How to Use Data to Personalise Your Content Marketing

Using data to gather information about your potential customers is crucial for your marketing strategy.  It allows you get to know your audience better and enables you to personalise your content marketing. All of this to better cater to the needs of your clients.

“Website conversion rates can be increased by up to 70% when serving the right website content. Additionally, it avoids the majority of your customers becoming frustrated when shown content that has nothing to do with their interests.”

Es Chandra
CEO – Glide

How should you start to personalise your content marketing?

Personalisation can really improve your content marketing. Interaction and engagement can be increased through this technique.

Target everyone, or focus your energies?

Most of the time, marketers focus on the 5% of leads that actually convert, but tend to forget about the rest. What about the 95% of prospects who came to your website and stayed anonymous?  You should focus on them too! The key is to develop numerous personas around your entire client base. You can tailor your main communications to those aspirational target markets that would give you the best return on investment. However, each piece of communication should be written towards a clear persona, and be customised to their needs.

Life cycle matters!

To start building relationships with people who land on your website, you need to give them the right content. One that will engage them enough to enter your buying cycle. Whether that’s downloading a piece of gated content, or subscribing to your blog, it’s all about educating your persona until they are ready to interact. Data is already giving you a lot of information about all your visitors: intentions, interests, personas, and locations to name just a few. So, take advantage of it and analyse your existing client base and your most successful clients. Create your personas around these, plus your aspirational goals. After that, you will then be ready to start targeting more of your traffic with more personalised calls to action. The lead score, displayed below, shows you exactly where your prospect is in their life cycle for you to then take the appropriate actions:

Personas need to be realistic

Have a content marketing strategy that covers each step of every persona’s life cycle stage. Your prospects will access the material they need, at their own pace, as they progress through their own purchase and decision making process. Spread your efforts in a more strategic approach, with communications that step readers towards a final outcome, which favours everyone. Lead nurturing and generation should be a gradual procedure. Understand that each conversion happens at an individual rate. There are no short cuts, it takes time and consideration.

Create the right website content to gain trust

For consumers who do not know your brand, serving up the right website content is key. It should be based around the life cycle of your customers. To know in which stage each of your leads is at, look at your website plus digital traffic insights. When undertaking a campaign, initially, you should personalise your content marketing towards top-of-funnel. This means it should be purely informative and start a conversation. Focus on your personas problems by gently solving needs and highlighting benefits. This relevant content should not scare your potential prospects off, but grab their attention, via building rapport and trust.

Lead the pack as a thought leader

Be a thought leader in your industry, answer questions and avoid a sales pitch. Do not give content that is too detailed (middle of the funnel), or try to close them (bottom of the funnel content) – as this may lead them to disengage with your site, if they’re not yet at that stage. You need to start building a relationship with every visitor that comes through, and personalise your content marketing, as they move through your sales cycle. This can be done through email marketing automation tools. Direct digital marketing can naturally generate trust, and brand loyalty will evolve during this process.

Consumers consume information – data is currency

When consumers see that you are relevant to them, they will be more likely to convert, when they need your products. So it’s important to know who is visiting your site, and where that traffic is heading. Learn what resonates with your audience, be ready to constantly evolve to meet trends and better understand the behaviour of buyers. There’s tonnes of information out there for you to call upon and Google can also guide you. However, if you’re unsure about what to write or how to produce quality content – then stay tuned to our blog articles for more upcoming tips.

Increase your website conversion rates

For some, all content is hidden behind forms, so only a fraction of your audience may take the time to look around, or fill out forms in order to receive this content. It must be an even balance. Lead that horse to water – it will drink when it’s thirsty. At the outset of the buyer journey, blog articles can be good top of the funnel content marketing to organically educate those searching for the solutions you can provide. That’s where keywords and SEO optimisation techniques can be very useful.

Be dynamic

You have to make sure the right content shows up for the right prospect, in order to get his or her attention. Providing content dynamically, depending on the information you can collect and garnish from your website visitors, will help you to nurture them into a lead, and thus increase your website conversion rates.

 What information can you gather thanks to data?

Analytics can give great insight into your traffic. Let’s discover what you can determine.

Geographic

Google Analytics can teach you a lot about where your website traffic visitors are coming from. And just from knowing where most of your traffic is, you can tailor the content marketing on your site or target campaigns to specific regions. Interestingly enough, some Australian companies seem to have traffic in countries where English is not the first language. They see German ranking in the top 10 for example. If that applies to your company, depending on your products and services, e-commerce can allow you to explore and take advantage of such untapped potential overseas client bases. It is also possible to compare geography with website conversion rates. And the results can be surprising! When looking at the image below, it is clear that NSW has the highest website conversion rate. However, NSW is far behind WA when it comes to the number of sessions. This result hints that the marketing strategy should include content marketing tailored around NSW website traffic visitors.

Demographics

By taking a look at your demographics reports, you will gain a better understanding of who your target market is. You will then be able to tailor your content marketing based on the persona. For example, Google Analytics shows that this company’s website traffic visitors are mostly females aged 25-34. If a company wants to change its target market, it may have to change the content on its website to resonate better to males in the 35-44 age group for example.

Intent

Keep in mind that there are three general types of intent: direct, consideration, and conversion/purchase driven, and you should target each differently. Direct means that the consumer is typing your website’s URL directly. This means that he or she is probably looking for your website in particular. Consideration means that the visitor is looking to gather more information about a product or service. Conversion or purchase driven, means that viewers are looking to perform an action – either downloading, buying, or registering, for example. If you are not sure how to write the content accordingly, then this article should provide further insight.

Engagement data

Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, you can see if your visitors have already been on the page. You can then segment them into a new versus returning visitor list. You can also know their time spent on a page, or several pages, to determine their interests. Lastly, Google Analytics will also show you how your website traffic visitors are accessing your website. So, make sure you have a personalised content marketing strategy on hand, depending on the interest shown, or the method used to access your website.

Analytics & responsive insight

If most of your website traffic is coming through mobile devices, but your website is not responsive, you may be loosing it. It may lead to higher bounce rates, or less time spent on your site. There is so much data you can gather from your site! So make sure you are analysing it and learning from the behaviour of site traffic. Don’t miss opportunities, and discover trends that may surprise you.

Use data to personalise the website traffic visitor’s experience

The user experience of your website is more critical than you may realise. There are various aspects to keep in mind, so let’s review these.

New vs returning visitors

Now that you know the basic data, you can create a list of returning vs new visitors. You can then personalise your content marketing for each list. Your returning visitors (even when still anonymous) are more interested than the ones who do not come back. They should be served different content than a new visitor. Try some “next stage” content in order to make those website traffic visitors lean toward the next step of your pipeline, as well as keeping their engagement high.

Have all channels consistent & work towards the same goal

When doing due-diligence, it is normal for buyers to access your website through approximately six different channels. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself if you would like to see the same content six times. Optimise your website traffic visitor’s experience by serving them different content. Use each medium to move them through the sales funnel, and build them towards the final stage of the customer lifecycle.

Time on topic

Data can show you how long website traffic visitors have spent on a page, or on several pages, and even the percentage of scroll. This shows you if your potential customers went all the way to the bottom of your page, or just stayed at the top. The longer the time spent, and the lower your visitors go on your page, the stronger their interest is. Knowing this, you could send your “high interest” visitors content about that topic, and ask them to sign up to get more information about it. This is a win-win situation, as you would be able to gather even more information on that prospect, if they do indeed end up signing up. You can then enroll them into email marketing automation or traditional EDM (electronic direct mail) communications.

Pages visited

Data can also show you where your website traffic visitors are in their buying cycle, depending on the pages visited. You can then decide to serve them more top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, or bottom-of-the funnel content. By tailoring the customer experience to their needs, you are helping them advance within the buying cycle.

Knowledge is power

These are only a few examples of what can be done. And once you figure out all of the content you want to show to all of your different persona, the secret is to be able to do it in scale. This is where email marketing automation software comes into play. On this picture, you can see the kind of data that you can capture – the devices your visitors used to access your site for example.

Database building, lead learning & personalisation

Building a strong database is crucial to the success of your business. You can extend the lifetime value of your existing client base, whilst better nurturing your prospects. There’s a few ways that this process can be personalised, yet automated.

The advantage of email marketing automation software

There are various email marketing automation software options on the market. Ultimately, they all have the same goal, and similar features. They are able to take into account massive amounts of data, and serve the right content automatically, without the need of human control. Once you have set the “one size fits all optimisation”, you can then use rule based segmentation for all of your lead. This will automate your personalisation, give every single lead personalised content and optimise your website conversion rates.

An increase in ROI – ensure return on investment

The more automated your marketing becomes, the more you will be able to personalise your content marketing on a much higher scale and larger volume. It will help you to leverage the maximum amount of content, and serve it to the right person at the right time. It will also lead to higher content return on investment, and a longer content shelf life. Why? Because it can be reused for the same persona, for a longer period of time. Over 90% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across different channels. So, have you delved into automation? Ensure your content lands in the right mailbox!   Make sure you take time to analyse your data. It can help to not only define customer personas, but also to personalise your content, in order to assure you reach your leads with content they actually want. Leverage marketing automation to strategically personalise your content on a much higher scale. These tools help ensure your prospects feel special through these custom one-on-one communications. Likewise, as your customers converse with your staff, you can learn much through call tracking technologies. Follow your clients through their entire lifecycle process, to ensure they keep coming back to you. Build brand loyalty and extend the customer lifecycle. Do you want an agency to set up marketing automation or analytics for your company? Approach Glide today and enquire below! We can aid your content marketing strategy, to maximise your efforts. Many companies are only able to commit to a fraction of their time towards proper content strategy and marketing processes. Learn more about our automation and analytics can assist your lead nurturing here, or read our article on how digital video marketing can boost these efforts.