The internet has drastically changed the marketing landscape. Advertising campaigns that once took months to develop can now be deployed in a matter of days, and businesses have access to a global audience of consumers. With this increased accessibility, however, comes increased competition. In order to succeed in the hyper-competitive world of online marketing, businesses need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is by personalizing your content.
What does it mean to personalize your content? Personalized content is tailoring your message specifically for your target audience. This might include varying your language or voice for different demographics, sending targeted emails based on customer interactions or creating social media ads that speak directly to the needs of your audience. Developing a strategy for personalizing your content can be tricky, but it’s worth taking the time to get it right. In this blog post we discuss practical tips to personalize your content marketing.
Collect Data On Customers And Your Target Audience
The first step in personalizing your content is understanding who your target audience is and what they want. This means collecting data for both current and potential customers on things such as demographics, interests and purchasing habits. Once you have this data, you can start to segment your audience into different groups, which is the process known as creating customer personas. Here are a few ways to collect customer data:
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Look at your current customer base.
Who are they? What do they do? What do they like and dislike? How did they find out about your business? Answering these questions will give you a good starting point for understanding who you should target with your content. It’s likely that you already have a strong sense of who your customers and target audience are. If not, this information will be incredibly helpful.
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Use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides insight into who is visiting your website and what they’re doing while
they’re there. You can use this information to understand what kinds of people are interested in your business and what kinds of content they respond well to. This information is crucial for understanding your customers’ needs and trying to meet them with your personalized content. This article by Social Media Examiner shows you how to reveal the most valuable data about your audience from Google Analytics and use it to your advantage. For more insightful information about the powerful tool, this article by Three Girls’ CEO, Erika Taylor Montgomery, shares how you can use Google Analytics to increase brand awareness and social validation. - If you have a new product or service or you simply want to get your business some exposure, Google Analytics’ “Traffic Sources” and “Organic Search” data might be the key. You can use these tools to optimize content around the most viewed search terms.
Another good tool to use is Google’s Keyword Planner. This will help you identify related keywords, as well as highlight the high search and low competition keywords you can use in a blog post or a dedicated landing page on your website. This tool gives you the opportunity to fine tune your content to be placed higher in searches.
- Google Analytics recently added a Trackbacks section to its social analytics data. Trackbacks show you the social factor of your content strategy. According to Webopedia, Trackbacks are a type of peer-to-peer communication system designed to send notifications of updates between two websites via a Trackback Ping. Trackbacks are useful for informing another website that you have referenced it within your own site. For example, when you write a post and reference content elsewhere within it, you are providing a Trackback to the other article. By understanding what they are and how to use them, you can identify opportunities for your business.
Google Analytics is a wonderful toolbox that can help you target your audience better and start seeing the results you are looking for.
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Use social media.
– Social media is a great way to interact with potential customers and get feedback on your product or service. If you’re not already active on social media, now is the time to start! Make sure you
regularly post engaging content and respond to comments and messages promptly. Remember that the feedback you receive from your customer base or potential customers will only be useful if your brand is authentic. Learn about the basics of branding in this Three Girls article, in which I discuss branding, the “voice” of your brand and how it affects every aspect of your business. In a recent article by Hootsuite, they specifically share how you can track social media data for marketing purposes and the type of data you’ll need to look for. It all starts with knowing your own business goals. They share that, “if you want to use social media to build brand awareness, you might be most interested in tracking engagement. If your goal is to create sales, you’ll likely want to track conversions.” In the article they also list some of the “most important raw data you can collect through social media.” This includes:
- Engagement: Clicks, comments, shares, etc.
- Reach
- Impressions and video views
- Follower count and growth over time
- Profile visits
- Brand sentiment
- Social share of voice
- Demographic data: age, gender, location, language, behaviors, etc.
Analyze The Data You’ve Collected
Once you’ve gathered some data, it’s time to start analyzing it. Try to look for patterns and trends in the information you’ve collected. For example, if you notice that most of your website visitors are women aged 25-34, you might want to focus on creating content that appeals specifically to that demographic.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are some great resources available online, like this one from Klipfolio. Once you’ve taken some time to analyze your data, you’ll have a better idea of who you should be targeting with your content.
Create Customer Personas
Once you’ve collected and analyzed data on your target audience, it’s time to start creating customer personas. Customer personas are semi-fictional representations of ideal customers, based on real data about your current and potential customers. They help you understand your target audiences better and create more personalized content that resonates at a deeper level.
Three Girls’ CEO, Erika Taylor Montgomery, recently wrote an article that discusses buyer personas in great detail. In it she shares the importance of considering “customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals when creating buyer personas.” She goes on to share:
It’s hard to guess what content your audience wants without a buyer persona to
guide you. Without one, you’re likely to find yourself creating content based on what you know and care about, as opposed to what your audience cares about. This phenomenon of writing about your own level of understanding and caring has been called the “Curse of Knowledge.” The Decision Lab explains: “When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information. In turn, this makes it difficult to share our knowledge, because we struggle to understand the other party’s state of mind.”
In content marketing, this can result in content your audience finds uninteresting and irrelevant. Companies can overcome the “Curse of Knowledge” by using buyer personas to govern their content marketing strategies.
When it comes to content creation, use what you’ve learned from your buyer persona research to write blog articles and craft social media posts. Speak to their pain points and offer solutions. Engage your audience by speaking their language. Allowing buyer personas to guide your content marketing strategies will keep you focused on your customers’ needs, resulting in targeted campaigns. When you create content for individual buyer personas, it will result in content that is highly relevant to a key segment of your audience.
The article shares in detail the benefits of this powerful strategy, but in short, the benefits of investing in buyer personas is building effective content marketing strategies, earning your audience’s trust and generating guidelines for consistent content creation.
Once you have some basic information about your persona, you can start to flesh them out by giving them a name, age, occupation, etc. The more detailed you can make your persona, the better. Remember, the goal is to create a character that represents your ideal customer so that you can generate targeted content that appeals to them.
Creating a persona might seem daunting, but there are plenty of resources available online to help you get started, like this one from HubSpot as well as the article by Three Girls Media mentioned above. Once you’ve created a few customer personas, you’ll have a better idea of how to personalize your content for each one.
Implement Personalized Content In Your Marketing Strategy
Creating personalized content is an important part of any successful marketing strategy — but it’s not always easy to get right. By following the steps outlined above, you’ll be well on your way to creating targeted, engaging content that speaks directly to the needs of your audience. Just remember, take things slowly at first and don’t be afraid to experiment! The more effort you put into personalizing your content, the better results you’ll see from your marketing campaign as a whole.
Contact Us
If you need help creating personalized content for your audience, contact us at Three Girls Media to learn more about our content marketing services. Together, we can design a strategy that’s perfect for your business.