Powerful and personalised content

The concept of targeted marketing is nothing new, but as digital tools become more sophisticated, highly personalised online marketing is fast becoming a necessity to stay competitive. Consumers are used to receiving tailored, data-driven offers based on their interests from big brands – whether it’s Netflix’ Because you watched… or Amazon’s Recommended for you. But it’s important for all businesses of all sizes to take note and make the most of the digital tools available. Marketing automation enables us to personalise our approach to marketing based on needs and preferences, but there are still far too many SMEs who operate a shotgun marketing method.

We recently announced that we’ve become a SharpSpring partner to provide marketing automation functionality. To maximise the benefits of this, we recommend that all clients create multiple customer personas for their websites and a personalised outreach so that they can talk to them directly. This makes marketing efforts more cost effective. It means we can measure ROI for specific audiences by better understanding the types of customers that respond well to marketing communications, and those that don’t.

How to create personalised content using personas

A persona is a way of defining a specific segment of your customer audience by creating a fictional representation. We look at how people describe themselves, their biography, fears and aspirations, pain points and frustrations, how the product helps them, buyer motivation as well as age range, purchasing motivation and influences.

Personas for customers and leads can be created in SharpSpring and this enables content to be tailored based on triggers in the information each person provides on a landing page. This is particularly valuable if you have multiple types of buyers within your target audience. There are no limits to how many can be created, but we typically develop five different personas.

Creating personas enables higher conversions by making personalised messaging dynamic and simple. The information can be used to create tailored landing pages based on attributes, interests and actions.

A travel company can tailor landing pages based on the type of holiday people enjoy and their interests. Sarah might like big cities and sightseeing, while Jacob enjoys Pacific Islands and surfing. Dynamic content can then be created to help Sarah or Jacob plan their next holiday.

Similarly, in a B2B environment, the content provided for a Director will be different from content for an Operations Manager. If someone has visited your site and you’ve segmented them based on a factor such as industry, buying stage, job position or region via a form, then a dynamic call to action, email or landing page content can be created specifically for that person.

Using SharpSpring you can swap out phrases, images, videos and calls to action for each customer. It’s a powerful marketing tool and one that’s not available in services like MailChimp, where you can only personalise by name and subject line.

Why dynamic content works

It works because it provides an incentive for people to engage with your business; the ultimate aim of online marketing.

Often dynamic content solutions are part of a CRM system, so rely on building a reliable customer database. It also helps to enhance site search and is becoming a more prominent part of site navigation. Dynamic calls-to-action also streamline the journey from first interaction to conversion, depending on any past or current interactions and buyer persona.

Being able to adapt content dynamically based on user signals makes the experience more relevant and intuitive: if customers know your company provides useful information and valuable content for them, you are more likely to cut-through the noise and offer a logical next step in the customer lifecycle or discovery process.

If you would like to create powerful, personalised personas for your business in Surrey or have any questions about the SharpSpring marketing automation tool, please get in touch on …