According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing “is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Incidentally, content marketing has been with us all along; it was there before the internet; it is about how you tell your customers your story; what the internet has done is to make the art of this storytelling relatively easier.
The fact that marketing has become consumer-centric only goes along to tell the story with a focus on whom the customer is. To tell your customers stories about your product in such a way they relate to your brand, you must know your customers.
You need content marketing to help you in persuading your customers and potential customers into taking action. Whatever content you create must entice all who see it, with information that’s relevant, valuable, and engaging.
If you are the content marketer for your organization, you must determine how to ensure that you also use the necessary metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies you employ in creating enticing content. You can enhance how you effectively identify and engage your target audience with analytics and content optimization, as consumers all over the world now crave personalized/tailored experiences more than ever before.
Why do you need content optimization?
The duty of the content marketer of any organization is not just to go about creating content; you need content optimization to ensure that your content is well written so that it can reach your largest possible target audience. Content optimization enables you to create content that includes features such as associated keywords, title and meta tags, and the necessary links.
These are the features that will enable your content to be ranked highly by search engines, however, the essence of your content must not be for ranking, it must be informative and targeted to individuals. Customers want you to recognize them as persons and not as numbers; your content must be personalized to each customer as an individual.
With content optimization, you can assess whatever content you have on your website and discover if you have missed out on anything that you must do better to ensure improved quality and quantity. You will have a better grasp of what you need to remove, improve, or retain.
The importance of hyper-personalization in content marketing
Personalization is no longer a novelty; businesses have seen the need for personalizing content they send to their customers, but what mostly obtains is sending messages to customers based on their demographics and geographic locations. While this is commendable as a way of telling your customers that you know them, it’s still not enough.
In a recent expert panel held by CXBuzz on Hyper-Personalization Effects on CX, Kevin Leonor, Customer Success Manager at Zoom pointed out how hyper-personalization celebrates the customer’s uniqueness, focuses on exclusivity, and evokes instant ownership. What this boils down to is that by placing your customers in hyper-segmented groups, you make them have a sense of belongingness that makes them similar and yet, different from other customers.
You end up creating a comfortable balance. But, how do you do this to ensure an improved customer experience (CX)?
By deploying real-time customer data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics, you can tell your customers the stories they want to hear individually about your products or services with content that is relevant and informative. They are no longer interested in stories for the fun of it.
Customers are no longer interested in wasting their time to read content that is not hyper-relevant to them; they want you to have in-depth knowledge about their behaviors; they want you to know what their pain points are individually and relate with them along those lines and in real-time. This is what hyper-personalization has come to redress, different from ordinary personalization.
One problem you may have to face is the reluctance customers have about releasing their data; this is due to privacy and security issues a lot of customers have had when their sensitive information falls into the wrong hand, and the fact that some organizations actually sell customers’ information to the highest bidder. The way to get over this reluctance from customers is to build a strong bond of trust.
Your customers want to experience the best from you; you need them for your brand loyalty efforts. Content marketing and hyper-personalization are important for the improved customer experience that will ultimately enhance customer retention and going by the revelation from Bain $ Company that a 5% increase in retention drives at least a 25% increase in profit, every effort must go towards enhancing customer experience.
Since customer experience is essential to ensuring repeat customers, here are some reasons why you need a mix of content marketing and hyper-personalization to enhance it:
- Consistent revenue – When your customers have a strong loyalty bond with your brand, they are reluctant to be swayed by the competition; this ultimately means more revenue for your organization because they will want to do repeat purchases.
- Bond of trust – It’s easier to sell to repeat customers because of the existing relationship you have built; the bond of trust you have established with them makes it easier for them to believe in your ability to deliver.
- Word-of-mouth marketing – The quality content you send to your customers coupled with hyper-personalization can push them into recommending your products or services to family members, friends, and their colleagues. They may even go the extra mile of leaving positive reviews about your product on social media and product review sites.
- Greater lifetime value – You have a great chance of your repeating customers adding more value to your brand over their lifetime, they will be better disposed to try out any new offering you introduce into the market as compared to new customers. The relationship you have established with them serves as an enhancement.
