Your target audience is likely not as huge and varied as Amazon or Walmart and despite that, it’s likely that your business or organization is still shooting content out of a cannon as if it were. While technology can help scale a business by providing personalized content, most organizations are missing the bus when it comes to making their consumers feel like Special Snowflakes. If you aren’t specializing content, then why in the world are you wasting time creating it?
The benefits of personalized content are indisputable. Using enriched or personalized content and digital interactions brings higher response and engagement rates, more timely and relevant interactions, as well as greater customer affinity. Emarketer.com ranked the benefits as a result of the CMO Council, June 2015 survey as follows:
Image: eMarketer.com (2016).
So what does this mean for your content marketing plan? It means you need to apply effort with a different mindset. First, set a few simple goals.
Use KPI’s (key performance indicators) to create simple goals for your content game.
Second, employ a content calendar. You don’t have to get too fancy here. A simple Excel spreadsheet or Google doc will suffice. A quick Google search for content calendar templates will even get you beautiful free templates to explore and exploit.
This helps you with the next item, mindful execution. After you plan your content calendar/schedule, keeping in mind your KPI’s create content that is both consistent and targeted with your channels. This might mean you create LESS content than before.
Using keyword research, key target audience demographics, with a little research into what resonates with your engaged or soon to be engaged audience you should be reaching your actual audience, not all of the audiences.
Finally, this takes us to audit or evaluation of your efforts. After a month, measure. After six months, measure. After a year, measure. Get the picture? Data over time on your various channels will help you keep or toss content and content-related ideas that you have accumulated. This is a trial and error process, but to embrace this idea you do have to keep track of what works and what doesn’t.
What’s your secret to personalized and effective content? We’d love to hear from you.
