Consumers are tired of irrelevant marketing. A lot of content is produced by brands every day, spamming them with all kinds of offers and information. Brands are leading the war for customers’ attention and content personalization is one of their greatest weapons.
Simply put, content personalization is the strategy of delivering targeted and relevant content to your audience based on their interests, behaviors, funnel stage, and other factors. Content personalization boosts conversions by helping brands engage customers at a personal level.
Benefits of content personalization
Here are some interesting stats to prove the importance of personalized content:
- 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.
- 80% of frequent shoppers say that they only shop from brands that provide personalized experiences.
- 90% of consumers are ready to share their data in exchange for a personalized and smooth shopping experience.
In general, content personalization is known to increase engagement, conversion rates, and overall customer satisfaction. Those are three interconnected factors that all lead to the same thing – improved bottom line.
Types of content personalization
Content can be personalized in many different ways, hence the existence of multiple types we need to discuss. This is not a complete list, but most of the other types are just variations of the approaches we discuss below.
1. Personalization based on industry
This is the most common type of audience segmentation. It is not hyper-specific, but it still helps orient content towards potential paying customers, instead of trying to cater to everyone.
Segment-specific content is highly shareable as it is curated for a large audience (unless the niche you are targeting is, well, very niche). In order to grow your brand authority, you must consider creating industry-specific content to gain your target audience’s attention and show you are an expert in this industry.
This type of content personalization might not be specific enough to send target individual leads, but will definitely help you bring new visitors to your website and eventually generate more qualified leads to work on.
If you consider custom landing pages as content, which you should, Deputy is a great example of generating industry-specific content.
Deputy is a shift scheduling software that can be used in dozens of different industries. To increase conversions, they have a custom landing page for basically every industry. Landing pages are populated with industry-specific pain points, custom graphics, and testimonials.
Below is a screenshot that shows a chunk of the landing page that covers the healthcare industry.
2. Personalization for an organization
This is when you develop a personalized content strategy for an organization or account that you are targeting. If you have ever run an account-based marketing campaign, you might have an idea about account-specific content.
Custom landing pages, presentations, webinars, email campaigns, and dynamic web content are some examples of organization or account-specific content personalization.
3. Personalization for individual leads
Creating lead-specific content can be very time-consuming, but can also give huge returns. Once you know the problem your lead has, you can create personalized content that offers unique solutions.
Consider investing your time and resources in this kind of personalization after the leads have already interacted with your campaigns. For example, we at RecurPost provide customized pricing plans for each high-end lead, according to their unique requirements for social media management.
4. Personalization based on buyer persona
Many organizations depend on the representations (personas) of their buyers to generate relevant content. A persona-based content personalization strategy includes segmenting content based on the characteristics of your ideal buyer. These personas can be anecdotal or data-driven.
Insights such as demographics, psychographics, pain points, potential objections to purchasing can be used to develop persona-based content. As you keep collecting data over time, you can refine each buyer persona and further improve your content personalization efforts.
An example of such content comes from Limble CMMS. Limble is a maintenance software and their main target personas are maintenance directors, managers, supervisors, and other managerial roles in the maintenance space. They create a lot of specific content like this one to target those specific roles.
5. Insertion based personalization
This is a more generic form of personalization that takes into account visitors’ geographical information. Personal situations in emails, references to time (ex. “good evening”), or weather information on landing pages are some examples of insertion-based personalization.
6. Personalization based on the marketing funnel stage
Personalized content can be a great way to nurture your leads. It is basically the foundation of B2B lifecycle marketing.
You create awareness-level content to attract a broader audience and get them to download a lead magnet. When they download the lead magnet you trigger a semi-personalized sequence of 4-6 emails that get them more familiar with your brands and services.
Each subsequent email can feature content that is further down the sales funnel. It takes time to set everything right, but once it starts working, you do not have to do much to keep it maintained as the process is highly automated.
In the image below, you can see how different types of content match different stages of the marketing funnel.
You can learn more about creating a smart content marketing funnel here.
Tools that facilitate content personalization
RightMessage
RightMessage is a tool that will examine the behavior of your audience even before they visit your website. It finds out the advertisements on which the users have clicked in the past, which websites they have been visiting, and the actions they took on your website, if any.
Accordingly, it adapts the content on every page. RightMessage can show menus and pop-ups customized for every visitor and give them suggestions based on what they are looking for.
Attraqt
Attraqt is a platform that investigates what your website visitors spend the most time looking at. Then, it begins personalizing the experience of each visitor by providing them with relevant content.
It records all of the actions website visitors perform, which enables continuous testing and leads to improved customer experiences. Attraqt is a great content personalization tool if you’re planning to expand yourself globally as it’s available in more than 40 languages.
Barilliance
Barilliance is an all-around integrated suite of applications that allows you to deliver a personalized shopping experience during each step of the purchase journey. Barilliance offers abandoned cart functionality, live notifications, and detailed analytics.
It also keeps a track of the items that were dropped after adding to the cart, which helps in showing relevant product recommendations to customers. This tool is quick and easy to set up and requires zero programming efforts from your side.
Honorable mentions
There are many other tools that can help you to analyze your website experience and collect more info about your target audience – which you can later use to perform segmentation and create personalized content. Notable mentions include tools like:
- Contentsquare (offers many interesting features like customer journey analytics and session replay)
- any of the popular heatmap tools you prefer
- Qualaroo (customer and user feedback software)
Final thoughts
When it comes to content personalization, you simply can’t afford not to adapt to it. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to satisfy the increasing demand for customized experiences across the customer journey.
With personalized content, you’ll increase user engagement, conversion rates, and have easier time retaining existing clients. So, get out there and start personalizing!
Debbie Moran is a digital marketing strategist with over 5 years of experience in helping companies with advertising, and showcasing their brand to the right audience. She is a part of RecurPost for the last 2 years and handles all the activities required to grow the brand’s online presence.
