How to Personalize Content for Your Lead Generation and Nurturing Strategy

Gone are the days when creating generic content was enough to generate and nurture leads. 

As a McKinsey & Company report shows, 72% of modern consumers now expect content that’s tailored to their unique interests. You need content personalization to attract potential customers and keep them until they become willing paying customers.

This article explains what personalization entails. Keep reading to learn the types of personalization available and how it’s done. 

What Is Content Personalization?

Content personalization is the process of using insights gained from customer data to create and serve content that meets customer needs. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to content marketing, it aims to give current and potential customers personalized customer experiences. 

The data used to guide your brand’s content marketing efforts falls into three categories:

• Demographic Data - Customer traits like age, location, and gender are examples of the demographic data you can collect on potential leads. 
• Socio-Economic Data - Your leads will typically have educational backgrounds or employment statuses that place them in specific socio-economic classes. This data will prove useful when segmenting them based on factors like their income and tastes.
• Behavioral Data - The interactions between customers and your brand can be valuable data, too. So, consider them when going about your data collection and analysis for personalization. Examples of customer interactions you can track include a customer's purchase history and the time a lead spends on your website.

Well-executed content personalization efforts can boost lead generation and nurturing strategies. They can help your brand earn the trust of prospective customers, convert them into loyal ones, and make sales. 

Whether your potential customers are e-commerce customers or B2B buyers looking for specialized services, personalization of content yields results.

Why Personalize Content?

Content personalization offers several benefits. Here are a few reasons to offer your leads and customers these personalized experiences:

• Enhances Customer Experience: Showing leads and customers relevant content that addresses their needs enhances their experience. You can create the impression that your business not only understands its target audience but also values their well-being, ultimately paving the way for a lucrative and valuable long-term relationship.
• Boosts Engagement: When you offer a personalized experience to your customers and leads, it can boost their engagement with your brand. That's because people naturally respond well to content that's relevant to their needs. 

For example, a piece of content that addresses a customer pain point will likely resonate with customers on a deeper level than generic irrelevant content. That feeling of resonance can translate to higher engagement with future offerings.

• Improves Customer Loyalty: Consistently delivering relevant experiences to leads can help to earn their trust. Customers who trust a brand tend to stay loyal to it. So when you roll out content that's built on sound personalization strategies, you can improve customer loyalty to your brand.
• Better Conversion Rates: Content personalization can eventually translate to better conversion rates. When the digital content you offer resonates, you have an easier time influencing profitable customer behavior. Whether that involves tailoring product recommendations or offering sound advice to prospects at the awareness stage of their customer journeys, your personalization efforts could be the catalyst for your business to grow.

Overall, you can use content personalization to boost your customer acquisition, convert prospects to loyal customers, and forge profitable relationships with customers.

Types of Content Personalization

There are several ways to personalize content. Use the following content personalization examples as inspiration when planning your content personalization strategy:

• Email: Email marketing is a common way to deliver personalized content. It involves building email lists, organizing customers into audience segments, and sending them email marketing communications based on their shared characteristics.

You can automate personalized emails so that they trigger in response to user behavior. For example, when a prospect joins your mailing list, their act of signing up can trigger a welcome email that helps you kickstart the lead nurturing process. See Discord’s email for reference and note how it refers to the recipient by name:

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Later, you can send these customers a survey to collect more information about them and tailor your email marketing efforts to their preferences. 

When sending emails, you want to make sure you personalize your email signature as well. How? Create an e-business card as your email signature to share contact details and links that are specifically relevant to your email recipient. For instance, if they received an email from you because they left a product in their cart but never bought it, you can include your customer support phone number and links to relevant product testimonials and your return policy. Notice that all these resources aim to specifically address any apprehensions the email recipient might have when making a purchase. If you give them easy access to them through your virtual business card, you increase your chances of generating that sale.   

• Landing Page: Landing pages can be excellent places to create personalized user experiences. If you’re driving traffic through paid ads, personalizing the landing page can be as simple as tailoring its content to the sales hook that brought in the leads. Doing so also creates an online experience that offers your leads continuity.

• Call-to-Action (CTA): Another effective strategy for personalizing digital experiences is to tailor your calls to action to specific customers. This strategy lets you show the leads who are likeliest to follow through on your prompts dynamic content based on their behavior.

An example of this marketing strategy in action is a call to action aimed at leads who’ve yet to purchase from you. The call-to-action can offer them an irresistible discount that encourages them to buy their first product. 

• Retargeting Ads: This content personalization type involves re-engaging leads who didn’t complete a shopping experience with your brand. Like cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads aim to remind leads of the interest they previously expressed in a brand’s products or services.For instance, a user who has browsed laptops on a website may see ads for the laptop brand elsewhere on the web.

Retargeting can also happen onsite via personalized product recommendations and recommendations based on a shopper’s browsing history. The image below is a perfect example:

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E-commerce company Jumia dedicates the section highlighted with a red border to items shoppers have “recently viewed.” It serves as a great reminder for returning visitors to pick up the items.

As the above list shows, there’s no shortage of ways to personalize content. The methods you use will depend on the nature of business and industry.

How to Personalize Content?

Personalizing content boils down to a three-step process. Here's how to do it:

1. Analyze and Segment Your Audience

The first steps of the content personalization process are data gathering and audience segmentation. You must gather data on individual customers (whether current or prospective) to learn who they are and how to best serve their needs. 

With this knowledge in hand, it'll be easier to create buyer personas for your personalized content strategy and segment audiences by their shared characteristics. 

So, how do you get this data? 

With your current customers, it's as simple as asking them for it. If you run an email newsletter, you can send a survey as one of your newsletter entries and collect data from the responses. Your survey questions could range from general inquiries about the customer to their level of satisfaction with your content or product and service offerings.

As for leads, you can gather data based on how they interact with your brand. For example, Google Analytics 4 (pictured below) can provide a ton of data about your website's visitors:

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You can find out where they're based, how they found your brand, the pages on your site they find most engaging, and so on. Also, consider embedding forms on your website to capture data from leads. This method can give you a ton of demographic and personal data, like the visitor's name, age, and gender. A classic example is a form leads can use to register an account.

Once you’ve gathered the data, analyze it to identify audience segments you can create content for. Use demographics like age and location to categorize your prospects and customers and develop personas for them. 

2. Create Content Personalized to Each Segment

Having collected data and used it to segment your audience, your next step is to create the personalized content. 

You can either do it from scratch or kickstart the process with the help of AI templates. Whichever way you go, make sure to use the buyer personas you’ve developed for each audience segment as guides. 

Has this persona/audience segment never bought from you despite having previous interactions with your brand? Consider creating personalized calls to action that convince them to take the plunge.

Does this persona belong to an age group that isn’t technologically savvy enough for online purchases? Send them content encouraging them to pay you a visit in-store.

Aim to make content that appeals to your segments and targets them at their preferred channels (email, social media, website). Additionally, keep the customer journey in mind during your content creation process. The way one piece of content addresses a repeat customer will differ greatly from how another speaks to a potential lead. 

Finally, leverage artificial intelligence-powered solutions like Nostra AI to ensure that the visitors your content pulls in can easily convert. The best content in the world may not be enough to make visitors stick around if your website or landing page loads slowly.

3. Evaluate and Make Improvements

Your final step is to monitor and evaluate content performance to make improvements. 

This step is essential because it provides insights into how your leads and customers are receiving your personalized content. You can learn whether your content and promotional messages resonate or fall flat and make the necessary adjustments.

Once you start seeing positive results, return to step one and repeat all steps. Content personalization is a never-ending cycle of learning what your audience wants and giving it to them.

Conclusion

Personalizing content for a lead generation and nurturing strategy is straightforward when you know how. Whether you're personalizing emails, landing pages, or ads, you must know the people you're creating content for. 

That entails collecting data on them, analyzing it, and organizing your findings into segments. Once you have this information, you can create content that generates, nurtures and converts leads. You can ultimately grow your business!