In case you haven’t noticed, the days of selling products and services on their own are over. When you examine TV and radio ads these days, you notice that things are swiftly trending away from features and benefits and toward viewer/listener experience. This is true of products as well as services. People aren’t anywhere near as interested in the particulars of either these days as they are with how the product or service will benefit them and make them feel.
What Is Personalized Content?
I think it’s important to start out by defining exactly what it is we’re talking about here. The vast majority of websites and social media pages attempt to appeal to a broad range of users at the same time, then worry about strategically placing content that will appeal to different groups and individuals. While this can be an effective strategy in some cases, the more “at home” people feel on your site, the apter they will be to want to stick around, and the longer they linger, the more likely they are to make a purchase or perform any number of actions that are part of your marketing strategy.
Personalized content is pointed directly at the individuals and groups that are most likely to respond to it; it isn’t left up to them to find it when they reach your website. So how do you manage this without developing a dozen websites or social media pages? It’s actually easier than you might think. Here are a few suggestions.
1. Email
I cannot stress with you enough how important it is that your emails are properly targeted and aimed at the correct funnels. Not everybody is in the market for the same thing, so they should not be marketed the same thing in the same way as everyone else.
The most successful email campaigns are the ones that target small populations of your lists with pointed content that the readers are most likely to be interested in enough to open. Once you get your open, what follows needs to be in perfect step with the subject; otherwise … game over.
The best litmus test for whether what you’re doing with your email is working is to track how people respond to your calls to action. If you’re finding that you’re getting less response than you should, it’s time to either test out a new CTA or a new approach altogether. That’s easier to do when you’re dealing with smaller list segments than it is if you’re trying to gauge engagement across the board.
2. Your Website
The best way to personalize website content is through two avenues: personalized landing pages and SEO. The former allows you to put very specific content in front of specific people while keeping your site navigable and searchable should those people decide they want to have a better look around. E-commerce professionals experience this all the time: They drive traffic with a particular ad for a particular product, but when they analyze the conversions, people are actually buying other products instead. It’s not about what they’re going to find on your site, it’s about what they find first.
On the SEO end of things, the easier you make it for people to find you using personalized search criteria, the more likely your pages are to rank high and deliver the kind of traffic you want. It’s not enough to be optimized for search terms like “Omega 3 supplement.” You need to reach the crowd searching for “Omega 3 supplement joint pain” and “Omega 3 supplement cholesterol” as well. Here’s the thing, though: You’ll need content available on both when they get there, not just the words in a blog post. If you don’t develop content around those long-tail keywords, you won’t achieve the rankings for them to find you in the first place.
3. Your Social Media Channels
This one is probably the easiest to manage but can also be the most expensive. Your best bet, regardless of your business, is almost always going to be focusing your social media marketing around Facebook. Notice I said your marketing, not necessarily your content. It is easy to drive traffic from Facebook to the other networks, but it isn’t as easy doing it in reverse. This is why I recommend maintaining a good, current Facebook page and using its marketing tools to drive traffic to personalized content both there and on other networks, like Pinterest or Tumblr. Remember, it’s all about what they see first. That’s what makes the experience personal.
4. About Your Content
So, really, the only thing left to consider is content creation itself, and we have tons of info on that on the blog already. Of course, I’ll make the same recommendation here that I’ve made before: Whatever areas you lack the time or expertise to delve into yourself should be outsourced. Find a good custom writing service (like Beez!) and start with written content since that’s where SEO is going to help you the most. Then, build on that with content that is geared toward individuals and groups that will make them feel as though you’re speaking to them directly. It’s the only viable approach in our rapidly evolving social-centric world.