Why your content needs data-driven personalization

Data-driven personalization tailors content, services, or experiences in B2B marketing to prospects’ unique preferences, behaviors, and characteristics. Data from various sources helps marketers create exactly what their audience wants.

For marketers, the goal is to provide relevant content that improves user experience and fosters long-term customer relationships. You can only do this with a deep understanding of those you are marketing or selling to.

Think of it like having a friend who likes comedy films, but not horror. You wouldn’t choose to show them The Shining, so why send irrelevant or unwanted content to leads who won’t take a second glance at it?

When it comes to revenue-driving content production, there are many benefits to using data-driven personalization, but the key benefits are connected: You show that you understand and care for leads and customers, personalization drives further engagement from your content (it’s proven to), and together these things drive more data insights.

Data for customer-centricity

You may be using data, but your audiences aren’t numbers to your business, there are real people behind the keyboard you’re trying to appeal to.

With a keen understanding of behavior and adjusting your material accordingly, there is almost certainly going to be a drastic increase in key metrics like open rates, read time, and interactions.

Data for lead management

Engagement data influences how to create and market your content – and manage and nurture leads for a free-flowing pipeline. If you can see intent data from your content, you know exactly which leads to contact first, and which can wait.

By using personalized content that returns intent data, your business saves time, money, and effort by helping leads walk through your sales funnel.

Collect intent data

Begin by gathering intent data from various sources, such as user interactions, preferences, and behaviors. Utilize tools like Turtl Analytics, Google Analytics, and data from your CRM. Direct customer feedback is ideal, you can collect zero-party data as part of a customer feedback strategy– and directly from a Turtl Doc.

Polls, surveys, and interviews reveal how current customers feel, what they want, and what they need.

Audience segmentation

Divide your audience into segments based on common characteristics. Segmentation allows you to evaluate marketing materials and create more targeted and relevant content for specific groups, addressing their unique needs and preferences, at various funnel stages. Understanding what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like will help to segment audiences by the use cases of your product or service.

Traditionally marketers used demographic or firmographic data but content behavioral data reveals another layer of intelligence. Imagine adding behavioral tags to your segments. You’d have a clearer idea of buying intent.

A/B testing

A/B testing is typically seen in email marketing but can also be used with personalized marketing materials. It involves distributing two (or more) versions of your content to similar audiences to discern which performs better. Bear in mind that once you’ve segmented your audience, it is worth keeping your A/B tests to single segments to gain a better understanding of that segment and how your content is performing. Sending one version to one segment, and a different version to another segment is likely to cause wildly different results that don’t aid your efforts. Keep those variables down!

Feedback and real-time personalization

By using a feedback loop, your audience has a direct line with your data to tell you exactly what they want to see. You can use real-time personalization – for instance, before they view your content, offer a form that asks what they may be interested in. Your content can then dynamically shift to be much more relevant, engaging, and appropriate for your audience. Turtl’s Personalization Engine helps marketers create reader-led content journeys just like this.

Collect more data and optimize

Regularly monitoring the performance of your personalized content is essential. Don’t just send out material based on previous data and hope for the best. By analyzing your efforts consistently your data will always be up to date and your content will always be relevantly personalized. Optimization is an ongoing process to stay aligned with ever-evolving user preferences and industry trends.

Choose quality data

Choosing the right data to use is far more important than just collecting everything. Whether trying to prove content marketing return on investment (ROI) to senior management or just not bogging yourself down with irrelevant data, the correct metrics change everything. For example, if you’re using marketing channels like social media or sending interactive newsletters, measuring click-through rate is far more important than checking read time.

Define your objectives

Without a clear end goal, you’re just shooting in the dark. Whether it’s increasing inbound lead generation or scaling ABM accounts – an objective keeps your marketing efforts focused. With a clear goal in mind, you can adjust your personalized marketing material accordingly and use your collected data effectively to optimize your B2B content marketing strategy.

Team alignment

Aligning your goals and efforts across teams is essential in keeping your sales funnel fluid and your data relevant. Ensure that your sales and marketing teams are crossing over at the right point and not repeating efforts or even using wildly different data sets. This will keep consistency in your strategy and coherency for your audience.

Multiple data sources

Just like the importance of aligning your teams, the same goes for the sources from which you collect your data. By bringing data points together, you can create a data landscape that effectively shows the information you need and can lead to highly optimized content across all channels.

Return, review, redo

Learning from your data is a constant ongoing process. Data and audience behavior, while often predictable, is likely to change a lot, even in ways you or algorithms cannot predict. Regularly reviewing your data can lead to better content, more refined personalization, and better segmentation of your audience.

Personalized content can only work when you know who your audience is, what they want, and how they behave. To do that, consistent data collection is essential. Without the data, you’re just hoping that your understanding is correct, and hope, while nice, doesn’t produce results.

Understanding the psychology behind that behavior, backed by analytics from multiple up-to-date sources, can lead to greater personalization, which leads to greater engagement and more conversions.

Want to learn more about using psychology to power up content? We’ve got you.

Click to read Demystifying the psychology of attention | Turtl