Personalization in Content Marketing: 5 Ways to Use it

Personalization in content marketing is no longer an option—it’s a necessity.

So, if your personalization game isn’t strong enough, you’re staring down into a deep rabbit hole of failing marketing campaigns.

You need to understand your audience, figure out their interests, and personalize your campaigns accordingly for effective content marketing.

But why should you do so?

It’s because an overwhelming majority (72%) of consumers only engage with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests.

Image via SmarterHQ

But what exactly is personalization in content marketing and how do you achieve it?

Let’s take a look at it all in detail.

What is Personalization in Content Marketing?

Simply put—personalization is the targeted delivery of your content to your audience based on a predefined set of conditions.

These conditions are, of course, the various likes, dislikes, and preferences of your audience. That’s the reason why such content is also called dynamic content as it differs for each person in your audience.

And what aspects of your content can be customized?

Pretty much everything. You could personalize your blog posts, resources, headlines, CTAs, images, and so much more.

Now that you know all about what is personalization in content marketing, let’s take a look at how you can achieve it—at scale.

How to Do Personalization in Content Marketing?

Here are the various tactics that you can employ to achieve personalization in content marketing.

1. Personalized Recommendations

The simplest way of going about personalization in content marketing is by sending out personalized or related recommendations to your audience.

This is a highly effective tactic of personalizing your offerings without the need to collect any audience or visitor data.

And the best part?

It can be automated too.

So how can you go about it?

All you have to do is list recommended content on a particular content page on your website.

This recommended content essentially includes all the posts that are similar to the one that your audience is currently viewing. As a result, these recommended posts would match their interests as they’ve already shown some interest in the post that they’re currently viewing.

As mentioned above, this process can be automated as well.

If you’re using WordPress to run your website, you can install plugins that can automatically pick up and display related content in your posts.

Alternatively, you could showcase the same as a pop-up once the readers have spent significant time on your post.

This strategy for content marketing works because it’s fairly non-intrusive and also requires minimal effort.

2. Retargeted Ads

Yet another way of incorporating personalization in content marketing is by harnessing the power of retargeting.

Facebook Ads and Google Ads let you launch retargeting ad campaigns that allow you to reach all those people who’ve already shown interest in your content.

And how does personalization come into the picture here?

You can use retargeting ads to recommend content that’s similar to the content that your visitors interacted with in the past.

This method comes in handy as your visitors are familiar with your website and would also likely be interested in the recommendations. As a result, you can get the traffic back on your website and drive your content’s views and engagement.

For example, note how the retargeted ad below works well to attract the attention of someone who’s scrolling through their Facebook News Feed after visiting the website.

Image via Facebook

3. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is one of the best ways to personalize your content marketing efforts and drive sales.

In fact, an overwhelming 79% of businesses say that live chat has affected their sales, revenue, and customer loyalty positively. Additionally, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers live chat.

Image via Kayako

So, conversational marketing helps you boost your bottom line, great. But how does it help you personalize your content marketing efforts?

You could send out personalized content recommendations to your website visitors when they chat with you. This not only improves their experience but also helps drive better engagement.

However, you’d have to collect their browsing data to figure out what interests them on your website for this process.

What’s more?

Live chat requires you to communicate with your audience manually. However, you could also put this process on autopilot by leveraging AI-powered chatbots that can understand the preferences of your visitors and recommend content to them.

This form of recommendations would work too as you’d essentially be conversing with your visitors one-to-one as opposed to other passive modes.

As a result, this method could help you level up your personalization game while running your content marketing campaigns.

4. Partner with Influencers

Influencer marketing is yet another great strategy of going about personalization in content marketing. It lets you reach a particular segment from your audience that has interacted with similar content from your brand.

And if that’s not the case, it still lets you personalize your content as the influencer’s followers find their content relevant.

Unlike the other methods, it doesn’t let you reach each person among your audience individually. But it’s still a highly effective strategy that you can implement.

The best part about such a strategy is that the responsibility of creating the content will be with the influencers.

So how can you go about it?

You need to start by looking for influencers and find an influencer whose audience is similar to that of your brand or a particular segment of your audience.

The idea is to get these influencers to promote your content and amp up the reach and engagement of your campaign.

Once you’ve partnered with the influencer, you can ask them to create content around your brand. The content that they’ll create will be tailored to the interests of their audience, hence personalizing your content marketing campaign.

To manage your influencer campaigns, you should consider leveraging influencer marketing platforms as they can help you partner with multiple influencers at scale.

For example, note how the influencer below has partnered with Avail to promote their brand on Instagram through their customized content.

Image via Instagram

5. Location-Based Personalization

The other type of personalization that you can do in content marketing is based on the location of your audience.

Such personalization is especially helpful if you’ve got a business that transcends geographical boundaries.

In this case, you could personalize your content marketing efforts based on each region. This personalization could be in terms of products, images, languages, and more.

The idea is to make the content more relevant for the people in a particular region. As a result, there would be a greater chance that they might engage with the content.

You could also send out emails based on a particular location’s time. This would ensure that everyone would receive your emails at the right time.

Additionally, you could take this a step further by providing access to GPS-based maps to showcase the location of your brick-and-mortar stores or things that your audience wants.

Maps would add the interactive element to your marketing efforts and make it easy for your audience to navigate to the location.

For instance, William Hill leveraged location-based personalization in content marketing to drive up their engagement rates.

They sent out targeted messages to their audience based on their locations. Through it, they were able to generate 400% more engagement over other standard notifications.

Final Thoughts

Personalization is an important aspect of content marketing that can help you power up your campaign’s results.

You can achieve it by sending out personalized recommendations to your readers by suggesting relevant content to them.

Additionally, you can use retargeting to show ads related to the content that they’ve been reading on your website. Similarly, you can use conversational marketing and location-based personalization to further personalize your offerings.

Finally, you can partner with influencers and they can create content that’s relevant to their audience and drive engagement.

Do you have any questions related to the methods of personalization in content marketing mentioned above? Ask them in the comments section below.