Credits: By Jens Kreuter via Unsplash
Times, when we had no idea how to target our content, are way behind us and it’s a great relief to have an ability to personalize our ads and marketing campaigns. As of today, we even have the tool that helps us automate your social media posting, how cool is that?
When we talk about successful marketing nowadays, we always keep the behavioural targeting in mind. It works quite easy: you have a service or a product to sell, but you want to be sure that you reach your target audience correctly. That is where the personalization of your content should come in play, but do you really understand what it is? Let’s start from the basics.
Personalized Content and Behavioral Targeting Explained
When we scroll around the internet, buy something or simply interact with different websites and social networks, most of your decisions and actions are tracked and written down in order to build up your taste profile.
So let’s say you shopped for vinyl records yesterday and today you read a new Washington Post article, chance are you’ll see an ad of the closest vinyl store in the advertisement block. Some of you may say it’s creepy, some of you may be surprised, but that’s how the real marketing world works today and it’s great. Do you want to know why? It’s simple! This kind of ‘tracking’ allows to deliver only truly relevant content that’s based on the personal tastes and interests of a certain user, doesn’t it feel right to you?
To put some meat on these bones, we’ll give you a few examples to show you what kind of information can be used to personalize content and target the audience neatly.
Location Targeting
This is one of the easiest ways to break your target audience into groups and choose the relevant clients is to determine their location. For example, there is no sense in pitching your winter coats to someone from Africa or skiing classes to someone from LA, etc.
Work on your content and prepare the relevant variations from every location you work in and talk to your customer about problems that are close to him/her, the ones that bother him/her particularly. Make sure your content hits the daily struggle of your customer based on where he lives, cause it’s obvious that we all have different kind of difficulties in our countries, cities, etc.
Buying History
It became really easy to track what kind of products your client bought previously or reviewed on your website. Additionally, ads can reach those parts of your target audience that had a shopping history on other websites.
This may help you build up a taste profile of your customer and provide him with a personalized feed of products he/she may like. It helps you take care of the conversion rates since your ads or content are not trying to grab the attention of those who don’t really need this particular product.
Interaction History
Since Google Analytics is free, everyone has an opportunity to work closely with the audience and gather lots of different data on the customers’ behaviour.
Basically, once you’ve tuned in GA, you can set up a huge flow of input data that can later be used for content personalization.
This kind of tools allows you tracking almost every interaction of the user with your website, so you can define your target audience more definite.
Successful Examples From The Real World
We bet most of you have a Netflix account or bought something from Amazon. Their feeds of ‘Recommended for you’ had a huge impact on customers affecting their choices.
This kind of direct personalization works great to this day. Once you’ve established the input data flow and started to interact with your customers more closely, you’ll see what a huge impact to your conversion rates it may have.
Here is one more for you. We all know Coca-Cola and saw their marketing campaign called ‘Share a coke’, right?
The idea was simple, yet so brilliant. They started to print the most popular First Names on each bottle of coke and reached the hearts of millennials in a blink of an eye. On top of that, they decided to take it to the next level and started to deploy the machines on the streets that gave you an opportunity to engrave any text on the Cola cans.
That’s when the Instagram and Facebook audience went crazy and started printing everything from ‘Make Cola Great Again’ to ‘Can’t Touch This’ and other meme phrases.
Best Tools To Use For Content Personalization and Behavioral Targeting
So we have Google Analytics that helps us track almost every move of our customer on the website, but are there any other special tools to consider? Yes, and here is the list we recommend you.
You can order personalized texts, essays or any other kind of content from these guys and get a professional writer assigned to your task. A great way to prepare top-notch content in a fast and effective way.
Tool to deliver the smart promotions, personalized emails and other types of engaging content to your customers. Everything is automated and saves lots of time.
Allows you to create a completely different experience for every customer on your website.
The ones you should also take a look at:
Delivering unique experience for every customer, Monetate takes care of increasing engagement and lifetime value of your brand.
Analyzes the users behaviour and lets you control it to deliver more conversions and revenue.
Analyzes everything from the scroll speed, to images that your users reviewed. All the smallest movements are tracked and used for your benefit.
There are lots of different toolkits that you may use to personalize your content, but it’s a matter of taste, so you should try each one and select the one that brings the biggest value to your business.
How To Approach Targeting And Personalization In Your Own Project
There are only a few steps that you should perform to personalize your content and bring your marketing work to a completely next level. We’re talking about raising the conversion rates here, so make sure you try it out with your current project or brand.
Evaluate The Input Data
You can gather your data with Google Analytics or any other tools that fit your needs the most. We’re talking about tons of data that should be used wisely.
Evaluation of the gathered data is fundamental, since if you screw everything up here, your whole marketing campaign may turn out dead.
Make sure you figure out what kind of data you’ll use to determine the generic profile of your typical customer that you want to reach.
Set Up Basic Rules For Your Content Targeting
When we have the needed data and separated the useful data from garbage, we can continue our work.
Using one of the tools given above, you can set up new rules and ensure that your content reaches only the groups of clients you need. For example, highlight the most problematic types of customers and try to impress them with some hot prices or offer a free shipping to those who leave their shopping cart once they see the shipping price.
Execute Your Plan
Deliver your personalized content to your clients and watch out for the statistics. The best idea here will be to stop and evaluate the success of your marketing campaign from time to time. This way you’ll be able to see if it works and you won’t lose money if it doesn’t. In this case, just stop it and try to figure out where you could make a mistake.
Final Thoughts
No one likes to be a part of some huge generic group of customers, everyone wants to feel special and everyone needs this ‘special premium treatment’. The best way to give this feel to your customer is to personalize your content and touch the problems that are close to him/her. This way you’ll be sure that you bring the real value to your target audience and ensure that your product is offered to those who really seek for it.
You can also affect the way your customers think of your brand by targeting some special sales, offers and personalized messages to the clients that really need it.