67% of consumers admitted in a Salesforce survey that their expectations from brands are higher than ever. Besides a great product and top-tier customer service—what else are they expecting? In this day and age, content personalization is the name of the game. Every visitor to your site should be seeing content that appeals to them individually, based on historical, contextual, and behavioral data. The key to a successful brand and marketing strategy is creating content that is useful to your audience, and promoting the content that is most relevant to each consumer through personalization.
Why is content personalization important?
The most successful brands recognize how they fit into the lives of their consumers. Content is a way to expand your reach long after the purchase. Whether your content makes you a convenient database for product-related information, or an innovative thought leader in your industry, it should be promoted and optimized to find a uniquely engaged audience every time.
In the same Salesforce survey mentioned above, 87% of respondents said that treating them as a person and not a number is the key to winning their business. Consumers respond better to marketing campaigns that are tailored to their habits and experiences. Businesses can reap greater rewards by providing visitors with personalized content. Behavioral data provides a lot of insight on what each consumer will respond to. Not using this information to optimize your content puts your business at risk of losing customers.
What is an example of personalized content?
Relevant Content
The first building block of content personalization is to offer relevant content to your consumer. This can range from ways to use your product to general industry information. If you are a food and beverage company, for example, you might like to begin creating and publishing recipes that use your products. A travel company, on the other hand, could focus on travel tips to their destinations. The possibilities are endless when you start thinking about how your brand fits into the lives of your customers.
Product Recommendations
The next way to personalize your content is to use historical data (purchases) and behavioral data (viewed products; visited pages) to curate an optimized list of products for each consumer. Consumer data is being produced at an alarming rate; sifting through and acting on so much data can feel overwhelming to a marketing team—not to mention the fact that they might miss a pattern that would optimize your efforts and increase revenue. Using an AI-driven personalization tool to analyze and act on data insights will help maximize your ROI and ensure that every consumer gets a personalized content experience.
Loyalty & Rewards programs
Another facet of content personalization is using historical and behavioral data to curate exclusive rewards for your consumer. An overwhelming 70% of consumers say they will shop exclusively with brands that personally understand them. This means tapping into their habits and making them feel valued. Noticing that a customer buys the same products from your beauty brand every month, for example, can help you to enable a loyalty program that delights them the next time they buy from you.
Personalized Pricing and Promotions
Yet another way to personalize your content and delight every consumer is to offer personalized promotions that appeal to each consumer’s unique habits and needs. You’ll need to use first party data and testing to enable this tactic, but the idea is to present each consumer with an irresistible, individual offer that entices them to convert. This goes beyond the annual push for holiday sales; ideally, you’re finding ways to personalize your content year-round. Personalized banner ads on your homepage can allow you to offer deals that are consistent with browsing history, cart history, profile information, and more.
According to an Epsilon survey, 80% of consumers stated that they are keen to engage with brands that offer them a personalized experience. Content personalization helps your brand to stay relevant and top of mind for their consumers in between purchases. It also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases by positioning brands as thought leaders in their respective industries.