Now sure what content personalization actually means? Imagine this!
You have recently shopped on Amazon and bought a Fuji camera at a 20% discount. You are happy about your purchase. You visit Amazon again but upon reaching the home page, you see something that catches your eye.
You see a list of Fuji camera lenses and they’re on sale at a discounted price.
Next to that, you also see a bunch of camera related accessories which you think might be useful.
What next?
You add them to your cart and bang!
Now you’ve not just bought yourself those lenses but also a lens filter, a monopod and a camera bag.
Did you intend to buy them? Nope.
Here’s what happened:
The homepage of Amazon dynamically changed based on your previous browsing interactions and showed you products most relevant to your purchase history.
How?
Dynamic content personalization!
And it’s revolutionizing content marketing like CRAZY!
Essentially, content personalization is the art of customizing different type of content and displaying them to different audiences based on the personal data you have about them.
Content personalization leverages a user’s generic data such as location, searched keywords, clicks, purchase history, etc. and compares it against metrics like gender, age, interests, session details, and device type to display relevant content to each user.
Long story short, it’s all about using content to provide a more targeted and exclusive experience to your customers.
You may think, so what? Does it make any difference in actually driving sales?
Truth be told, it absolutely does!
In fact, according to a report from Instapages it was seen that just by personalizing web experiences and content for users marketers were able to see an average improvement in sales by 19%!
Not just that, about 78% of Internet users said that relevant content shown by brands increased their purchase intent!
While about 80% of buyers said they were more likely to buy from brands that provided a more personalized experience.
Considering all those numbers, it’s a no brainer that personalization is the key to successful sales after all.
With the right type of content personalization, you can make a significant impact on your content marketing strategy.
Great, now that you know why content personalization matters, let’s take a look at different ways you can personalize content for more effective results.
This is a commonly used personalization method used by a majority of digital marketers today.
You can simply segment your audience by industry, geography, age or job title and tailor your content to appeal to different people.
Segmentation is best used in email marketing campaigns as well as website UX and have shown to bring a great impact. However, the cons of using segmentation is that it doesn’t offer a deeper level of personalization.
On top of that, it’s highly resource intensive. You can only create a limited number of segments which greatly reduce your personalization options.
Persona-based content personalization is another popular type of strategy that relies more on customer representation or buyer personas. Here the content is segmented according to the characteristics of a typical customer to deliver a personalized experience.
Ever stumbled upon an ad while scrolling through your Facebook feed which was actually relevant to your business? That’s persona-based content right there!
The great thing about this personalization type is that you can gather more data about your audience in real-time and create more tailored content to attract more leads.
You can also personalize your content based on your buyer’s journey. This form of content personalization uses customer journey maps to figure out the phase a particular customer might be in the buyer’s journey.
The content shown to a customer in the awareness phase will be different to the customer who’s in the decision-making phase.
By aligning your content according to different phases you can deliver a more meaningful experience to your customers and help them progress further to the end of the sales funnel.
As the name suggests, individualization is all about offering a truly personalized experience to each individual user rather than targeting broader segments or groups.
Think of those personalized emails you might’ve received after dining at a top-rated restaurants or the ones from an airline company after booking a flight ticket.
Today AI can create content can be heavily personalized by analyzing customer data and making smart decisions.
Using that and other strategies like one-to-one emails and dynamic web content you can offer a more robust personalized experience to your customers.
Barillaince, a company focusing on providing personalized eCommerce solutions uses machine learning and content filtering to offer smart product recommendations to customers.
It’s a great example on how AI and content can be used together to provide a more tailor-made experience for customers shopping for products.
Dynamic landing pages are a great example of content personalization. Dynamic landing pages use dynamic text replacement that changes the headline instantly based on the search query the user used to land on the page.
For example, if the user landed on the page by typing “Best Sports Shoes For Men” the Banner headline would automatically change to “Shop for the Best Sport Shoes for Men”
Dynamic Banner ads are another fantastic examples of how content can be personalized to the next level.
These ads are mostly used for retargeting and display products that it thinks is most relevant to the users. It could depend on several factors like time spent on the website, products searched in the past, or products recently brought.
As you can see, the perks of using content personalization are promising!
With personalization becoming the next big trend in the world of digital marketing, it makes sense to make it part of your digital campaign as well.
Using content personalization will not only help you provide a more cohesive experience to your customers but also significantly increase your chances of driving more sales in the long run.
Make sure you use it in your content marketing campaigns for some excellent results.
If you need a hand, you can always count on us.
We are a reputed digital marketing agency that can help you create everything from dynamic landing pages to personalized blogs or even email campaigns to skyrocket your business leads.
