Content design, personalization, and psychology

Discover how marketers are shaping it to their brand and audience.

Marketers know design matters.
But a lot don’t always nail it.

A surprisingly large proportion of marketers (42%) aren’t controlling and aligning the visual presentation of everything they create.

A small number even told us they rarely or never ensure the consistency of design across their content.

Almost all of this group (86%) said their business was missing opportunities as a direct result.

Design consistency is another best practice that’s more likely to be second nature to a very successful content marketer, whether it’s using brand guidelines, templates or strict approval processes.

7 in 10 _{^{very successful content marketers always ensure their content is consistently designed}}

_{^{… compared to}}5 in 10_{^{for not very successful content marketers}}

Which has the greatest impact on content performance?

Consistent design
Deep personalization
Psychology-led content creation

Marketers know personalization matters, too. But most could be going much deeper.

Almost every one of the marketers we spoke to personalizes at least some of their content. And when they do, they can see a range of highly desirable benefits.

Top three benefits of personalization:

60%

saw increased engagement

53%

saw increased
loyalty

52%

saw increased
sales

What our own data tells us about personalization

Turtl data shows ‘deeply’ personalized content delivers 84% more attention and engagement than non-personalized content.

But when we asked marketers how they personalize their content, we discovered just how much scope most have to up their game. Only one in three marketers say they do what we call ‘basic’ personalization — tailoring content with the recipient’s name or job role, or to reflect the recipient’s company.

Even fewer say they use analytics to tailor content to recipients based on their preferences—though, once again, this was much more common among our group of ‘very successful’ marketers.

Interestingly, content marketers in the US are much more likely to personalize. 45% of US respondents said they change the content based on the recipient’s job role, compared to just 24% of UK respondents.

4 in 10_{^{very successful content marketers use analytics to tailor content based on recipient preferences, compared to}}2 in 10_{^{for not very successful content marketers}}

Use analytics to tailor content based on recipient’s preferences

Successful marketers are way more likely to study what’s going on in their prospects’ heads.

When marketers judiciously apply the principles of behavioral psychology and behavioral economics to their content, the impact can be profound.But not all marketers are being led by the science.Compared to their peers, very successful marketers are almost x3.5 more likely to always build content with behavioral psychology in mind.

Very successful marketers are almost x3.5 more likely to always build content with behavioral psychology in mind.

The psychology of attention

Why is having a little science a huge advantage for content marketers?

Our Founder and CEO, Nick Mason, explains—with the help of shoes, obscure Italian battles, and Britney Spears.