy.
1. Consider Meeting Customer Needs
Before starting content personalization, think about all possible problems or pain points for your target audience which might be overcome by using your product, service or content (customer advocacy). A good content personalization strategy shouldn’t be about how great your product is. Rather, it explains more about how you can meet the specific needs of your audience. Therefore, focus on creating something that is truly valuable to end users, regardless of whether they buy your brand’s products or services or not.
2. Collect Customer Data
After that, you also need to collect customer data (customer data integration) which is in the form of first-party data or data that you collect directly from the audience. These data include:
- Demographic data consisting of customer persona data such as age, gender, education, income, marital status, and others. By knowing basic details about a customer, you can present a wide variety of promotional offers.
- Contextual data is background information that provides more context about a customer. Starting from device and browser data used, geographic location, and even forms of customer interaction on social media (social media engagement).
- Behavioral data or behavioral data refers to the behavioral segment or customer cycle in interacting with the brand (customer lifecycle). For example, usage behavior, what website pages are visited or what products are purchased.
You can collect the above data (data mining) by:
- Sentiment analysis or behavioral analytics to analyze consumer behavior on websites or applications, overall customer analysis, or RFM analysis using Google Analytics.
- Providing customer satisfaction surveys such as the net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES) via email or other communication media (omnichannel).
- Observing the email list or email list that is obtained when a customer registers for a brand email newsletter (subscription business model) or when a user first creates an account on the website.
3. Customer Segmentation and Identification
At this stage, we recommend using CRM or customer relationship management tools as part of content intelligence. The goal is to segment customers with similar attributes based on the data you have collected. Because, you actually have to know detailed customer information in the customer journey which is useful so that you can reach customers with the information they need (prospecting). Apart from CRM, you can also use the following tools.
- Customer Data Platform (CDP): is a useful software for collecting customer data at various touchpoints and collating real-time data into each customer profile.
- Data Management Platform (DMP): is a special customer data management software that is useful for collecting, analyzing, creating, managing, storing, and even sharing anonymous customer digital data (data wrangling), such as cookie IDs, device IDs, and device IP addresses .
- Google Tag Manager (GTM): consists of variable data layers that are useful for triggering a personalized customer experience, improving the user experience on the site, and also increasing the conversion rate.
4. Create Relevant Content For Different Customer Segments
The next step is to create content that is relevant and perhaps timeless (evergreen content) for each market segment that you have created. Some examples of the types of content you can personalize are:
- Blog posts for specific demographics, such as younger and older audiences.
- Buying guides for various roles, for example for executives and managers.
- Emails based on customer behavior on the website, for example pages visited.
- Videos for specific interests, for example about technology, health, and others.
5. Measure Content Personalization Success
Content personalization does not stop until you have successfully created and disseminated content to your target audience. You also need to measure the effectiveness of your content by referring to each KPI or content marketing metric, namely:
- Content traffic: number of page views, downloads or downloads, total backlinks and internal links.
- Content engagement rate: bounce rate, type of customer (new or old), lead time, number of likes and comments, and number of social shares.
- Conversion rate: return on investment (ROI), lead generation, click-through rate (CTR), sales mix, sales pipeline, sales funnel, and others.