Chapter 2
Getting Personal with Content Marketing
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the differences in delivering content
Painting portraits of your best customers
Getting smart about telling stories
Making it personal and taking it online
As consumers, Google has taught us that we can quickly find almost any type of information we want when conducting online searches. And, we can expect that the content showing in the search engine results page (SERP) will closely match what we asked for in our search query. As online marketers and online businesses, Google has made it clear that if we want our websites to rank well in search, it’s up to us to provide high-quality content. Not only should the content match the searcher’s intent (what she specifically wanted to know), but also it should anticipate what questions our buyers are asking.
For an online business, that doesn’t mean Google expects you to be a mind reader. But search engines do require that you know your customers extremely well. You must also understand what content buyers find most helpful and anticipate how those content needs change during different stages of the buyer’s journey. Sounds simple, right? Trust us, it really is not that difficult. In this chapter, we show you how content marketing and personalization can work wonders for your website and help meet the needs of search engines and customers.
Delivering the Goods with the Right Content Approach
As an online business, you use content to help drive quality visitors to your website. And search engines, not just Google, then deliver search traffic based on the content that best matches the information request of the customer. This is the goal of content marketing.
Creating useful, interesting content for your website pays. Consider that content marketing leaders get eight times more website traffic than those who don’t use content well, according to technology pioneer, Neil Patel. What kind of content works best? Well, the short answer is that you need a mix of content types, styles, and lengths, which we discuss later in this chapter. But one interesting fact is that while consumers’ attention spans are fading, it’s still the longer form content that captures more site visitors. Top ranking content in Google is between 1,140 and 1,285 words, according to Searchmetrics (www.searchmetrics.com). And visitors are actually reading the content, spending nearly 40 seconds on long articles (which is a really long time in the online world!). Plus, readers then end up staying longer on the website that hosts the content.
If that’s not enough to prove the value of good content, think about this: Quality content generates three times as many leads compared to that of traditional outbound marketing tactics; and content marketing costs 67 percent less, according to Demand Metric (www.demandmetric.com). Of course, long-form articles aren’t the only requirement for creating an effective content marketing strategy. Personalized content is an increasingly important component for online success. And when delivered through your website, personalization is specifically referred to as web personalization. Let’s define these three concepts more clearly, because you’ll want to incorporate all of them:
- Content marketing: The process of developing and distributing content of all types that attracts, obtains, and engages a target audience for the purpose of achieving marketing and general business goals, and specifically contributes to brand awareness, lead generation, and revenue growth.
- Content personalization: A marketing strategy (as part of content marketing) that utilizes content written for a specific audience or persona, while aligning an individual piece of content’s purpose to the needs of that persona. Content personalization can also apply to smaller segments of text within a larger piece of content. For example, in an e-mail that is written for a general business audience, there may be one paragraph or even a single sentence within the e-mail that is dynamically changed (according to the recipient). The majority of the e-mail is the same for all recipients, but the piece of dynamic content with the e-mail changes to address different buyers by job title or industry, for example. The key to personalization is that you know enough about your audience to segment them into different buckets so that you can personalize how you to talk to them.
- Web personalization: Web personalization is the same as content personalization but it happens specifically online, and it can vary by channel or device. In this case, personalized content is delivered from your website to the desktop or to a mobile device, and it can also occur within a web app or a mobile app. It takes content that is written for a particular segment or buyer persona, and matches it to those segments that come to your website. For example, an online pet store may have a website visitor enter the site who has previously been identified with a product interest in dogs. That website visitor is shown content (coupons, special offers, and articles) only about dogs. If there’s enough data to know the type of dog breed or the size of dog the website visitor has, then those offers and articles may be further personalized to the specific breed. The level of web personalization you offer is dependent on how much you know about the customer and how personalized your content is.
Developing Buyer Personas
Creating truly useful content starts with understanding as much as possible about the person who is consuming that content. You may have a website that sells to parents, but that’s a very broad category of buyer. You might have a mom of twin toddlers looking for parenting information on your website. She has very different needs than the father of a 14-year-old teenager who is also searching for parenting advice. But both of these buyers are your target customers. You likely have products that appeal to each of them. However, if all your content is based generally about being a parent, it’s going to be tough to convince these two different buyers to remain interested and shop with you. Your job is to provide both of them specific information that most closely matches their needs or interests.
If you have any type of store (online or off), you already understand the necessity of this customer analysis when stocking up on inventory. If you don’t know who is coming to your store and what they are buying, or why they are buying it, then you’re essentially guessing as to what products you should keep in stock. The same approach is needed when developing buyer personas for the purpose of creating content. If you’re not familiar with the term “buyer personas,” it’s simply a profile of your different types of customers that describes as much as possible about who they are and what they want. You might have only two to three different types of customers, but you may also a dozen different customers.
Getting started developing buyer personas doesn’t need to be complex. Create no more than three to five personas for your most frequent or important buyers.
Before you get started writing a profile of each of your best customers, you must have a substantial amount of information about those customers:
- Use your gut. If you’ve already been in business for a while, you probably have a general sense of the different types of people that make up your customers. You may talk to them frequently and know a good bit about their personal lives, or you may only know them based on the products they buy from you. Perhaps there are some types of buyers that you tend to sell to more often. Use this general knowledge of your business to start categorizing the different types of existing customers.
- Analyze all the data. Go digging through all your data sources, from website analytics to CRM (customer relationship management) software records. Look for trends or common traits and buying signals across all your customers. Once you identify patterns, group that information together to form a buyer persona.
- Check out competitors. It’s probable that some of your competitors have already gone through the process of creating buyer personas. You can tell by the different types of content offered on their website. Spend some time going through the competitor’s website and blog and take note when there are articles, ads, or offers that seems to target a specific type of buyer and then see if you can see similar buyer profiles from your customer base.
- Talk to your buyers (all of them!). One of the best ways to get detailed information about your customers is to talk to them. And this includes the people who buy from you regularly, those who visit your website and talk to your sales team but never buy, and those customers who bought only once or twice and never came back to you. By talking to the customer directly, you uncover more detailed information about what motivates them, how they found your website, or why they bought from you over someone else. You can access a larger percentage of customers by sending them an online survey, but you also need to call and talk directly to half-a-dozen customers or more to get a better sense of what makes your buyers tick.
You can increase the likelihood of getting customers to speak with you or complete your survey by offering them an incentive for spending time with you. You can give them a gift card for a free cup of coffee or a discount on their next purchase from you. But we almost guarantee that you’ll have better and bigger response rates if you provide some small incentive or thank you for their time.
Speaking of getting your customers to hand over the keys to their personas, you might wonder what type of information you need to know. This can vary a bit depending on whether you sell B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), but generally you want to segment them into some common types. For example, in B2B, it may be important to know what their job titles are; that’s because IT roles (or technical job roles) might show an interest in your product or service for very different reasons than business owners or executives. In B2C, you may want to know it’s a parent who works full-time outside the home, or a stay-at-home mom or dad. While both of these parents are your customers, they are motivated to buy from you for different reasons. While this is not an extensive list, following are some of the most common data points you might want to know to start creating a buyer persona:
- Job role or title
- Industry in which the person works (healthcare, education, and so on)
- Product interest
- Geographic location
- Age
- Do they have kids (how many, what age)
- Income range (either individually or by total household income)
- Own pets (what kinds, what ages)
- Hobbies or interests
- Type of car they drive
- Own or rent a house or lease an apartment
- How often they buy from you (or from competitors)
- Why they buy certain products or services (what drives that need or want)
- What problem they want to solve when considering your website or products or service
- Role in buying process (in B2B, do they have authority to buy or do they influence the purchase)
Once you have sufficient information, it’s time to create a buyer persona. Start by sorting through all the data and interviews and look for common points of interest or common data points. You should be able to quickly begin grouping buyers into categories based on the similarities you uncovered. A buyer persona is actually a fictional customer who is made up of all the real data you collected from those different customer types you uncovered. So, for each buyer persona, you get to create a character.
Start by giving him or her a name and then identify this customer’s buying category, such as “Serina, working mom of teenagers,” or “Bob, stay-at-home dad of preschoolers.” Another key persona for your online business may be “Geraldine, grandmother.” Then, for each of these named personas, continue adding information that details who they are, describes their lives, and shows details about when or why they might buy from you. You’ll also want to include information about where they go (online and off) to get news, parenting tips, and advice about their households. The objective is to figure out who influences them or what other online communities (forums, social media) or websites they depend on for information.
When trying to decide what or how much information to include in a buyer persona, imagine you are at a party with potential investors for your business. You’ve invited several of your top customers to meet the investors so they have a better idea of who is buying from you.
Consider how you might introduce each buyer to the investors so that they feel confident you know about your target market and your buyers. For example, you might say: “Joe, this is one of our top customers, Mary Steady. She has her hands full working full-time and raising two teenage daughters. Although she considers herself to be very cost conscious, she doesn’t mind spending a little extra to shop with us. In fact, Mary buys from us frequently not only because of the quality of our products, which is super important to her, but also because it’s convenient. She doesn’t have to add another trip to the store to her already busy day. Instead, she orders online and knows everything will be on her doorstep with 2 to 3 days. She first discovered our site after a popular parent blogger mentioned it in an article.”
As you see, a buyer persona contains not only basic facts about the shopper, but also it tells a story about your customer’s life and how your product or service fits into her world. Once you get to know your different types of customers, you can give them content that will be interesting and helpful specific to that buyer persona.
Creating Content for Storytelling and Consumption
There’s a reason content has the reputation of being King in the world of online marketing. Content, in all forms, has the ability to evoke specific actions, or reactions, from readers. And the content creator has the opportunity to shape what those actions or responses should be based on the desired intent. In other words, every piece of your content should serve a specific purpose. If done well, the content should net the desired outcome. When it comes to content marketing, your job is to align the right piece of content (purpose) with the right person (buyer) at the right time (buyer stage) so that you successfully tell your brand’s story and lead that reader (or online shopper) down the path to become a buyer.
Content framework
In order to understand how best to use content, it helps to categorize it, or determine what type of content goes into which bucket. At the highest level of categorization is the framework. The information you create falls into one of these specific frameworks:
- Educational: This content is focused on discovery, or helping the buyer to learn something new. Educational content could include an article about industry trends, or it might be a video that discusses the history behind the popularity of a particular product or category of products. The content should be of a high level.
- Instructional: Similar to educational content, this type of content also revolves around learning, but it is detailed and usually product-specific. Instructional content includes product “how-to’s” and “tips” or shortcuts for using the product or service.
- Entertaining: Sometimes the purpose of content is to generate awareness and one way to do that is to entertain the reader or viewer. Capturing the attention of the prospective buyer is challenging, and providing fun, funny, or interesting content that entertains is one way to do that. Videos, memes (images with captions that are shared via social media), and lighthearted blog posts are all examples of content that can be entertaining for an online audience.
- Persuasive: Ultimately, you want the online shopper to buy from you, and you need content that convinces her to do so. Usually, persuasive content provides a specific reason to use your product (a benefit). That message may get relayed by hearing from an existing customer in the form of a testimonial, review, or case study, or from an expert outside your company.
- Promotional: There are plenty of times when you need content to shine a bright spotlight on your brand or product. Its sole purpose is to speak to your product and show why it is better than competing products. This type of content can be created by you or by your customers who have turned into advocates for the product or for your brand.
Now that you understand what makes up the content framework, let’s look at another way to organize content based on who creates it.
Content segments
Today’s online buyers are savvy shoppers. But they are also heavily influenced by others, including peers, trusted advisors (from analysts to bloggers), celebrities, family and friends, and strangers (people leaving product reviews, for example). When researching products and services, there is one information source that online shoppers tend to rank toward the bottom on the trust meter — the brand! This is especially true for paid advertisements, but it applies to content as well. Whom do shoppers trust? Research indicates that friends and family top the list as most trusted, followed by online reviews, and then third-party experts.
Yes, that means your company or brand can crank out a lot of content that tells how great your product is, but at the end of the day the buyer may be skeptical about its value, simply because it came from you. Notice the emphasis we put on the phrase “how great your product is” — that’s because blatant, in-your-face promotional content usually isn’t taken at face value, but other types of content produced by your brand can still be highly trusted. Buyers expect you to say only good things about your product, and that means they have to go other places to figure out potential problems or downsides to your solution. Customer reviews usually help fill in that gap, by providing a more balanced user perspective the looks at both the pros and cons of a product.
On the other hand, if your brand writes articles about industry trends or common problems and how to solve them (without directly naming your product as the solution), buyers are more receptive to hearing from you. Similarly, if you share information from your existing customers (case studies and testimonials, for example), buyers are also more trusting, especially if they can identify with your customer and see similarities to themselves.
While it’s understandable that a direct sales pitch isn’t always seen as the most accurate, you still have to talk about yourself and your products at least some of the time. The bottom line is that you need to produce content pieces that fall into all three of these content segments:
- Brand-generated: This is content produced by your company. It includes both branded information (names the company, product, or service) and unbranded (discusses trends, problems, or solutions but without specifically mentioning your company name or product name).
- Customer-generated: This is content that is created by a customer or the public without help from your brand or company (although you can encourage the development of the content). This type of content usually mentions the brand name or product name, but it’s from the perspective of the customer. An example of this are the Doritos commercials shown during the Super Bowl each year that are created by fans. Even though the brand requested the content and held a contest to find the best commercial, it’s still the fan or customer who created it without direction from Doritos.
- Third-party validation: In both B2B an B2C, there is a lot of content that is generated about a brand from someone other than customers or from the brand. This content comes from analysts, experts, celebrities, or others considered knowledgeable or influential about your product or service. These third-party content creators are not part of the brand, but sometimes the company can use (and pay for the use of) the content if it is favorable to the brand or product. (Think in terms of paid celebrity endorsements, or even the recent trend of paying bloggers and social media influencers to create content about the brand.)
Content types
The last category addresses the specific format of the content, or the way in which it’s packaged for consumption. You want to have a wide variety of content types, but here are some of the most common types to add into your content marketing strategy:
- Video
- Images/pictures
- Memes (images with text on top)
- Articles
- White papers/guides
- Product demos
- Infographics (using images or graphics as a way to show data or research)
- Testimonials
- Online tools (savings calculators, free trials, and so on)
- Interactive quizzes
- E-newsletters
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
Sometimes it feels like you never have enough content. You can stretch out the content you already have by repurposing it, or repackaging it into a different content type. For example, you may have a video testimonial from a customer. You can take that same information and write it as a customer case study. Or you can pull out a specific customer comment from the video and use it as a stand-alone quote — add the quote to an image and create a sharable picture for social media.
Content may have a shelf life. Blog posts about a new product, or articles that center on a current event or news will eventually no longer be relevant because it happens on a specific date or time period. To help increase the staying power of your content, consider adding some “evergreen” content into the mix. Evergreen means that it stays fresh, or relevant, indefinitely (or, at least for a very long time!). To give content the evergreen treatment, avoid using dates in the article. For instance, instead of referring to “Winter 2017,” simply say “winter” or refer to “the colder months.” Similarly, avoid referencing a specific event that could also date the content. The more general way your content is written, the better chance it has to live a long life online as a piece of evergreen content.
Aligning content to intent
As you can see, there are all types of content that serves a wide variety of purposes. For content to be effective in helping convert browsers to online buyers, you need to next match each piece of content to the appropriate stage in the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey represents the path a prospective buyer takes on her way to becoming your customer. That journey is segmented into four stages: awareness (not yet aware of having a need or desire for a product, just exploring); consideration (aware of a need, researching options); decision (choosing a solution, comparing options); and advocacy (loyal customer, sharing experience with others and open to repeat purchases for self). We discuss the buyer’s journey in detail in the previous chapter if you want to learn the nitty-gritty details, or need a refresher.
When you’re ready to map out, or align, your content, start by considering your prospective customer’s intent at each stage of the buyer’s journey. What is it that they want or need to accomplish? What are their goals? How does your product or service meet that goal, or help in achieving the goal? Then, look at the best type of content that can not only address the buyer’s intent at that particular stage in the shopping process, but also convince or entice the reader to move to the next stage. For example, let’s say a buyer is shopping for a floor rug and trying to decide what kind. She has already found a vintage rug your online store has for sale, but is hesitant because she’s unfamiliar with how to care for it, or if it will hold up to wear and tear from her kids and pets. This shopper is in the “decision” stage and if she has access to content that is instructional and promotional, it could help her finalize the decision to buy. In this case, you could provide a quick one-minute video from your company that shows how to care for vintage floor rugs. You might also show a review from other customers who speak to the sturdiness of the rug and its ability to hold up in high-traffic rooms, despite it being an antique. We like to use an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets to identify what content is needed at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You can also tag which personas might need the content most at each stage. When your existing content is mapped out in this way, it’s also a good way to reveal gaps in your content, or what type of content you need more of to ensure there’s something available for everyone at every stage. In Table 2-1, we show you an example of how to map out your content framework, segments, and types to the buyer stage.
TABLE 2-1 Align Your Content to Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
|
Stage |
Awareness |
Consideration |
Decision |
Advocacy |
|
Goal |
Exploration, entertainment (Not yet aware of need) |
Researching, looking for a solution (Recognize a need) |
Comparing solutions/products (Addressing need) |
Sharing results (Committed to brand) |
Content Framework |
Entertaining Educational |
Educational Persuasive Instructional |
Instructional Persuasive Promotional |
Persuasive Instructional |
Content Segment |
User generated Brand generated (unbranded) |
Brand generated (branded) Third-party |
Brand generated (branded) Third-party User generated |
User generated Brand generated (both) |
Content Type(s)* |
Infographics Videos (fun) Trend articles E-books |
White paper E-newsletter Webinars Online reviews |
Free trial Demo Video (how-to) Testimonials, case studies |
Video (testimonials) Video (product tips) Online reviews Social sharing |
Persona |
Decide which of your personas are most likely interested in each stage of content. |
|||
Vertical |
Identify a specific vertical market that matches content you have to offer. |
|||
Name of content |
This is where you identify the exact content you will use. |
|||
*These are examples of the type of content that could fit with each buyer's stage. You could have more or less for each stage.
As much as you want a prospective buyer to move effortlessly and in a linear manner through all the buyer stages to become a passionate, loyal customer, that’s not realistic. A buyer may start the buying process at any one of the stages. And he may move in and out of several stages before actually becoming a customer. Having the appropriate content available for each stage of the journey is the best way to ensure you brand (or product) remains a consideration throughout the entire buying process.
Launching the Personalization Effort Online
Having content available for each stage of the buyer’s journey is a critical step in any content marketing strategy. But why stop there? If you want to really increase your chance of influencing the buyer with content, then the information should be personalized as much as possible to that buyer. By “personalized” we mean that the content addresses challenges, needs, or desires that are specific to a particular buyer. If your customer is the office manager for a doctor’s office tasked with shopping for an online appointment service, you want to provide her with content that talks specifically about her industry, healthcare. Your content should discuss patient needs, for example, when talking about how easy it is to use the service. Compare that scenario to another customer type. You might also do a lot of business with hair salons. For that buyer, you want content that addresses the hairdresser’s customer, or perhaps how an online appointment service can help a salon have fewer cancellations. As you see, personalized content is just that — it is written with a particular buyer’s needs in mind and speaks the language of that buyer, or her industry.
For online businesses, content personalization primarily occurs via your website, also known as web personalization. As with any online system, you need to make sure that all your online systems communicate in order to pass the right information (or, in this case, the right content) to the right website visitors, at the right time. Let’s take a look at some of the backend system considerations, as well as some online tools that can make personalization easier for you to accomplish on your site.
Integrating systems
Just as you may have a backend inventory management system that needs to relay information to your shopping cart, there are other systems you may use to talk with customers. And in content personalization, it’s important that these systems or tools integrate, or communicate, with one another to pass along pieces of information that lets you personalize your content. Here are some of the systems and tools that are likely to be involved in the web personalization process and need the ability to communicate with one another:
- CRM: Your customer relationship management software holds a treasure chest of information about your buyers and your prospective buyers (or leads). You may use Salesforce (
www.salesforce.com) or SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com) for this functionality. Whichever solution you choose, you want to make sure it has the capability to integrate with the other tools we mention in this section. - Marketing automation software: If you’re a large online retailer or B2B company, you might send out a lot of e-mail to customers and have a complex structure for communicating with them and nurturing them on a regular basis. You might use a system like Marketo (
www.marketo.com) or Eloqua (from Oracle). Even if you are a smaller online business, you probably use e-mail software such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, or Pardot (from Salesforce). Like a CRM, your marketing automation software also keeps a lot of information about customers and prospective buyers that is helpful in personalizing content. - Website and analytics: Using a tool such as Google Analytics, you are able to track an incredible amount of information about visitors to your website and the actions they take while on your site. Also within an analytics program, you might set up goals and conversion points that you track based on types of campaigns or users. This is some of the data that you might need to coordinate with a personalization tool to know when and where on your site to deliver personalized content.
- Paid ads: You may use Google AdWords, Bing ads, or other tools to create and manage your paid advertising efforts. It’s possible to set up paid ad campaigns to deliver personalized content based on certain actions a visitor takes on your website.
A benefit of marketing automation software is that most solutions offer a way to personalize messages within your email. As part of your mass e-mail you may still be able to use a person’s first name in the e-mail so that it looks like it’s been created especially for that customer. Or, you may be able to use dynamic content functionality. This allows you to change out small amounts of text within an e-mail so that the text can be customized to a certain recipient.
Categorization: One thing is not like the others
As you begin to implement a personalization strategy in your content and on the web, you first need to decide how to segment your audience or visitors. If a visitor has never volunteered information about herself to you (by filling out a form or creating a customer profile), then getting information starts with cookies. When it comes to the web, you’re able to use cookies, or a tracking code, to identify some things about your visitors and follow them around your site. If they leave and return, you are still able to use the cookie (unless the user clears his web browser cache which would remove any cookie tracking).
Cookies are small text files that are encrypted and stored on the user’s computer. There are different types of cookies that keep information on the user’s web activity and preferences. Session cookies may track specific page activity on a website (like what items the user has added to a shopping cart). Permanent cookies hold information (like passwords or login details) even after the user shuts down the browser. And third-party cookies are tracking cookies used to collect specific information about the user. A site enables the use cookies through the use of code that is placed on the website; the site’s privacy policy must clarify what and how cookies are used.
Even if you’re not familiar with implementing this process on your website, you’ve very likely been “cookie’d” yourself. Have you ever visited an e-commerce shop and looked at a specific product? After leaving the site without purchasing, you’ve probably noticed an ad for that exact product or website show up in your Facebook feed and in ads on other websites. Or, if you return to the site, you may see content or offers that are based on your previous browsing behaviors. Similarly, with the use of cookies, you can now decide some of the ways you want to segment or group your website visitors. First, there are two general types of visitors to consider:
- Known visitor: These are people who have been to your website before and completed some type of sales form, signed up to receive your e-mails, created a customer profile, or taken similar actions so that you now recognize them (because they are in your CRM system or marketing automation system). The more you know about these visitors, the more options you have to segment them, such as by product interest.
- Unknown visitor: Just like it implies, these are visitors who have never provided you with enough personal information to identify them to you. Instead, you’ll depend on the information passed through an IP address (or other third-party solutions) to allow you to segment by geographic location or industry (in B2B), for example.
You can use web personalization tools to help you collect information in stages from unknown visitors, without sacrificing conversion rates on your offers. For example, you may start by showing an offer for free content that a visitor can download after submitting her e-mail address. That’s such a small amount of information visitors are more likely to provide it, thus converting on the offer. The next offer she sees asks for additional information, such as full name and job title. Eventually, you’re able to construct a full profile of this visitor, or use other third-party tools to help fill in the blanks — but you end up with a known visitor.
Depending on whether you are targeting known or unknown visitors, here are some examples of other ways you can segment visitors to offer more personalized content:
- Geographic location
- Referral source (where they came from before getting referred to your site)
- Organic source (from search engine) or paid source (from AdWords)
- Product interest
- Industry (usually specific to B2B)
- Job role (B2B)
- Income level (B2C) or company revenue (B2B)
- Company size (B2B)
- Demographic information (lives in a certain state or zip code)
- Psychographic information (are parents of toddlers or teens or are pet owners)
As you see, the more information you have access to about your visitor, the more specific you can get with segmenting.
While there are so many different ways you can segment your audience, or site visitors, it’s only effective if you have content appropriate for that segment. If you’re an online stationery store and want to target parents to buy graduation announcements, you need to have content that speaks to that buyer persona. In this example, you might want to offer a checklist for planning a graduation party, or offer a guide that discusses how to prepare your senior for college. Without specific content for your target persona, the purpose of personalization is lost.
As you build out your content, you’ll want to keep a list of what you have available. There are lots of expensive content management solutions out there, which may be appropriate for a large, complex site, but they’re also expensive. Instead, use a good old, reliable spreadsheet (or Google Sheets) to develop and track your inventory. As part of the content inventory, you’ll want to include the following: type of content, when it was created, buyer persona(s) targeted, buyer stage, where it’s promoted, and link to where the content is online.
Choosing personalization tools
One of our favorite things about having an Internet business is that there is almost always no shortage of online tools to help manage and grow your business. This is certainly the case with content personalization for the web. Here are some of our favorite solutions that make it easy to use personalization on your site in an effort to increase conversions — and revenue!
- Triblio (
www.triblio.com): Considered an Account Based Marketing (ABM) tool, Triblio allows you to show personalized content and offers on your website to prospective buyers. You can provide your content to known and unknown website visitors, as well as show personalized content to targeted buyers (specific leads or accounts you are trying to influence and sell to). Triblio also works with e-mail or marketing automation platforms and Google AdWords. - Folloze (
www.folloze.com): Account-based marketing is also a core capability for this personalization tool. But one of the things we really like about Folloze is the unique method for delivering personalized content to buyers. Folloze lets you create content boards that contain many different pieces of content all designed for a specific buyer. Think of it in terms of a Pinterest-style layout of a board (or online page) that groups your content in one easy to access place. Figure 2-1 shows an example of a personalized board from the Folloze website. Another benefit of this tool is that it not only tracks who engages with or visits the board, but which pieces of content they interact with; and it lets you see who the prospective buyer is that is viewing the board. You can put a link to a Folloze board in an e-mail, on a page of your site, or just about anywhere. - Evergage (
www.evergage.com): This content personalization tool monitors your site visitors’ intent in order to know which content to show them. In addition to tracking what places of offers get clicked, Evergage also tracks how much time is spent on each page, where the visitors’ computer mouse hovers, and how they scroll through a page. Looking at a host of data points as they occur on your site in real-time, or why a visitor is actually on the site, the tool uses machine-based learning to make recommendations and decisions on which content to deliver to the visitor. Evergage is designed for large e-tailers and other sites with heavy traffic, and can identify the users and what purchases or interests they’ve had on other sites and then recommend similar products or content to be shown on your site.
FIGURE 2-1: Create a custom board to deliver highly personalized content to buyers using Folloze.
There are plenty more web personalization and account based marketing tools available. And, you don’t have to start out using the tools, which can range from several hundred dollars per month to several thousand dollars monthly. These tools are a significant investment. But to compete online today, offering a one-to-one personalized approach to marketing with content and product offers is quickly becoming a necessity in order for you to remain competitive.