Partner Article

The future of on-site content: personalisation

Adam Blenkinsop, head of digital at North East-based integrated brand communications consultancy, r//evolution, discusses the importance of on-site content and personalisation.

In marketing we talk about marketing messages being clear, timely and relevant to our customers. On-site content is no different. We know so much about the people browsing our websites now that it just makes sense. If you can tailor your content to each individual visitor to your site, you can be sure you’re giving them exactly what they need throughout their journey. For a customer, that’s the difference between a good site and a great site.

We’re all familiar with the importance and the benefits of a well thought out content marketing strategy to drive visitors to a website. But what about once these visitors arrive? On-site content is just as important but often neglected. We all know about including keywords in our content to make a website ‘search engine friendly’ but it’s more important that a website is ‘customer friendly’ to drive conversions.

Regardless of industry sector, a successful business is all about relationships with your customers. What’s most important to remember is that each and every one of your customers is an individual, and it’s time to start treating them like one.

Personalised content holds the key to online success for brands big and small over the coming months and years. We’ve seen a big shift in the way that brands engage with their customers over the last few years through increased emphasis on social media marketing. Brands have been forced to listen to customers and engage and interact with them through two-way communications. Now, we are starting to see similar opportunities with our on-site content.

The development of sophisticated marketing techniques and analytical tools has given us access to so many statistics and detailed knowledge about each of our web visitors. It’s time that digital marketers started to use this information to provide a truly personalised and individual visitor experience. A successful website is all about engagement and ultimately we want our customers to connect with our brands to form that all important relationship. Your customer, whoever they are, is much more likely to connect with your brand and feel valued if you treat them as an individual.

Content personalisation isn’t a new concept. However, making things truly individual is, relatively speaking, still in its infancy but moving quickly. “Over the last five or six years we have seen brands placing a huge focus on SEO. Gradually, we are seeing a shift towards focusing on conversion rate optimisation and content plays a huge part of this. Getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time will always help drive conversion.

The big secret about personalised content is that it isn’t as complicated as you might expect. It relies on a couple of clever bits of technology, you just need to pull it all together. With the right analytics, a good quality integrated CRM and a few changes to your CMS to pull it all together - you’re ready to go. Once you’ve got the right tools it’s up to you to create the quality content that your customers are looking for.

For more information about r//evolution marketing, visit: www.r-evolution.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Adam Blenkinsop .