What is Personalized Content? Definition, Technology and Best Practices

A trick to achieving more is building a personalized encounter for your users. This in turn yields more revenue, more confidence, and more lifetime value. You can appeal to your users more with your online marketing strategies if you understand them well. You are well on the path to seeing greater Returns as you do. Personalization of content isn't only a clever marketing strategy; it's becoming the trend steadily. Yeah, the effective implementation of personalization always has difficulties, but it is very possible, and it would be much better to figure out what form of personalization (and in what media and channels) our customers respond to as marketing analytics technologies advance.

What is Content Personalization

Content Marketing Institute defined content personalization as a technique that depends on visitor data to provide meaningful content, based on the desires, and motives of the user. It's a solution to the user experience that integrates the users more easily with the details they need, increasing the chance of lead conversions.

Types of Personalization

There exist 4 types of personalization that is applicable for the best user experience.

1. Segmentation
It is the most common and arguably the simplest method of personalization of material. You can prioritize by market, agency, work description, profit, location, behavior, and more. Develop a foundation piece of content in which 80 percent of the content is the same to effectively distribute your efforts, but then make personalized variants for each of your different parts.
Although segmentation lets you raise the importance of your emails and site experience and maximize overall engagement, the drawback is that this degree of personalization is restricted to making sure segment of users are drawn to your content.
Segmentation, also, is labor-intensive. There is a limit on the number of segments you can establish, which further reduces your ability to maximize. And because the distribution of content is dependent on time for marketing strategies, segmentation often restricts the ability to produce content in real-time, restricting its usefulness to users.

2. Persona-Based Personalization
To create content and educate the course of their editorial policy, many organizations will depend on personas or images of their target buyer or client. A persona-based personalization process requires segmenting information by persona, or each individual's behaviors.
Personas may be subjective or more data-dependent and focused on insights such as behavior on the page, history of sales, or profiles. You will customize each character, or section, to further develop your personalization activities as you accumulate more data sets. Yet, you need a way to capture and interpret customers' real-time data to scale the output and efficiency of data-driven personas.

3. Personalization Based on the Customer Journey
Generally, to turn broad-based content into personalized content that is specific to each phase in the process, customer progress maps are required. Your mapping should show your target users, and at which point you focus on them.
Another personalization strategy is to match the content with and step in the chart of the consumer experience. Through this, you will provide content specifically relevant to their point in the process in a meaningful context, ideally assisting them to advance to the next level. That being said, you require user data to identify each step-specific segment regarding consumer preferences and observations, similarly to the segmentation and persona-based and strategies.

4. Individual-specific Personalization (or Individualization)
Although all personalization methods are the 3 strategies above, they are all focused on providing content to large communication segments. The truth is that, even though they are grouped into a customer-specific category, users no longer tolerate one-size-fits-some content encounters.
Personalizing a category of one, also known as individualization, is the best way to fully customize the user experience in a manner that complies with unique customer preferences. Content must unambiguously be tailored to the particular needs of each customer by an individualization approach for real personalization to happen.
Advertising agencies should offer content experiences in one segment to achieve individualization, tailored in real-time, based on the behavior and desires integrally related to the personality of that particular user. You will immediately evaluate all existing contents, alongside real-time and historical indicators, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning software to bring the most optimized set of brand content to each user.

Technology Levels for Personalization

The scale of personalization depends on the capacity of a company to plan and execute the 4 Ds, which are:
-Data
-Decision
-Design
-Distribution
The trick to unlocking the maximum intensity of personalization is to approach the technologies in each D.

1. Data
Data must be consolidated and made accessible so that operation in one channel will help engagement in the other in real-time or near-real-time instantly. 3 basic data processing systems are required for this to take place:
-Customer-data platform (CDP)
Customer data is spread in most industries through independent, isolated networks usually operated by multiple stakeholders. A CDP addresses this issue by centrally linking the most important information to establish an addressable customer persona that can be used reliably across networks in a scalable, coherent model. A contemporary CDP can have a user-interactive interface, and as such the data can be accessed by non-technical marketing companies, including an analytics workspace where data analysts can install Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning models to "sense" the data, generating 1-to-1 indications and micro-segments that may be useful in for tracking and personalization.
Identity-resolution platform (IDP). The CDP depends on first-party information, but most times, trying to solve a user's identity by making use of first-party data only will be extremely difficult. Systems for identity resolution raise the match level of identified clients with otherwise unknown electronic IDs, broadening the range of configurable users and prospects. Some of the methods used encompass onboarding data, corresponding browser cookies, and distinctive mobile application IDs with email addresses, as well as aligning multiple user IDs managed by the same personal devices.
-Data-management platform (DMP)
A DMP collects signalized CDP data and makes it accessible on wireless platforms for activation. To create extra micro-segments and abundant "look-alike" categories, a DMP also allows third-party information accessible. These devices have existed for a while, but Information Technology has historically done much better in data processing in most businesses.

2. Decisioning
The logic for decision-making exists in person, channel-based, black-box structures, or it does not exist at all, resulting in clients experiencing a disjointed experience. To rate different inclinations for each user, it is crucial to building an optimized decision-making system that utilizes machine learning and Artificial Intelligence models.
Marketing experts develop several unified predictive models in the CDP that produce inclination and elevate ratings for consumers at the individual level to have a cohesive experience. These models help businesses to anticipate the next best marketing activity to bring to the consumer based on a full range of individual and micro-segment actions.

3. Design
The amount of content and speed of creativity expected by personalization cannot be matched by marketing companies. A solution is to divide contents into little bits for optimum consistency that can be seamlessly modified.
The number of alternative methods of handling consumers keeps increasing with personalization on a scale. This provides a need for a lot of materials to design and build.
A business must step away from conventional production methods that produce more tailor-made material, to rather run a content factory. Content-art, images, copies, recordings, emails, banners, web and software components, and even frameworks for addressable non-electronic channels, must be divided into scalable components to be distributed in various configurations.

4. Distribution
There may not be real-time communications between networks. To manage interactions and communicate with customers' behavior, it is necessary to build networks.
Integrating data, decision-making, and architectural features to marketing technology frameworks (such as A / B research, content management, email portals) that offer experiences to customers, would be the last mile in providing personalization at scale. With all these factors working together, firms will respond to opportunities, rather than depending entirely on a set of preset campaigns to engage clients and prospects.

8 Best Practices for Personalization In 2020

This is a chance for market share to rise. The more your service offers, the more user engagement you will invest in. Investing in personalization is the easiest and most productive campaign investment. You will increase the service sales and user lifetime satisfaction with personalization. Hence, you can dramatically boost the usability of your platform for every user through personalization.To help you reach ahead of the contest, below are few personalization practices and developments in 2020:

1. Balancing personalization and confidentiality of data
While more and more clients can swap data for ease and more differentiated experiences, the equilibrium between personalization and confidentiality would continue to be sought by organizations. Making the best of personalization not only requires serving persuasive and appropriate content. Using these mutual desires of the users, the key is to build better user interactions while also compliant with data protection laws, protecting customer data across mere enforcement, and guaranteeing that procedures are more straightforward.

2. Marketing teams will develop to continue innovating customer experiences through all points of contact.
Companies expect CMO's (Chief Marketing Officers) to seize advantage of emerging technology to fuel success while consumer service overwhelms price and commodity as the main brand-differentiating factor. For this, m marketing teams will keep evolving in providing world-class consumer services.
The e-commerce industry tends to be driven by personalization, so marketing functions would be the secret to developing creative user interactions to pave the way for driving and sales streams. Marketing companies and data analysts will work together to form a collaborative technology-empowered team to innovate consumer experiences to orchestrate interaction through all touchpoints to accomplish this objective.

3. Meaningless digital advertisement is going to decrease
There is now a decline in digital advertising that is meaningless, disturbing, and invasive. Via a variety of channels, users get more involved with brands such that they choose advertisements personalized to their tastes and adapted to their expectations and recent habits.
Particularly for first-time website users, the pressure is more intense for marketers to fully reinvent consumer interactions. It is important to regularly provide appropriate and personal communications that cater to customer demands throughout the entire journey. Through displaying commercials for extremely specific items instead of publishing bland social commercials, businesses are re-engaging their future users for insightful product reviews. Personalization based on context provides faster advantages.

4. Probabilistic personalization will continue to thrive and AI is not just a myth anymore.
Artificial intelligence is not just buzzwords and patterns anymore. There would be less one-dimensional initiatives as the analytical models are embedded in the background to drive customized customer experience and to change a company entirely by providing a beneficial effect on sales. As personalization activities are becoming more highly detailed, marketers can put a much greater focus on providing more relevant information.
Companies will continue investing in predictive analytics in 2020 and even beyond, and harness a powerful tool to personalize fuel. It is now being used by several brands, with Netflix and Spotify taking the lead. Predictive analytic plays an important role in improving ad strategies and helping marketers evaluate customer reactions, leveraging prior user experience, and algorithms relevant to browsing trends. It may be a daunting undertaking that could never see daylight to create and release predictive methods, using several years of historical evidence. The trick is to start little and periodically release them.

5. Loyalty is now reaching a significance
Personalization can be a future-proof path for marketers to recognize and attract consumers, but digitizing it and the technological advancements of today drive marketers to move even further. Personalization is best to use cases that reflect the distribution of customer interaction not only at the peak of the buying funnel but during the customer experience. Thus, even the new website visitors can find more important interactions.
New technologies are now more developed to encourage brands to respond to their users' interests, criticisms, and satisfy them appropriately. Marketing professionals and e-commerce administrators should also tailor and offer a personalized digital engagement to meet their users in a more meaningful and stimulating way, with their requirements and desires increasing exponentially each time.

6. Drive for hyper-personalized encounters for users
Users have more flexibility to switch between products, with the emergence of web advertising and access to unrestricted knowledge. Now, they influence to let advertisers know what they want. They are no longer waiting for marketers to convince them that their services are excellent, so, they are investigating and discovering on their own.
That being said, better customer service will not only point out quality and comfort but will also require intense personalization. Technology improvements have made it possible to understand more about their users and find it easy to allow hyper-personalization to build product reviews and everything involved, from content to advertisements.
The aim is to obtain a personalized message by consolidating the data into comprehensive and precise segmentation, such as system sort, time, geographical location, among others. This ensures that content from brand incentives and tweets to product reviews can be provided for particular user types depending on a particular context, allowing marketers the ability to influence user behavior online at a whole new stage.

7. Consolidation of technologies into a common network
Due to the vast volume of data available on just one user, the problem of personalization becomes more complicated. To fix this, a lot of the acquired data need to be transferred, data processed, monitored, and data interpreted. Marketing teams will now aim to identify technologies that can combine a single and robust framework with targeting criteria.A far more integrated approach and optimized capabilities would be more advantageous to marketers for a long time, with the growing number of marketing infrastructure developments over the recent years, alongside modern integrations through mar-tech platforms. The media industry A-leader, for example, has more than a dozen platforms with diverse technological solutions, but has streamlined them and developed a technical solution that is sufficiently scalable to satisfy the ever-changing needs and expectations of its audience.

8. Building trust to enhance transparency and accelerate growth
Loyalty is going to be a great asset. So, it is a losing struggle to see personalization as a 'fast fix' for brands to overcome conversion issues and boost sales. Companies need to be exceedingly cautious about how they are using personalization, as questions about data use, and public cynicism over how brands work continues to rise. A company can prove that it is reliable by doing what makes customers feel respected as individuals.

A free ticket to building lengthy client partnerships is the distribution of extremely important communications, which eventually drives engagement and revenue. But never at the expense of misappropriating data, which may not only cause a company a catastrophe but also risk offending and losing clients.