We’ve all experienced content personalization whether we realized it or not: shopping for a product and seeing a set of “recommended for you” or “people like you also purchased” listings. Getting a personalized email recommending products based on other items you’ve purchased (or even browsed or left in a shopping cart). Newsfeeds based on topics you’ve interacted with in the past. Weather customized to your location or suggested businesses near you.

These helpful—and occasionally annoying—experiences are some of the most complex a business can plan for and deliver and require a strategy and cross-functional participation to deliver.

At the leadership level, KPIs (key performance indicators) or OKRs (objectives and key results) will drive the expectations for personalization’s success. Marketing will define the messaging, channel, and audience targeting strategies. User research will provide demographic and behavioral data about the audience. Content strategists and user experience designers will craft the content delivery and presentation plans. The technology team will put the necessary tools in place to manage and deliver the content to the audiences in the appropriate channels and at the appropriate times. And you’ll need data analysts to track and report on performance metrics and feed that data back to support the continuous refinement of personalization strategies based on data-driven insights.

Getting Started

To get started with a personalization strategy, there are a few key activities to lay the groundwork:

  • Establish your goals

  • Understand your audience

  • Define your implementation techniques and channels

  • Choose your tools

  • Assess and prepare your content

Setting the Business Context for Personalization

To launch a project like this and facilitate a productive discussion on defining personalization goals for the website, begin by focusing on key aspects of personalization, ensuring that the entire cross-functional team is aligned. If the organization isn’t already doing personalization, that discussion should include an introduction to personalization that addresses

  • The importance of personalized content to the business and customers

  • The benefits of personalization (user engagement, conversions, user satisfaction)

  • Challenges and considerations (data privacy, complexity, resource allocation)

Organizational Benefits

Getting the organization on board with a personalization initiative can be addressed by focusing on a set of specific objectives and outcomes, such as

  • Increased user engagement

  • Boosted conversions and revenue

  • Improving user satisfaction and loyalty

  • Brand awareness

  • Enhanced user experience and website usability

End-User Benefits

Content personalization provides several benefits to end users, contributing to an improved and more engaging online experience. Many of these benefits address business objectives as well. These benefits include:

  • Relevance: Personalized content is tailored to individual preferences, interests, and behavior, ensuring that users encounter content that is more relevant and meaningful to them.

  • Improved user experience: Personalized content and adaptive user interfaces create a more seamless and enjoyable browsing experience, making it easier for users to navigate, find information, and interact with the website.

  • Time savings: By presenting users with content that aligns with their preferences and needs, personalization reduces the time and effort they spend searching for information, products, or services.

  • Customized recommendations: Personalized recommendations help users discover new content, products, or services that are closely aligned with their preferences and interests, enhancing their overall experience and satisfaction.

  • Enhanced engagement: Personalized content encourages users to engage more with the website, increasing the likelihood of them consuming more content, sharing it on social media, or participating in community discussions.

  • Increased trust and loyalty: When users consistently encounter relevant and valuable content, they are more likely to trust the website and become loyal visitors or customers.

  • Personalized marketing: Users receive marketing messages and promotions that are specifically tailored to their interests and needs, making the marketing communications more appealing and less intrusive.

  • Cross-channel consistency: Personalization efforts that span across different channels, such as web, mobile apps, email, and social media, help create a seamless and consistent user experience, fostering a stronger connection with the brand.

  • Context-aware personalization: Users receive content that is adapted to their current context, such as location, device, or time of day, providing a more engaging and relevant experience.

  • Empowerment and control: Personalization efforts that allow users to manage their preferences, data, and content delivery give them a sense of control and ownership over their online experience.

Overall, content personalization benefits end users by delivering a more relevant, engaging, and enjoyable online experience, which can lead to increased trust, loyalty, and satisfaction with the website or brand.

Understanding the Target Audience

A key contextual underpinning of any content initiative, but especially one that relies on a finely-tuned targeting strategy, requires an understanding of user needs and behavior.

Audience analysis is crucial for understanding your target audience and tailoring content and marketing strategies to their preferences, needs, and behavior. Here are some useful techniques for conducting audience analysis:

  • Market research: Conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups to gather information about your target audience's preferences, interests, and pain points. This primary research helps you better understand their needs and expectations.

  • Analytics tools: Use web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to gather data on user demographics, interests, behavior, and engagement patterns. Analyzing this data can provide valuable insights into your audience's preferences and habits.

  • Social listening: Monitor social media platforms and online forums to understand the conversations, trends, and sentiment around your brand, products, or industry. Social listening helps identify common themes, questions, or concerns among your target audience.

  • Customer feedback: Gather feedback from existing customers through reviews, testimonials, or direct communication. This feedback can help you understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, allowing you to address them more effectively in your content.

  • Competitor analysis: Examine the content and strategies of your competitors to understand what resonates with your target audience. Identify gaps in their offerings or areas where your brand can differentiate itself.

  • Persona development: Create detailed user personas based on your audience analysis. Personas are fictionalized representations of your customers based on your user research and customer data, and including demographics, interests, and behavior patterns. They can help guide content creation and personalization efforts.

  • Market segmentation: Divide your target audience into smaller, more specific segments based on factors such as demographics, interests, behavior, or geography. This enables you to create tailored content and marketing strategies for each segment.

  • Industry reports and trends: Review industry reports, research, and trend analyses to gain insights into your target audience's preferences, expectations, and emerging interests.

  • CRM data analysis: Analyze data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to understand customer interactions, preferences, and purchasing habits. This data can help inform content personalization and marketing strategies.

  • A/B testing: Test different content variations, headlines, images, or calls-to-action (CTAs) to determine which elements resonate most with your target audience. Use these insights to refine your content and personalization strategies.

By utilizing these techniques, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience, allowing you to create more effective, engaging, and personalized content experiences that drive results.

Selecting Personalization Techniques and Strategies

Specific personalization techniques and strategies are chosen to deliver a tailored and relevant experience to users by catering to their preferences, behavior, and context. Here are some examples of personalization techniques and strategies. Not all will be relevant to all organizations; you will need to align your plans with your business objectives and your audiences’ needs.

  • Dynamic content adaptation: Display content that changes based on user preferences, behavior, or context, such as showcasing personalized offers, product recommendations, or content suggestions.

  • Context-aware personalization: Adapt content based on contextual factors like location, device, time of day, or referral source. For example, display location-specific content or offers, adjust the content layout for different devices, or show time-sensitive promotions.

  • Personalized recommendations: Use AI-powered recommendation engines or algorithms to suggest content, products, or services based on users' preferences, browsing history, and other data points.

  • Segmentation-based personalization: Create content variations tailored to specific audience segments based on demographics, interests, or behavior. For example, develop targeted email campaigns, landing pages, or articles for different user segments.

  • Personalized search results: Customize search results based on user preferences, browsing history, or behavior to provide more relevant and engaging results.

  • Adaptive user interfaces: Adjust website layout, navigation, or design elements based on user preferences or behavior to enhance usability and user experience.

  • Personalized calls-to-action (CTAs): Display dynamic CTAs based on user behavior, preferences, or context. For instance, show different CTAs for new visitors, returning visitors, or users who have abandoned their shopping carts.

  • Personalized marketing automation: Implement automated marketing campaigns, such as email, social media, or SMS, that are tailored to individual users based on their preferences, behavior, or engagement history.

  • Cross-channel personalization: Ensure a seamless and consistent personalized experience across various channels, such as web, mobile apps, email, and social media.

  • Behavioral trigger-based personalization: Use user behavior, such as cart abandonment, browsing history, or content consumption patterns, to trigger personalized content or offers. For example, send a follow-up email with personalized recommendations when a user abandons their cart.

These personalization techniques and strategies can be combined and tailored to suit the specific needs of your website, audience, and business goals. By implementing effective personalization, you can enhance user experiences, increase engagement, and improve conversion rates.

Implementation and Tools

Perhaps more than any other type of content initiative, personalization relies heavily on technology. To support your efforts, you’ll need

  • A content management system (CMS) with personalization features and the ability to manage and structure content for delivery in different contexts and devices

  • Analytics and tracking tools

  • AI-powered recommendation engines or algorithms

These tools need to deliver

  • Dynamic content adaptation

  • Context-aware personalization

  • Personalized recommendations

  • Cross-channel consistency

  • Testing and optimization capabilities

Assessing Your Content Readiness

Delivering personalized content experiences doesn’t happen without the content to support them. This is where the audit process comes in—how do you determine whether you have the right content, in the right formats, in the right channels for delivery?

Personalized content requires

  • A variety of content formats (articles, videos, images, interactive media), designed to deliver specific types of information to specific audiences

  • Distribution channels (web, mobile apps, email, social media) to meet your audiences where they are

  • Integration and consistency across channels to ensure that audiences who encounter your content at different touchpoints in their customer journeys are getting a cohesive message and experience

A content audit will help you assess the quantity and quality of your existing content, identify the gaps, and find areas for improvement in authoring, publishing, content management, and distribution.

To get started with your assessment there are a series of basic steps:

  • Establish goals: what do you need to learn and how will you apply what you learn?

  • Review business and user objectives: what do your audience and organization need to achieve from personalized content delivery?

  • Set benchmarks: establish the baseline of current metrics against which you can measure your success

  • Define your scope: what content and experiences are currently personalized or could be personalized and what content supports those?

  • Determine criteria: what will you evaluate content against? Criteria can be both quantitative and qualitative—i.e., you might include an analysis of analytics as well as review content for its tone and presentation

  • Review and capture your evaluations and notes: your audit output will ideally provide specific, tactical actions for improving content

Identifying Personalized Content

Before you start analyzing, determine what levels of personalization support your site includes. Here are some tips for identifying where personalization is happening to aid in setting your audit scope.

Table that describes personalization types and tactics for identifying

Audit Inputs

To assess the personalized content you discovered, there are some key inputs to guide you:

  • User engagement data (user flows, conversions, engagement time, scrolling behaviors)

  • User location data

  • Customer purchase history

  • Personas

  • Browser-awareness

  • Mobile-friendly content

  • Content currency

  • Necessary content elements

    • Product descriptions were written to display in different contexts and devices

    • Product images

    • Content requirements for length (e.g., titles, product names)

    • Required metadata (e.g., meta descriptions, tags to support content categorization)

Takeaways

In sum, to successfully plan and deliver on a personalization initiative, it’s important to

  • Understand your users and how they interact with your content

  • Assess your technical capabilities, including managing content to support dynamic, multi-channel publication and support for recommendation engines

  • Ensure that all content has the necessary elements to deliver useful, consistent, targeted content

  • Audit regularly to maintain a consistent level of quality and content-readiness

  • Measure and optimize for testing and refining strategies and tactics