April 20, 2018

How brands are using personalised content for improved conversions

personalised content - a man looking at his phone, smiling

In my last blog post titled ‘Great Examples of Engaging Content’ I gave the example of Coke using personalised content, and signed off with the statement: This is the age of mass personalisation. In this post, I want to elaborate on personalisation and customisation of content.

A 2016 Demand Metric study found that 80 percent of marketers say personalised content is more effective than “unpersonalised” content.

At the outset, we must mention that marketers need to collect personal details about consumers to drive personalised content. This can be done with or without your consent. You can voluntarily provide this information in exchange for free services or whitepapers. But act with caution. Ask yourself if it’s really worth parting with personal details in exchange for a freebie.

Aggressive marketers collect consumer profiles from social networks. They also track consumer behaviour online – the sites visited, the products they look at, how long do they stay on the site. This is called behaviour targeting. They then use analytics tools to process all this data and create consumer profiles. Armed with these profiles, they send consumers content (and offers) that are very specific to their needs.

Marketers have long used trackers and cookies to collect this information when you visit websites. But data collection methodologies have become more sophisticated in recent years. We now hear about techniques such as attribution, automated optimisation, and tagging.

Examples of personalised content


There is a good side to personalisation too. Wouldn’t you like to get information and updates that are really relevant to your life and career? Customised information helps organisations and individuals save time and money. Imagine having a customised newspaper with only the topics that interest you (filtering out the negative news). For marketers, wouldn’t it be great to show a different piece of content and a different call to action for each user – customised to a user profile?

Here are some examples of how marketers and consumers use personalised content.

Remarketing

Log in to an e-commerce site and browse around for products. Then visit another website. You will see ads on that website for the products you were reviewing on the e-commerce site. These are targeted ads and the concept is called Remarketing or Retargeting. It is personalised content being served across the websites in the display network. This also happens when you use e-commerce apps and other apps on your phone.

Amazon Recommendations

Browse around the Amazon website, click on products and add some to your cart. The next time you log in, scroll down the page to the Recommendations section. You will see similar products listed. Amazon also shows what other customers bought when searching for similar products. Amazon has been using its recommendation engine since 2013.

Today we also see recommendation engines used for music and movie streaming services: Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify (tailored playlists).

Customised news feed

News aggregator websites such as Google News and apps such as News360 let you specify the topics you would like to track. These aggregators then scour various news sites and pull in the news feeds that match the topics you specified. Earlier, you had to use an RSS reader like NewsGator to achieve this.

Automated content curation

Websites like Paper.Li and Scoop. It takes the news aggregation concept a step further. Paper.Li also aggregates content from social networks and e-mail newsletters. Marketers can use these tools to push highly customised content to consumers.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

This is B2B marketing that’s specific to accounts. Businesses send their retainer accounts market intelligence and other content that’s very relevant to their business. This is a way of driving value for clients. PR agencies do ABM by sending their accounts press clippings that feature news stories about them, their competition or their industry. Based on these reports and news clippings, the accounts can then devise their media and advertising strategies.

The takeaways

Studies show that personalised content can increase conversion rates and e-commerce sales. Showing consumers the content they want to see is certain to get their attention and build brand trust.

We see the analytics getting sharper and smarter as marketers adopt AI-based techniques for behavioural targeting and remarketing. It is also a scary thought. Imagine a marketer sending you offers by email based on the content you read online or the videos you view on YouTube. Potentially, they could track everything you do on your phone or PC.

This is where governments need to step in and firm up laws to protect privacy and consumer data.

But on the flip side, isn’t personalised content a wonderful thing? Especially for content like movies, music, news and books that we enjoy.