Personalisation is wreaking havoc in the online marketing universe. Every solution or platform-maker is pushing personalization as a trophy feature. And every piece of content you turn to lectures you on the importance of personalizing one or all your processes. This post is no different - go personalize something!
The end result of the personalization arms race is Rules & Lists Marketing since personalization is simply not there yet, technology-wise; according to an Experian survey, the three biggest challenges in achieving a single customer view (essential for personalization) are:
What we end up with is labour-intensive software where we need to set up numerous rules and organize lists. This is actually segmentation, but we won’t fuss over details.
Actually, we will.
According to a Forrester Consulting paper, 85% of brands that reported having at least basic personalization in place, agreed or strongly agreed that their efforts are based on broad segmentation, creating content pillars, and simple clustering:
Turning to content personalisation, that’s where things get hazy:
We can go by the route of personas, a.k.a. personalising the message. Still, in the B2B space, every company targets various personas, even for the same product. This stems from the fact that various decision-makers are involved in every purchase decision. We need to write different pieces of content for the different decision-makers at the various buying journey stages.
Let’s put that in an equation form:
This looks like a decent amount of work, but totally doable - as long as you use your team to help you with business blogging.
If we manage to create the above content pool we are more or less set, right? We have managed, in a way, to adapt the concept of personalization to content, meaning, we have targeted pieces of content that would appeal to different personas.
One tiny detail is still unsolved:
How do we make sure persona X reads the content meant for them, and not the content meant for persona Z?
In nurturing, assuming we collected enough information about the lead in the conversion process, we can send specific content to specific leads, ensuring that the right content reaches the right persona.
Email works pretty well for the personalised distribution of content.
But what about your most important touchpoint, your website?
You equipped your website with content. Is that enough as far as how you present your content?
The thing is, websites have vertical architecture. In order to reach desired content, visitors need to drill down and browse through the blog or the resource section and that’s where things get tricky, from two angles:
If an amazing article is buried in the third page of a blog and no one is around to read it, does it make an impact?
There’s nothing personal about posting content on your website and hoping visitors will accidentally stumble upon it. It’s akin to assuming that users will somehow find you online without you taking steps to optimize your online presence.
You need to have a proactive content personalization agenda and again, we are not talking about personalizing the content itself, you’ve done that already, but rather personalising content interaction - how your website visitors interact with your content.
The two-step solution is to learn as much as you can about your website’s visitors, and then according to what you’ve learned, recommend the most relevant content for each visitor. Oh right, and you need do it in real time.
Instead of using simple, generic popups to offer something irrelevant which is anyhow usually a command - Register Now!!! Join Today!!! Sign Up!!! - how about suggesting to your visitors a relevant, informative piece of content? Which do you think they’ll appreciate more? Such a difficult question!
Personalized content recommendations, rooted in relevancy and based on understanding user behavior are key to providing the right website experience to your visitors in your most lucrative touch point - your home turf.
This can be done manually by integrating two or more tools - Google Analytics for gathering the information on the visitors and then a UI solution for suggesting the content.
Another way this can be achieved is by entrusting the entire process to an algorithm that can do both - analyze visitor behavior on the site according to which pages they visit, cross-reference it with the information they arrive with, and recommending them relevant content. The content can be gated, thus helping in converting them. If the eBook or whitepaper holds the information the visitor was looking for, they will fill out the form, happily even.
It’s about thinking what your website visitors need, want, or are looking for, not about how you can open another lead in SalesForce. Once you focus your efforts on catering to your visitors, giving them what they came for (not trying to force them to convert with non-closable full-screen popups or oh-so-witty language like ‘No thanks, I know everything’) the leads will come naturally, and they will be of a much higher quality.
Conversions that are driven by gratitude and curiosity are more likely to listen and be receptive to what you will tell them next, as opposed to coerced conversions. Internet users are very sensitive to what’s coming their way and they’ve gotten extremely quick in brushing things aside and moving on.
Personalisation feels like the stuff the future is made of. Things can change - at one point, in the late 90s, MiniDisc felt like the stuff the future was made of - but personalisation surely seems like the natural progression of segmentation, which is the force that drives marketing automation today.
And what’s even more convincing than that is the plain fact that we all want it; just give me what I’m interested in and don’t bother me with the rest. Now that’s something I’ll sign to right now.