Start with Your Digital Content Strategy
Ultimately, the goal of any digital content strategy is to support the delivery of the right content to the right audience at the right place and the right time. All content must be personalized and considered within the context of the audience:
• What content formats does the audience prefer?
• What are their knowledge requirements?
• Where does your audience go to consume content?
• Which channels does the audience prefer?
• When is the right time to deliver content to the audience?
The answers you generate for each of these questions should be based on the known consumption history of the audience. With this information, you can then effectively apply the four personalization best practices.
Applying Best Practices for Personalization
As you learn about your target audience by answering the questions listed above, you can build deeper and more effective programs by combining the information with four industry best-practices for personalization:
1. Develop Your Strategy
Choose your strategy based on the best leverage opportunity, including existing data and sales-play priority as well as the breadth and depth of existing content. You may decide to target a market persona, an account persona, the one-to-one level, or a combination.
2. Create Your Design
Asset design must meet audience interaction and personalization channel requirements. While the design should be driven by personalization program goals, use data to drive your efforts and consider your production capacity. To reduce product costs, you can repurpose proven content and gain production efficiencies with a primary-derivative asset approach.
3. Determine Your Delivery Mechanisms
Back to that step we referred to above that so many jump to first! Base your choice of technology to implement your delivery mechanisms on audience consumption and behavior. Also utilize technology that allows you to leverage the data so you can test channel preferences while using a mix of inbound and outbound campaigns, and be sure to rationalize technologies across multiple channels.
4. Measure Your Return
Study interactions over time while analyzing target content consumption data as well as email opens and click-throughs; also look beyond the activity to measure actual business that’s generated. KPIs defined as part of the strategy (consumption time, qualified leads) will help optimize personalization by identifying changes that need to be applied to the program processes and actions.
Crawl Before You Walk, Then Run
If you haven’t tackled a personalization project in the past, we strongly recommend beginning with a “crawl” by trying personalization within a CRM, MAP, CMS or Google Analytics program. You can then “walk” by testing social media, ad platforms, third-party programs, and attribution platforms. You will then be ready to “run” as you move onto an integrated, full-featured digital experience management platform. This blog is an excerpt from “Personalized Experiences: Building a Powerful and Scalable Digital Foundation,” a webinar sponsored by SiriusDecisions and featuring Jay Atcheson, VP of Marketing for R2i Technologies, Danny Dalton from the Adobe Industry Strategy Group, and Jessie Johnson, Research Analyst-Demand Marketing from Sirius Decisions. Click here to listen to the entire session For more information on how to leverage personas and prospect data for content creation, contact R2integrated at https://www.r2integrated.com/contact
