People have short attention spans these days: studies show we spend 10 to 15 seconds on a website before bouncing to another one. What can marketers do to keep their audience’s attention? Get personal. Make it about them.
Most online consumers expect a brand’s web content to be personalized to their interests. In fact, 74% of consumers get frustrated when website content appears to have nothing to do with their interests. While 94% of marketers believe it is critical to serve personalized content to their viewers, only 26% of marketers actually implement personalization technology.
What’s holding them back?
Time – 46% of marketers cited lack of time as the biggest hurdle. And it’s not surprising. Just think about all of the variables marketers have to think about to start a personalization campaign.
Yet companies that personalize their website see an average of a 19% increase in sales. So it might be time to make time. How can brands save time and get started with personalization campaigns in the simplest way possible?
Tips for getting started with personalization
Personalize based on personas. With so many different ways to segment your audience—on-site behavior, company size, location—deciding on where to start can be a bit overwhelming. But remember: “personalization begins with PERSONA.” That’s where you should start. A persona is a target group of people. For example, if you’re selling marketing software, your persona is marketers.
Create content based on their interests. Once you’ve figured out the personas you want to target, understand what information they are looking for and where they are looking for it, then tailor content based on their needs.
You can also do a content audit to see what content has performed well for this persona in the past. For example, you could provide resources based on previous downloads or, if you’re in the e-commerce space, serve recommendations based on previous purchases.
Companies like Nordstrom, Netflix, Pandora and Amazon do an excellent job of the latter. These companies built their own recommendation engines. Of course, you don’t have to custom-build a recommendation engine. Some popular ones include PredictiveIntent, Strands, The Filter and RichRelevance.
Decide which marketing channels to focus on. Start with one of your most effective marketing channels, which you can easily segment. Many marketers choose email for this reason. In fact, 80% of industry professionals personalized emails in 2015.
After you’ve tracked and measured the effectiveness of your personalized campaign, then you can repurpose top-performing pieces of content for other channels, such as targeted social media campaigns and landing pages.
Learn more about how to repurpose content effectively in this blog post.
Effectively manage all content. It gets complicated when you have multiple audiences and marketing channels to personalize content for—and that’s before adding all of the pieces of content you have to manage. Modern brands use digital asset management platforms to manage content, review and approve it faster, share it with their stakeholders, and publish it to the appropriate marketing channels. This makes it easy to manage everything from one place with all of the right stakeholders.
Use personalization technology. There are a number of tools available—including those from DemandBase, Marketo and Response Logic—to help your organization with personalization. Advanced personalization software can tell you all about who is visiting your website: company name, company size, location, industry, company revenue and so forth.
People are savvy on the web today. They don’t waste time. And they expect brands to deliver a personalized experience. Marketers recognize this: 84% of marketing executives plan on developing a process to map content assets to the buyer’s journey. Those who take the lead with the latest digital technology will stay ahead of the competition.
Bynder maximizes your contents potential and boosts brand consistency. Book a demo today.
