No more reinventing the wheel
Personalizing content in any major way calls for you to break your content into discreet modules so it can be used dynamically - just like Lego bricks
Okay, we're going to detour into Lego for a minute, bear with. Forgetting for a second about the agony of standing on it barefoot, Lego brings a lot of joy to a lot of people. Why?
Well for one, there are no real rules. There are constraints, sure, like the shapes and colours of the pieces in your collection. And there are instructions if you want to create a predefined build, like the Millennium Falcon. But you are absolutely free to fit your pieces together in whichever way you want and build custom creations. This kind of control feels good.
Control happens to be one of the underlying reasons personalization is effective in digital comms, according to a study from the University of Texas. Even if a personalized experience doesn't involve the recipient making any actual choices, something that is overtly tailored to you gives your brain the impression that it's more in control. And people feel much more positive towards you when they feel like they're in control of the situation.
But how you deliver personalized content is about more than just presenting tailored experiences to your readers. It's about equipping people across your company with the ability to quickly and easily create customized collateral for a variety of contexts. Again, control comes into play. Your content and creative team want to control the messaging, branding, and information being used publicly, while your colleagues around the business want to control what's being sent to their contact lists.
Returning to our Lego comparison: The design team at Lego HQ control which blocks are made available to us users, and how they fit together. We play within those constraints, but control which blocks we choose - selecting the most suitable and relevant ones for the project at hand. This is what your content operations could look like with a modular content approach.
Modular content involves you creating components or modules of content that can be used in all sorts of contexts and content builds. The benefits of this approach include:
Modular content strategies allow businesses to update and manage content centrally. HQ can make sure everything's accurate and consistent, and remotely update all instances where a module appears in assets sent out across divisions of the business.
One of the first questions you have to ask is ‘what exactly does a module of content look like for us?’ A module should be something self-contained, so it makes sense out of context, but small enough in scope to be applicable to a variety of channels, audiences, and contexts. Like a product description, or an industry-specific chapter of a report. Set requirements for modules so content creators are aligned on what they need to do.
Once you have a definition of what a module is for your particular strategy, you can begin to either produce content by building it up from smaller modules, or by breaking up and adapting existing resources into independent components ready to use elsewhere.
One thing to do before you start creating and publishing anything is to establish a taxonomy for how modules are going to be tagged within your library of content. This is absolutely necessary for the creation of any kind of automation but also helps users across your business locate and use what they need.
of content, in general, ends up wasted because people don’t find it or use it
Source: SiriusDecisions
You can take a modular approach to any format, so long as you bake it into the entire planning and production process - particularly for more costly formats, like video ads. This goes back to how you've defined your modules. Within each one, you can also determine whether certain elements can be personalized at the point of distribution - such as dynamically adding in the recipient's name, a custom note or video, an image of their website, or references to their key competitors.
For long-form written content, especially key documents like product overviews and thought leadership reports, you can build out the core material as a single project. Write each chapter to work independently, and then tag each module to link it up to your decisioning mechanism or make it available to anyone building content from your module library.
Say you’ve created a report on the marketing-finance rift. It's great for anyone who wants an in-depth guide, and the time to invest in reading it. But it's not ideal for readers who are short on time or just looking for a specific bit of analysis.
You've created the report with a modular content approach, so you can break out and tag each chapter to stand on its own:
These, shorter pieces, can then be targeted and personalized for subsets of your audience. You've also equipped the content with dynamic fields to allow for personalization within the body copy.
Say your sales team is pulling together a resource for a client who is particularly interested in data tracking. Without having to edit a thing, they can pull in the relevant chapter from your report into their custom resource, and adapt the title to reference the client: "How [client] can improve transparency with better data tracking."
The creation and maintenance of your content library is an ongoing effort, but with the right tools, every change you make to a module can be pushed live automatically everywhere it's in use. This means you can easily iterate, update, and replace elements remotely and in one go, without having to reissue the full materials to the satellite teams that are using the content, or manually update every webpage.
