At its heart, personalization is all about giving customers content that’s highly relevant to them, wherever, whenever, and however they want it. But, before you can do that, you need to understand what your customers really want from you and your content.
Fortunately, there are huge volumes of data available to help marketers understand that today—so much so in fact that many aren’t making the most of what they’ve got.
By utilizing more diverse data sets and tracking a wider range of metrics, marketers can shine a light on this so-called ‘dark data’ and start turning it into powerful insights that enable tighter personalization and continuous content improvements.
Mindshare is an extremely important metric for most marketers—and one of the clearest indicators that their efforts are having the right impact on customers. However, many only analyze it at the surface level. In practice, there’s a lot more that most teams could be doing to understand the impression their content is leaving on readers—and it starts with a better understanding of how to measure mindshare.
Many marketers fall into the trap of thinking “If sales are happy, I’m happy” when it comes to corporate content. While teams are great at providing what sales asks for, very few ask for insight in return. Sales teams can tell you a lot about what content their customers have responded to and which pieces their teams lean on most frequently for customer engagements. Closing that feedback loop can shine a light on a huge volume of valuable insights.
Marketers understand the power of personalization. But while 75% of businesses think they're excellent at personalization, just 48% of customers agree. One of the biggest reasons behind that gap is poor tracking of relevance. After you’ve personalized, data can tell you how good of a job you’ve done—giving you important insight into how you can continuously improve how you personalize content, and for who.
Classic measurements of content success—like opens and clicks—are interesting, but they don’t tell you anything about attention or impact. To know where to focus, marketers should shift part of their content marketing budgets from actual content marketing initiatives to measurement and analytic efforts.
1 When Gareth—the new CMO at Redstor—planned a complete marketing transformation for the organization, he put metrics at the heart of their reimagined strategy, which helped his team:
2 Similarly, when Faith—Marketing Director at Cisco—was tasked with streamlining a legacy content machine, she focused on ensuring the new foundation could deliver strong insights into performance, which helped:
