3 Tools For Personalized Content Journeys

Content is at the core of marketing. Whether it is a landing page, an email, or a Facebook post, everything we share with customers or prospects is based on content.

While your company has one identity, your customers are not all alike. For your content to succeed, you must get to know your customers up close so you can personalize the content that you serve to each group of (or even individual) users. Personalized content engages more, and converts more.

How can you personalize our content to better engage your users? How can you make sure your content “serves” to each user the parts of the story that are most relevant for him or her?

Read this post to learn the tips and tools to creating engaging Content Journeys that will help you generate qualified leads for your company.

What’s A Content Journey?

Lead generation, especially in B2B marketing, is usually not achievable with a single piece of content–personalized or not. On average, readers must encounter anywhere from 6 to 14 touch points with your brand before they convert to leads. Each of these touch points marks a stepping stone of the Content Journey. By personalizing the stepping stones, you can navigate readers along a pre-mapped path. Destination: your funnel.

So, what is this Content Journey? In short, the “journey” describes the steps that prospects take on their way to brand commitment. It’s the means to an end and, in this case, the end is lead generation.

Personalizing a Content Journey is no easy feat: it requires much time commitment, planning & strategizing, and that special pinch of a marketer’s creative vision. However, that creative vision can’t succeed in a vacuum; it needs direction and tips that shape it along the way.

How To Personalize A Content Journey

Personalized content can be described as the strategy located at the cross-section where customization and creativity meet market research. Its benefits for lead acquisition are simple: by appealing to your target’s particular interests, you’re resonating with those prospects in a lasting way.

6 steps for personalizing your Content Journey:

1. Create customer profiles, by asking yourself questions like who is the person that is going to read this? What is his or her role? What kind of company does he or she work for? How old is he or she and how experienced? What is he or she looking for? By identifying your customer’s profiles you can pre-design and model your content accordingly. With this preconceived initial introduction, you are setting up your prospects to be drawn down your funnel.
2. Name each customer profile. Keep a record of which name belongs to each profile. For example, “Jack” can be the name of a 45-55 year-old CMO in a large corporation, and “Peter” can be a 25-30 year-old junior social media manger in the same company.
3. Collect and analyze tracked data markers to identify visitors to your content. Jeff Zelaya, Head of Sales at Triblio, advises marketers to pay extra attention to the figures associated with each visitor, such as geo location, referral source, time of day, IP address, and search queries. By collecting this kind of data, you can offer a personalized and relevant experience to these visitors, even when it’s their first time on your website. Another way to collect data, says Zelaya, is to Gate content with progressive profiling (ask for job title, interests, timeline etc..) that allows you to keep visitors engaged and consuming more content, then at the right time you can offer a compelling CTA using the data you’ve already collected through progressive profiling.
4. Tag each piece of content, including blog posts, landing pages, case studies etc. with all relevant profile names. This means that the same piece of content may be implemented for more than one profile, but you might want each one of those profiles to see it at a different stage of the funnel.
5. Using the data you have collected in step 1, serve each profile only the relevant pieces of content, in the order that you pre-determine as a good fit. Start from top-of-the-funnel content, such as blog posts and 3rd party recommendations, then continue with case studies and product demos. This doesn’t mean you should create different content for each profile, but rather repurpose your content to better fit each profile at its respective stage of the funnel.

1. Target each individual with actionable content, such as call-to-action buttons, lead generation forms and landing pages. Yaniv Navot, Performance Marketing Manager at Dynamic Yield, suggests adding an actionable piece of content at every step of your visitors journey that is based on their past behaviors. For example, you should have a different call-to-action for someone visiting the site for the first time and someone coming for the tenth time.

While most of the work should be boiled up in the back-of-the-house marketing department, there are some tools to help you with collecting the data and serving it to your prospects. You are probably familiar already with marketing automation tools, like Marketo, Hubspot or Act-On, which, while great, require long integration processes. Whether you are already using marketing automation or not, here are 3 tools to help you personalize the Content Journeys you create for your target audience: 

1. Roojoom

Roojoom is an online marketing intelligence platform that increases conversion and engagement through personal Content Journeys across customer life-cycle. Essentially, it’s a single aesthetically-pleasing bundle containing all 6 to 14 (on average, as discussed above) touch points required for you to convert a prospect to a lead. This platform allows you to usher readers along each stepping stone of the Content Journey, via the route that you choose. In other words, instead of flipping through pages in a book, readers are prompted to journey through each piece of your story within a single webpage bound by a single link.

With Roojoom, you repurpose your existing content into pre-determined Content Journeys to match each and every one of your customer profiles. You can further personalize each Roojoom by passing over data such as the name, gender, etc. of your customer to tailor that content in real time. These simple content tweaks are accompanied by the many other visual and actionable features that both complement and enrich the user experience.

Dynamic Yield is a great resource for giving your existing content that special, individual edge as it’s presented to each unique prospect. It works through its SaaS platform that delivers the right content to each visitor at every stage of the funnel automatically. If you’re only first dipping your toes in the world of personalized Content Journeys, this is an easy way to get started while maximizing all KPI’s without having to be too hands-on.

This engine’s real time automated decisions are data-driven and actionable, so you don’t have to be concerned with any overlook of small, yet vital details that you normally apply to your strategy. The service is confined to a line of code that you yourself can insert into your company’s system.

2. Triblio

My favorite thing about Triblio is how it serves to supplement, not replace, your current marketing approaches. So you can continue with your existing marketing automation, email platforms and CRM’s, and only use the product on a needed basis.

Its content board design feature, promotion scheduler, and curation feed allow you to easily puppeteer each prospect’s experience. Like a social media dashboard, you can monitor the action on your campaigns with the system’s content-centric analytics.

Conclusion

These tools vary in both marketer input and content output. However, they all share a universal concept highlighting the importance of the movement towards Content Journey personalization. Identifying your targets and shaping their experiences is not a simple task, but it has a direct correlation with the success of your marketing strategy and your ability to generate qualified leads for your company.