Content personalization is the process of customizing and tailoring content for a specific audience of a business.

The process is key to building audience interactions with potential customers of a business on various digital platforms. It is also based on the customer and industry information available to a business marketing team.

The process if utilized well can lead to a boost in sales of business products and services therefore digital marketers should consider content personalization as a content marketing strategy.

The content personalization process drives digital marketing technology today. These technologies capture, analyze, and develop insights about potential business customers for digital marketers.

Business audiences and brands therefore have a lot to gain from the content personalization process.

In this article, I highlight 5 pillars of content personalization that advertisers ought to know about.

Pillars of Content Personalization.

1. Customer Data

The first step of the content personalization process is being critical about customer data.

Personalize content according to the knowledge you have about your customers. Find out where your customers are located, their interests, contacts, age groups, and gender.

Furthermore, collect data about your potential customers visiting your website and how they interact with its content. Tools that capture customer data include google analytics, contact forms, and many others.

These key data points if captured well will be relevant in the first phase of the content personalization process.

2. Data Analysis

After collecting customer data, you should be inquisitive about the data metrics you discover. Advertisers must be curious about how potential clients interact with business websites and social media content.

Furthermore, they should be able to find out how many potential customers abandoned a purchase or cart on your e-commerce website. From this point, they can come up with relevant statistics and reports from the data collected.

It should also be noted that the data analysis process also involves looking into customer trends, customer searches, and industry statistics of a particular business.

Google fashion trends
Data analysis of the fashion trends in Uganda as of March 2020

With data analysis, look into competitors and key trends in a particular industry. For example new fashion trends, car trends or design trends. Traits like purchasing capabilities of specific locations and different markets in different cities worldwide.

Examples of analysis tools include google trends, Youtube analytics and many more. To find out more about data analysis tools visit top customer insight tools for digital marketing.

3. Insight Generation

Funner visualization
funnel visualization insights

From data analysis, marketers should be able to come up with insights and reports advertisers will use to run digital marketing campaigns.

Insight generation looks into data-driven approaches that can be used in marketing and decision making.

It should be noted that after data collection and analysis, it's important that marketing teams compile this data to come up with trends and insights. Insights help you find out why a potential customer abandoned a purchase or a cart on your e-commerce website.

These trends and insights will go a long way in providing direction to a company's digital marketing team.

Insights can also carve out niches and trends a brand can target through digital marketing campaigns.

Insights aren't just generated from data analytical tools. But they can also be generated from directly engaging with the customers through online conversational tools. For more on digital conversation tools visit top digital conversational marketing tools.

4. Audience Segmentation

This is the biggest focal point of content personalization. Brands need to capture different audience segments or specific audience segments.

As a digital marketer, it is important for you to realize that not all brands have the resources to be everywhere in advertising and not all brands have the capability to capture all audience groups, ages, and communities.

Therefore Digital strategists can guide brands to focus on specific niches that they can dominate. For example, In Uganda, safeboda is the biggest digital transportation service that is available to the public.

This is because they were the first organization to successfully target motorcycle transportation in Uganda. While big players like Uber mainly targetted car transportation. Safeboda targetted the motorcycle industry instead, which accounts for 59% of the total road transportation in the country based on a transiad international survey.

Audience segmentation does not only focus on classifying your audience. It also fosters community campaigns based on community interests and goals.

Motorcycle accidents are one of the most common accidents in Uganda. Safeboda saw a need to address this issue by pushing out the brand message of a safe transportation means the public can rely on. By preaching safe riding, use of helmets and different measures that can reduce accident mortality rates. The organization is fast expanding to become one of the largest digital public transportation means all over East Africa.

Audience segmentation does not only apply to the transport industry. It is applicable in every industry ranging from fashion, internet, technology and so many others.

For example, Apple sells high-end smartphones to people willing to spend a lot more money on a smartphone.

Smartphone market share statistics

While Samsung and Huawei sell almost twice as many phones apple sells in a single year according to IDC's market survey. Apple still maintains its position as the profit leader due to targetting wealthy people in different communities.

This is the reason why audience segmentation is very important in content personalization.

Examples of audience segmentation tools include Google audience manager and Audience center within google analytics.

5. Building Customer profiles

Customer profile

Lastly, after collecting customer data, doing data analysis, insight generation, and audience segmentation. Advertisers should be able to come up with the right customer profile that fit their brands.

In order for a brand to be successful at content personalization and digital marketing. It should have ideal customers or specific audience profiles it is looking out for.

Apple looks for customer profiles that are willing to spend on quality and brand technology. So they build their marketing strategy upon the high-end quality products that they provide.

Safeboda builds its marketing strategy upon customers who want a safe way to be transported on a motorcycle.

This gives a brand an identity in the market and helps it capitalize and carve out a market share from the community. These customer profiles are then added to audience lists which marketing teams target with adverts of their brand.

In conclusion, at Campaign, we believe if these content personalization pillars are well utilized your business will have successful digital marketing campaigns. Feel free to contact us and consult us more on how we can greatly improve your digital marketing needs.