FOCUS 2: Content Personalization How to improve digital customer experiences with personalization

Get personal without sacrificing privacy

Today, customers interact with your brand primarily through digital touchpoints.

Whether they’re liking your social posts, buying through your e-commerce platform, or just engaging with some of your newly-attention-optimized content, these digital interactions shape perceptions of your brand, and have a huge impact on consumer spending habits.

So, what can you as a marketing leader do to build stronger customer experiences? Here are five ideas to get you started.

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Find brain-friendly formats

Assess your collateral and communications to understand how effective the content formats you’re following really are. Looking at modern research or recent data can provide helpful direction, as we see in Lumen Research's scientific study into PDF.

Map content journeys

77% of organizations have issues with content waste and utilization. 39% of this waste is because the content isn’t relevant to the buyer's journey. Save production costs and boost content outcomes by taking the extra time to map out the desired content journey.

Here's how we do it.

Innovate to leap ahead

When the pandemic hit, many businesses had to adapt to a completely digital way of working and engaging prospects and customers. Willis Tower Watson was already leading the way: after 19 years of the status quo, they transformed their reports to a new interactive digital format. They quickly saw an impressive uplift in sign-ups, readers, and read rate, while discovering an untapped sales market with the data they gained.

Engage authentically

Successful marketing leaders understand that finding real and honest ways to connect with clients and staff will ultimately improve their bottom line. An easy way to do this is with powerful personalization that helps you communicate with your customers on a personal level, in a way that feels authentic.

Build feedback loops

We know that our prospects’ interests and interactions don’t follow a straight line—so why should your content? By creating opportunities for interaction and two-way communication throughout content and comms, marketers can adapt buyer journeys to the individual and gain valuable sales insights along the way.

Walking the tightrope between personalization and privacy

Of all those activities and actions, personalizing content is certainly the most widely discussed today.

Personalization plays a role in millions of organizations’ content strategies, giving teams a way to turn their customer data into engagement.

It’s effective. But as the regulatory landscape matures, and customers grow increasingly tired of having their personal data used to sell things to them, marketing leaders need to find creative ways of personalizing content that don’t compromise on privacy, security, or compliance.

Here are four tips to help:

Prioritize first-party over third-party data and work with data you’ve generated yourself through intelligent content gating, for example, avoiding putting customers in an uncomfortable spot where it’s clear you’ve learned about them from others.
Protect your personalized materials by setting clear access controls to keep any sensitive information safe. Moving to a secure content platform can help.
Increase the accessibility of your content to make it feel personally relevant to a greater audience, simply by virtue of it being easy for them to navigate and engage with. There’s no data necessary, and everyone wins.
Make the most of modularity and apply what you know about your customers to swap relevant information in and out of the content you put in front of them. It’s a much more subtle method of personalization, that many might not even notice.