A hot trend running among digital marketers these days is content personalization.  As we see more and more businesses enter the online world via social media platforms and modern, trendy websites, personal content will be the key to attracting and maintaining followers.   Content personalization is a new topic, and many are just beginning to understand how to implement it into practice. 

            In previous years, website creation was a tedious and daunting process.  Now a days there is technology and tools that make web design more straight forward.  Although there is no one size fits all solution; there are still a lot of choices when it comes to the best approach, there are some general steps and guidelines you can follow to design a program that’s both manageable and helps you meet your most immediate goals. 

Step 1: Know Who You’re Talking To

            Before you begin creating any content, you must first know who your audience is.  Collecting names through forms and recognizing the people who visit your website should represent a small margin of the audience you are aiming for.  Most of your buyers will complete their research on you before any interaction occurs.  So you want those potential buyers to see content that’s relevant to them on your website in the early stages of their research process.  Think about the specific companies/buyers you want to reach.  Create a list of names of companies that you most believe will be the ideal user of your product or service, then you can use that list to deliver personalized content to site visitors, that otherwise might be anonymous. 

Step 2: Segment Your List

            Once you have created your list, divide it up into segments of companies with similar attributes.  Divide up your list depending on what matters most to your company.  There may be some attributes that have higher priority than others.  Some examples of attributes are company size, revenue, industry, geography and account status.  One way to segment would be to separate those who engage only in sales cycles, verses long term customers.  Or group them by cap size.  Segmentation is crucial for content personalization by ensuring that marketing is aligned with sales when it comes to targeting accounts and meeting the company’s revenue goals. 

Step 3: Measure & Analyze

            A critical element of goal setting and prioritization is setting benchmarks.  Instead of just measuring clicks and page views in general, go for more robust analytics.  Look at each key target and segment separately, measuring how they are behaving on your website.  Greater understanding of your site traffic will help you make decisions about how to prioritize your segments.  A huge part of a successful personalization strategy is leveraging data that provides insight about company attributes.  By using an analytics tool that can identify your site visitors based on these attributes, you can deliver that personalization content to the right segments in real time. 

Step 4: Develop Messaging

            For most people, content creation feels like the biggest obstacle to personalization.  In reality, successful personalization is not so much about content creation but about content strategy.  So do an inventory on the content you have and know when and where to deliver that content.  There’s often a need for more content, when what you actually need is a better distribution.  Instead of creating a new case study, you may just need to organize your case studies based on industry and ensure that the right prospects are served the right content.  Another tactic would be to tweek call-to-actions and website headlines for immediate personalization. 

Above all, remember to consider the solution that works best for you company and your technology stack, and stay invested in the progress for optimal success.  Need some help analyzing and targeting your online audience? We can help.