What is personalized marketing content?

Personalized marketing content refers to content tailored to specific audience segments or users based on their demographics, preferences, buying behaviors, past interactions with the brand, and more. A brand uses the information it collects from customers or prospects during their buying journey to provide personalized user experiences with targeted content. Personalized marketing content aims to cut through the noise of generic marketing messages, leading to profitable campaigns and engaging customer experiences.

What are the business benefits of personalizing marketing content?

Better conversion rates

Personalized marketing content addresses the requirements of various audience segments throughout the buying process, helping users find solutions to their problems faster and resulting in improved conversion rates.

Improved ROI

Personalized content, such as product recommendations and targeted discounts, encourages users to purchase more often and in larger amounts, improving campaigns' return on investment.

Customer loyalty and retention

Customers feel a sense of connection when brands tailor experiences specifically to their choices. For example, when a customer sees movie suggestions from Netflix that match their preferences, they are more likely to consume that content and come back to the platform for more.

What are the challenges of personalized marketing?

Data collection & privacy

To effectively market using personalized content, you need to collect user data from websites, apps, social media, email interactions, etc., and follow data privacy regulations when collecting and storing this information.

Managing marketing tech stack

With endless data points and a growing number of contacts, you need Martech, including a customer relationship management (CRM) system or a customer data platform (CDP), to track user interactions. To see a comprehensive view of the customer journey, you should analyze data from various touchpoints, such as emails, ads, websites, offline, etc. This process needs software integrations, human resources, and technical expertise.

Over-personalization

No brand wants to alienate or annoy its customers, but personalized marketing content that is not optimized for subtlety and frequency can negatively impact your brand. For example, aggressive targeted ads can make your brand appear intrusive rather than helpful.

Costs

Personalizing marketing content requires dedicated resources and tools. You need advanced attribution mechanisms, project management, and a team capable of leveraging customer data insights for effective personalization. This setup requires significant investment from the business in terms of both money and time.

How to create personalized marketing content?

1. Collect and Segment Data

To gather and analyze information, utilize multiple data sources, such as website interactions from Google Analytics, purchase histories from CRM, and audience preferences from channels like social media and email platforms. Segment this audience information based on shared characteristics like age, gender, geography, website engagement, etc. This segmentation helps you tailor messages and campaigns for specific audiences to meet business goals. For example, if you notice audience segments aged 18-24 engaging more with videos than text content on your website, you can evaluate video marketing using channels like YouTube or Instagram to engage this target audience.

2. Define goals for personalization

Set clear objectives such as increasing audience engagement, boosting conversion rates, improving customer retention or repeat purchases, etc. Based on these goals, identify metrics you would be tracking for improvement, such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, engagement time, purchases, etc. For example, if you want to increase customer retention, you should try improving customer satisfaction with tailored communications, personalized discounts, or dedicated customer service.

3. Strategize the value delivery process

Once you have identified the audience segments, dive deeper into your audience's pain points, aspirations, and online behavior. This will help you prioritize channels (like Instagram, emails, or blogs), content format (e.g., videos, PDF documents, or text), and content topics for maximizing value with personalized content. For example, if you are a B2B product company selling to enterprises, you could prioritize creating in-depth whitepapers, hosting webinars, launching case studies, etc., and distributing them through LinkedIn or emails.

4. Create personalized content

Based on the decided goals and the value delivery process, start creating personalized content. For example, for all customers who purchased "running shoes" from an e-commerce store in the past week, the brand can create personalized emails offering a discount code to buy "sportswear clothing" like shorts, t-shirts, or track pants. They can also incorporate other personalization techniques in the email, such as mentioning the customer's name, suggesting products popular in the customer's geographic location, and more.

5. Test and refine

You ideally need automated solutions to manage personalization at scale, like email marketing software for email personalization. Keep track of the metrics and responses resulting from your content distribution so that you can refine your content and personalization techniques over time. For example, if you notice subject lines personalized with customer names get higher open rates than generic subject lines for a particular email campaign, you would want to implement this technique across multiple campaigns and audience segments to improve overall performance.

What are some examples of personalized marketing content?

Emails

Personalized emails use dynamic data like the recipient's name, past purchases, or wishlist items. You can also create segmented email lists based on customer lifetime value. For example, you can send personalized offers to repeat customers to increase customer loyalty.

Targeted Ads

You can retarget people who have recently engaged with your brand through different digital touchpoints like social media, website, or YouTube to showcase personalized content based on their initial interactions, with the goal of improving conversion rates.

Webpages/Landing pages

Brands personalize their website pages so that different audience segments can resonate with the content, get answers to their questions, and eventually become paid customers. For example, software businesses have specific landing pages with product information targeted to different industries, such as e-commerce, travel, nonprofits, etc.

Content or Product suggestions

You might have noticed that as soon as you finish reading a blog online, you find suggestions of similar articles linked for further reading. Such suggestions are personalized based on your intent of visiting the blog in the first place. Similarly, e-commerce websites offer complementary products as suggestions when you successfully complete a purchase.

Media personalization

Creatives play a crucial role in crafting engaging customer experiences. Brands improve their conversion and engagement rates by using custom digital assets like video thumbnails, promotional product images, email graphics, etc., for different audience segments, platforms, and devices. Many businesses implement a media processing solution for this purpose, which uses real-time media personalization to customize media at scale.

Wrapping up

Personalized marketing content is a powerful tool for improving customer engagement, conversions, and loyalty. Successfully creating and distributing personalized content requires the right technology and strategy. ImageKit helps businesses personalize their media and modify videos and images using dynamic overlays with the Layers API.

Interested to learn more? Visit ImageKit.io