You have put hard work into your content strategy and you are starting to see results. More and more businesses are willing to put the time and effort it takes into creating content that draws in more traffic and spreads brand awareness. But how are you ensuring your content is written for all of your various customer types at their points of entry?
Your visitors are coming in for different reasons. When customers come to your website they are looking for solutions, inspiration or other offerings. If your message doesn’t align with their needs, they bounce quickly.
The average visitor only gives you about 10 seconds.
What are you doing to make sure you appeal to the majority of your visitors? Content personalization ensures you bring in as many leads as possible for the right reasons (and keep them around).
What is Content Personalization?
As visitors consider what ads, articles and links they will click on, they have different factors motivating them. While one customer might pursue your solutions for their pain, another may not even have identified that pain or that there is a potential solution that could make life easier. Personalized content marketing takes their needs into account and tailors various pieces of content for very specific customers. This will be based on search history, ads they’ve clicked on, website visit history and other variables.
92% of content marketers say they are delivering some form of personalized content.
Email is one of the most common places to start with personalized content—companies should segment lists and only send out emails to the audience the content applies to. Email lists can be segmented by age, location, previous purchase history, point in the buyer journey, and more. Fully personalizing website content and tracking ROI can be trickier.
Planning Content Flows
Understanding your audience and the various leads you should attract is the first step. You need to run an audit of your customers and the leads you are likely losing out on. You will need to look at your competitors to see if there are gaps in the market that content alone could fill to help snag customers that are underserved.
Once you define who you are writing for, you will need to audit your existing content to see what content applies to which main visitor groups. What content is appealing to new leads that are not even in the discovery phase of their journey? Those topics should cover industry-relevant topics that aren’t trying to even address the pain you can solve. What about buyers looking to purchase a product or service you offer? Your content for targeting those visitors should have plenty of details to help them make an informed purchase decision.
At every step of the buyer’s journey, you should have content that encourages and informs.
Writing Powerful Content
Content that is brand-centric isn’t appealing. Your customers don’t care about your company or products—they care about their pain and current experiences.
In order to appeal to your customer, the personalized content has to resonate. You need powerful content. And, if you don’t know who your audience is, it will show.
Testing and Measuring Results
Of course, truly impactful content is going to come down to the tiny details. Where you place an image or the title you use will absolutely impact the number of shares, bounces, click-throughs, and more. You need to test various versions and measure the results of your content to fully customize it to your visitors. It’s vital you understand your key performance indicators (KPIs) and not get caught up on vanity metrics like social media follows or contact list numbers.
The expectations of customers are changing fast and it can be hard to stay on top of the latest marketing trends. Do you want to save time and attract more leads with effective personalized content marketing? Or maybe your content personalization strategy is, well, non-existent.