Audience relevance is the most important element of content success, followed by engaging and compelling storytelling that triggers a specific response. In a recent survey, over 30% of B2B marketers claim that their biggest concern with content marketing is that it’s not reaching the most appropriate audience.
Dynamic content coupled with marketing automation allows you to display content within a landing page or email according to rules that you define based on a visitor or lead’s attributes. This ensures that you are delivering highly tailored messaging to exactly the right audience.
While every marketing automation platform handles dynamic content differently, the marketers surveyed state the best way to segment leads is by product category, vertical or buyer personas. Consider your options and try to not to limit your dynamic content to only these three segmentation possibilities; you can deliver personalized marketing messages based on:
- Score and place in buying cycle: By setting up lead scoring you can bucket leads depending on their score, which assumes the quality of these leads. It’s likely the higher the score, the more familiar they are with your company, while those with lower scores might need more convincing by way of receiving additional educational/helpful information. The same goes for lead status – a prospect who is considered an ‘opportunity’ should receive different content than someone who recently became a ‘marketing qualified lead (MQL)’.
- Interests and behaviors: Lead behavior is another good indicator of what type of content your leads would like to receive. If they frequently visit pages on a certain product or service, it’s safe to assume that they are most interested in more information about that product or service.
- Location: Offers can vary by location. If you have a local store or office, then you may want to change the call-to-action. Rather than contacting you through a form fill out or by phone call, you can have them schedule a meeting directly with a local sales rep or set up time to visit your location. Adam Blitzer, VP at ExactTarget, also recommends using dynamic content based on location to showcase a client testimonial from that area.
- Persona and demographics: In order to make this worth the time, you should develop in-depth buyer personas (you can start with our crash course). On a company level or individual level, you can show content based on lead characteristics. These characteristics can be as specific as name and email address or broader like job title or industry.
- Buying history and customer loyalty: If one of your marketing goals is customer retention, you should separate the marketing content current customers receive from those who are new leads. What’s one way to do this? You guessed it – dynamic content! You can take it a step further by segmenting according to how frequently they purchase or time since last purchase. Loyal customers should be allowed to skip unnecessary steps.
We’ve said it before: quality content = relevant content. When your content development is based on the segmentation possibilities listed above, you can emphasize how your business truly understands its many different audiences.
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Melissa Mathews is a marketing communications specialist at Fathom. She is a graduate of Kent State University with a Bachelor’s degree in advertising. She has a wide range of online marketing internship experience from the automotive industry to the music recording industry. She currently works with Fathom’s internal marketing team, leading social media communications and online advertising. A Marketo-certified expert, she is also instrumental in helping the company generate and nurture sales leads through marketing automation.
