What happens when you visit Amazon?
What do you see?
Like everyone else, what you see is a recommendation that
Amazon presents to you based on your previous interests and purchases.
Isn’t it an awesome idea?
The fact that a website not only recognizes you as a repeat
customer, but also caters to your interests and alters itself according to
them. Ever since Amazon started this trend, data-driven personalization has
become more and more common. Now almost every e-commerce website offers you
promotions, discounts, and latest products based on your preferences as a
repeat customer.
The question here is why do businesses need to invest in
such highly adaptive content? Why the need to deliver an experience that is
unique to each and every customer? How does it affect the buying process of the
visitor?
Below, we break it all down for you and explain what smart
content is, how it works, and how can you use it to drive leads and generate
sales.
What is Smart Content?
Smart content is also known as ‘dynamic’ content or
‘adaptive’ content. Basically, it is a term that we have assigned to any
website, webpage, or email body that changes according to the viewer’s
interests, behavior, and past actions. Smart content is an experience that is
fully personalized and is unique to each and every visitor or reader. Amazon’s
recommendations page is just one of the many examples of smart content. There
are other examples as well, including unique images, animated video, personalized fields in forms
and much more.
How Does Smart Content Work
There are many factors that impact smart content but the
most essential element is relevancy. Research has found again and again that
the more personalized your marketing and targeting is, the better results you
will achieve. For example, a study found that emails that were relevant to the target audience performed 18x
better than broadcast emails. Another study found that if you nurture your leads with targeted content, you can increase
your sales generation by more than 20%.
So how do you make sure that your content is relevant to
your target audience?
Simple really. Data!
Everything depends on information that you collect about
your viewers. This doesn’t just include the demographics and contact
information, but also the insights that you collect about the pages that a
particular visitor has visited, the amount of time they have spent on a webpage
or a product page, the products they have already purchased, or the services
they have required, and more.
Smart Content Marketing Strategies
Now that we all know and understand what smart content is
and how it works, let's see some of the ways that you can use it to help your
visitors with their journey through your sales funnel and generate more leads
and sales than ever before.
Smart content should always be used with purpose and with
proper planning. It should always create a relationship between you and your
customers. It should let the customers know that you have their best interest
at heart and that you really care about them. It should always be implemented
with the intent of improving customer experience on your website or through
your email.
- Eliminate Repeat Conversions
A lot of the time you must have noticed that you see the
same notification or pop up for a particular lead generation offer, a discount,
or a promotion. That is exasperating, to say the least. If this is how we feel,
just think about how your visitors must feel when they are offered the same
thing that they have been offered before, again and again.
With smart content, you can make sure that if a visitor has
already downloaded an ebook or availed a discount before, they should see
something new the next time they visit, or if they visit another page. This
will not only help you create a unique experience for your customers, it will
also give you the opportunity to provide better offers to your customers and
make them realize just how much benefit they are getting from you.
- Tailor Smart Content to Help the Lifecycle Stage
The lifecycle stage refers to your visitor’s journey and how
far along they are at that moment. Maybe it is their first visit, maybe they
are still contemplating their decisions, and maybe they have decided to buy
from you.
With smart content, you can make sure that you don’t
oversell your products or services when they are still in the initial stage or
undersell when they are at the final stage and need just one push. Integrating
smart content with your previous knowledge of the customer and their current
experience, you can ensure that you will never miss out on an opportunity to
sell by making a mistake. You can map your content according to the customer’s
stage of the lifecycle. We see this done with email marketing, but you can also
do it with your websites and landing pages.
- Help Loyal Customers Skip Excess or Unnecessary Steps
Suppose you have a B2B company and you are offering a great
piece of content, but it is buried behind a form that is supposed to generate
new leads. If you have a new visitor, they will gladly fill your form to get to
the content, but if you have a visitor who has already filled the form for some
previous content, they might feel less enthusiastic about filling the form
again.
If you use smart content, you can easily find out if the
customer has already filled the form or not and let them bypass the form or
give them a smaller version of your form.
Using smart content, you can leverage the insights that you
collect from your visitors, increase your leads and make sure that your customers
become repeat customers.
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