Content Marketing – Let’s Not Take It Personally
Posted on 23. Aug, 2009 by Robert Rose in Online Marketing, Web Content, Web/Tech
So, this last Friday I was working with my team – talking about "personalization" because a prospective client was asking about it. For as long as I can remember, I've had this gut feeling that the topic of "personalization" and Web marketing always seems to come up right around the end of the third quarter and into the fourth of every year. So, this weekend to test my gut instinct, I went out to Google Trends and I searched. I was truly amazed at what I saw. In fact, it does come up every fourth quarter. Go look for yourself – it's like clockwork. There's a huge spike in interest in "personalization" every fourth quarter for the last four years. I wish I had the same gut instinct about my fantasy football draft coming up. But that's a different blog.
Anyway, so I speak at a fair number of conferences – and at some of the Content Management related events, the subject of personalization frequently comes up. I'll often ask the audience how many of them have a site that they enjoy more because it's personalized specifically for them. A good many hands (if not all) go up. Then I ask everybody to lower their hands if the site they have in mind is an e-commerce (e.g. Amazon) a news portal (e.g. my.yahoo.com) or, of late, some kind of social networking application (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc..). Inevitably 99% of the hands go down.
See, those aren't content marketing sites – those are Web applications that use content transactionally – and by their very design need to be personalized at a user level in order to be their most functional. It's like your online banking information, or even your Twitter stream. It has a different (e.g. better) value at a personal level than at an aggregate one.
So, as digital marketers we are quickly moving in a direction where Web content is becoming a key part of our strategy. And, creating content that is more relevant to our customers, as well as measuring that relevance is also becoming a key point. But we must also understand that those of us that aren't managing a huge e-commerce catalog, or news portal are content marketing - rather than marketing content. Trying to deploy personalization features for our marketing or other content related Web sites is as my grandfather would say "just plain ol hooey" (it's a technical term).
So, with all due respect to Wired Magazine:
Personalization = Tired
Persona-ization = Wired
If you're considering a content strategy for your Web site, stop thinking about personalization, and start thinking about persona-ization.
Now, if you're not familiar with buyer personas, there are plenty of good resources. David Meerman Scotthas an entire category devoted to it on his blog, and this entire blog from Adele Revella is focused on it. And here's a great article for all you Product Marketers out there on how product management and buyer personas fit together.
Basically, the idea is simple – find out who your customers are, then think like the customer, write like the customer and segment your content and marketing strategy around the different types of customers who consume your product or service.
This is very very different from personalization. It is an active strategy with a human element. It segments your content into subsets of your larger group – "customers" and identifies the drivers for each of them. In other words, it's at an aggregate level that you decide, rather than targeting content against a set of behaviors that is decided by technology.
If this is something interesting to you – here are three things to consider as you deploy these strategies:
1. Technology diverts traffic – and this is good AND bad
On the simple side, splitting your content may be something as simple as having an explicit choice on the front page of your Web site (e.g. wholesale vs. retail buyers). Or, you may do something more sophisticated such as technologically identifying "buyer personas" from campaigns or tactics that you're running. This is where content display technology can be very helpful. For example, you could automatically segment your users by buyer personna via where you run your advertising, or by organic vs. paid search, or geography, or even time of day – then content can be dynamically optimized and displayed to those personas.
But resist the urge to use technology to "optimize" your whole site. Not only does it exponentially increase your content management needs, it potentially lessens your SEO. What personna is the Google spider – and which personna should you optimize for SEO?
Rather, optimize key landing pages, your home page and bits of strategic site real estate throughout. Think of your Web site as an online publication where you need to target specific calls to action, but where the content itself is focused on one general topic (your products and services).
2. Remember, the more personas, the more content needs to be written but ISN'T necessarily content that's seen.
So, some would say that true personalization is basically persona-ization down to an individual level. I don't agree, but more on this in a moment. But it IS true to say that if you were to create personas for every unique user on your site, you'd have something resembling personalization. And, of course, no rational marketing organization has this much content for their web site, and hence the reason that persona-ization is a much more effective strategy for content marketing.
So, the key here is a balance between the granularity of your personas, and the amount of content you have to write. I would resist the urge to have more than 4-6 personnas (and less is better). The more specific you make it, the more content you have to write – and if you don't know the traffic breakout of your personas, you could write alot of content that will never ever be seen.
This is another reason to not "optimize" your entire site in the beginning. First, interview your customers to understand your buyer personas. Adele has good advice here. But then, from a content standpoint, start with small tests to understand at a deeper level where the different buyer personas are coming from, and who they are. You may find that you're wildly skewed one way or another – and need to completely re-think your media strategy to attract one of the better buying personas.
3.Persona-ization is more than a lead acquisition strategy – it's one that permeates the entire organization
If you sucessfully target the content on your web site, and speak to your customers with more relevance, chances are your conversion rates are going to go up. But that doesn't mean your success will. That conversation has to follow through the entire sales funnel with the Sales person that will talk with that prospect, and ultimately the Account Manager that will service that customer. Consider identifying your buyer personas and giving them names and personalities. Give those personas and their personalities to everyone in the organization. They should all understand how to talk with those customers – and what is important to them.
Making it "persona" to you…
As the fourth quarter gets going, and once again the conversation at conferences, from vendors and in the blogosphere turns to "personalization" – just remember that it can be a little confusing. As I mentioned above, many times, people talk about what I'm calling "persona-ization" and personalization as steps along the same path. I disagree with this view. I think they are two distinct, albeit, related paths with different goals. If you interview your customers and understand their buying motivations well, you'll find that you will group them differently than if you allow them to group themselves based on behavior, or purely at a one-to-one level.
The idea that the "ultimate nirvana" for Web content marketing is the ability to assemble a persuasive one-to-one communication through technology looking at every piece of data (e.g. IP address, time of day, weather etc…) assumes that there is a well written, persuasive and unique piece of content to serve for every combination of the data.
In other words, just because I have a soundstage full of award-winning actors, directors and special effects experts and one scene written doesn't mean I have a hit movie. I've got to have ALL the potential content filled to make that project successful.
And, I don't know about you, but I just don't have the time for that… Technology is making it easier and easier for us to segment content at a more and more granular level – but the content still needs to be written by us. And, just because we can, does not necessarily mean we should…
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