Personalization is about creating an individualized 1:1 user experience which is relevant to the user's needs. When you personalize a user's experience, you're offering them something useful based on that person's characteristics, behaviors, attributes, and history. It's a powerful tool for establishing the customer-brand relationship, yet many digital experiences fall short of personalizing in meaningful ways.
The most successful personalization solves a real challenge that customers have and demonstrates that your products/services are the ideal fit. Gone are the days of adding a first name to an email opening line — it’s simply not enough anymore. What your customers are experiencing in other industries is driving their expectations of your industry. Customer's expect personalized experiences. Only 22% of surveyed customers are satisfied with the level of personalization they receive from brands. Business Insider
Customers want to be recognized as unique individuals. In fact, they expect it! By creating relevant experiences, brands are connecting emotionally to customers, showing them that they not only see them, but also understand their needs and can help meet those needs. This understanding creates an emotional connection between the customer and the brand, setting the foundation for trust. Trust leads to intimacy such that the customer happily exchanges their personal information allowing the brand to learn more about the them. The brand is then empowered to continually enhance their experience. As trust and relevance continue to strengthen over time, brand loyalty is established.
There are a few things you need to consider when creating a content strategy for personalized digital experiences: guiding principles, market segments, customer journeys, personas, and key data attributes.
Customer journey maps and service blueprints
You first need to understand the task that the user needs to complete. What is the user trying to do with this content? What tasks are needed for the user to accomplish this task? To understand this, you will need a customer journey map. If one doesn’t exist, then you will need to create one. Creating a customer journey map gives you the needed perspective on the journey from end-to-end through the eyes of the customer. There are several sources available for creating customer journey maps and customer service blueprints. Free template pictured above is available for download from Columbia Road.
Market segments
When personalizing a content experience, you need to identify who your target audiences are. A great way to start is by looking into your market segments.
Is your content experience meant for new or existing customers?
Who will most benefit from your products and services?
What are their needs and motivations?
Work with your business and marketing partners to understand your target audiences.
Personas
For each journey, within each marketing segments, you have personas. Personas are fictional profiles that represent groups of similar people in a target audience. They can help you figure out how to reach people on a more personal level. If you don’t yet have personas, and you want to personalize content experiences, then you need to invest in the marketing research to create them! They are a must for writing content that appeals to different needs, challenges, and personality types. You can learn more about creating personas via Buffer Marketing’s resource library.
Personalization guiding principles
Personalization is about knowing our customers, showing empathy without being creepy, creating the emotional connection while establishing trust to build brand loyalty. To accomplish this, you will need to hold these principles dear, ensuring that your content is:
Meaningful: The experience must be meaningful. Share and provide real value to the user.
Significant: Provide only the most relevant products, services, content, options and recommendations.
Timely: Deliver a real-time, relevant experience matching the customer’s moment of intent.
Accurate: Know the customer no matter where they interact with you.
Consistent: Ensure a consistent experience follows the customer throughout their journey.
Empathetic: Demonstrate a knowing and understanding of the customer’s needs without being creepy.
Content strategy
This is where you bring it all together: the customer journey, market segments, personas, guiding principles, and content strategy. To accomplish bringing it all together, I prefer to use a recipe card format. This has been wildly popular with UX and implementation teams! This is a high-level content strategy brief that instructs teams on when, where and how to personalize the content within the experiences. In my recipe cards, I start with the customer expectations, backed by data and research.
Customer intent & expectations: Remember your market segments? What is your customer’s intent? What are their expectations for the completing the task?
Audiences: Remember the Personas? Break your strategy out by persona. With new customers, you can leverage demographic data to give you clues into their intent. Are they connecting to the site using a competitor’s network? Do you know from your data management platform or your analysis of visitor behaviors that a visitor is interested in a certain type of product or service?
Where: Remember the customer journey map? Be crisp about where, within the journey, personalization will be most beneficial. I like refer back to the journey map to identify the step and the components where personalization will be needed. e.g., hero, campaigns, landing pages, product list pages, product details pages, support content, etc. Think about each content element and the purpose it serves.
Strategy: Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. Remember the guiding principles? e.g., A new visitor to your site or app may not be as ready to complete a transaction with you; build trust by showing more informational material and proof points. Adjust the tone, language, imagery, and navigation options to be more relevant and empathetic to their context.
Data: Pull in both quantitative and qualitative data where applicable to give credibility to the validity of your recipe cards.
I hope this gets you off and running to creating your own personalization content strategy!
Comments