Content Personalization

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is it?

Content personalization is a really powerful tool that allows you to differentiate your content at different stages of the purchase funnel to help it be hyper-relevant to the right user at the right time.

Benefits

There are a number of benefits to content personalization.

• Targeted and relevant: You can make your message more targeted and relevant to your specific audience at a moment in time.
• Higher conversion rate: A lot of studies have shown a higher conversion rate. We're seeing 42% higher conversion rates by using personalized content at the various stages of the conversion funnel.
• Increased brand affinity: Ultimately, it will result in increased brand affinity as that audience believes the content is fit for them at that moment in time.
• Drives efficiency: For you, as a brand marketer, it drives efficiency to segment your content intelligently like this.

How can you give your content that personal touch?
 Being able to do your research around your audience segments and understand their consumer journey is hugely beneficial.

• Leverage customer data: Make sure that you're leveraging as much consumer data as possible. Are they on your website? Have they looked at a newsletter that you've sent them? Are they on a mailing list or have they had a direct mail in their inbox? Looking to see how they've interacted with you in the past will inform how you can interact with them in the future.
• Target your messaging: Look towards your targeting on your message. Are they the right audience that you need to be hitting? Is this the moment in time when they're making a purchase decision? Look towards demographics or consumer personas that we've mapped out previously, and make sure that you're hitting the right creative and the right copy to the right people.
• Measure and analyze: As you create and personalize content, you will glean great learnings and understandings by which content worked effectively. As they're guided through the purchase funnel, you'll be able to assess which content most effectively brought people onto that next phase. If you're selling and linking people to an e-commerce platform, you might be able to see which content formats across your content personalization chain actually help drive the most amount of sales or client acquisitions for you.

Case study: Vidyard

Here's a great example of content personalization and one of my favorites from a brand called Vidyard.

They created a simple, super personalized video campaign of bespoke video assets. They targeted individuals from a high-value potential for their business that they actually seeded out to drive the commitment to their potential clients.

The man in the video addresses each of the people individually, and he has a message for them that, relevant to their own audiences, mentions co-workers in their office or previous conversations that he's had. It's a really good example, if not possibly one that's not the most time efficient. It was a great piece of content that helped Vidyard hit their sales target.

Case study: H&M

Another great example of content personalization is from fashion retailer H&M.

As you can see, users who have purchased on the website are also treated to other content from, "You might also like this outfit." It's able to look at the individual items that you have been searching and recommend complementary items of clothing that would fit with your basket contents.

It's a really clever way for them to upsell their accessory suggestions, and also auto-generate list space off of the user's input with the website. These lists demonstrate the brand's interest in their customers or appearing interest as the case may be, and, again, result in their overall business objectives.