Mastering content personalization across digital channels

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy is capturing the attention and wallet-share of customers. This can prove complex when these same customers are bombarded with information across dozens of different digital platforms daily. According to market research experts McKinsey, delivering personalized content at scale is the answer, and “Marketing’s Holy Grail”.¹

Most companies are able to offer personalized experiences in at least some of their digital marketing on a campaign-by-campaign, channel-by-channel basis. But preferred channels and customer expectations are constantly shifting, as are target demographics and audience segments. Operating within this ever-changing landscape at the single channel level isn’t just inconvenient — it’s unsustainable. In fact, according to one estimate, companies with a one-size-fits all strategy are losing $1 trillion in annual revenues to their competitors because they’re not consistently relevant enough.² It stands to reason that if the customer experience is poor, so is the conversion rate.

To capture the hearts and dollars of shoppers, personalization must be done on an enterprise-wide scale. Multiple departments have to work together nimbly and effortlessly to deliver relevant content in real time, regardless of channel. Rinse and repeat.

One of the key foundational elements of a successful omnichannel content strategy is ensuring that your content is structured for use and reuse across channels.

A traditional Content Management System (CMS) is designed for websites and most of them still organize content into page-centric frameworks. This means page components like the headline, author, summary and call to action are combined with code to produce a web page or other channel-specific format. Because content is lumped together and combined with code, a different CMS is typically needed for each channel, limiting reuse and fragmenting your personalization efforts.

To meet the omnichannel needs of today’s customers, content must be structured for use across channels. This starts with a content model that breaks down content into individual elements, such as a blog post headline or the copy on a Call-To-Action (CTA) button. You define which elements you need and how they relate to each other. In doing so, you create a dynamic content infrastructure that organizes content for use across channels. What’s more, you can easily specify elements for different audience segments, channels or “triggers” — making it easy to integrate personalization and automation tools.

For example, a landing page on a website might have certain fixed fields in a traditional content model: title, summary, author, form, etc. In a flexible content model, those are individual elements that can be organized into different layouts depending on the channel. Or feature personalization and translation tool integrations to produce the most relevant user experience for site visitors. In this way, we can quickly create a custom landing page for each different target audience for the whitepaper, Publish once, sell everywhere. Alternatively, we can make adjustments to offer other types of content, like case studies about ecommerce.

#1: Start with a customer-centric business strategy. Great strategy drives measurable results. None of the outcomes we described above are possible without the vision, clarity, resources and team unity provided by a customer-centric business strategy. Successfully supporting strategy with content means serving target customer segments with customized messaging at key moments (see #2 below).

#2: Collect and use customer data to predict their needs. The companies who excel at personalized marketing campaigns are the best listeners. Customers are constantly sending out digital signals about their needs and preferences via activities like purchases, online browsing and social media posts. Companies need to convert those signals into behavioral data that’s actionable, segmenting customers with similar profiles to predict their needs and personalize their content based on previous interactions.³ For example, this might take the form of viewing product recommendations. This is used to great effect by companies like Amazon and Netflix who use the power of machine learning and algorithms to deliver a highly personalized customer experience.

#3: Create a flexible content infrastructure. As we discussed above, this is the key to efficiently scaling your digital personalization strategy. A flexible content model, built for use across channels, kicks aside the problems, frustrations and repetitive manual tasks of traditional content operations. You can quickly adapt content to serve evolving customer needs, whether that means expanding into new channels, localizing the right content for a new market or implementing a new page layout.

#4: Choose the right technology partners. Industry leaders are moving away from mega-suites. Despite vendors’ claims, no single party offers a true end-to-end solution. Adopting a microservice approach enables companies to assemble a tech stack using their preferred technology partners. API-first content solutions, such as Contentful, are built to integrate with your tech stack. This streamlines content operations by applying tools such as personalization, analytics and automation across content channels.

#5: Deploy the same content for different markets. Transforming content creation from a cost center into a revenue center requires the ability to scale and extend content into new markets. For new channels that means being able to deliver content in any digital format. For international markets, you need the ability to quickly and easily translate and localize content for homepages, landing pages, microsites, seasonal offerings, email marketing and more touchpoints across multiple locales. Optimizing content on the back-end fuels your ability to scale faster by aligning brand elements across channels, repurposing content to get more value and personalizing content so the right messaging delivers the right customer experience at the right time.

References:

¹ Brian Gregg, Hussein Kalaoui, Joel Maynes, and Gustavo Schuler, “Marketing’s Holy Grail: Digital personalization at scale”, McKinsey Digital, November 2016

² John Zealley, Robert Wollan, Joshua Bellin, “Marketers Need to Stop Focusing on Loyalty and Start Thinking About Relevance”, Harvard Business Review, March 2018

³ Brian Gregg, Hussein Kalaoui, Joel Maynes, and Gustavo Schuler, “Marketing’s Holy Grail: Digital personalization at scale”, McKinsey Digital, November 2016