Adaptive Content: Personalizing Your Customer Outreach

By Nick Rojas

The name of the game in today’s marketing is personalization. Interactions with modern audiences are more successful and meaningful when they are personalized across multiple channels. This has become increasingly important in recent years, as 94% of companies say that personalization is a vital component of their success.

All businesses and revenue models can be influenced by personalization. One important thing that changes with personalization is content. We live in a multi-screen world where 90% of the media interactions today are screen-based. Content needs to be multi-channel and adaptive to meet these modern needs.

Why does content need to be adaptive? Context and personalization are crucial to success in a multi-screen, multi-channel world. Content needs to changed based on where the user is, who they are, and what they are doing. Customer expectations for businesses evolve as new technologies become more commonplace and available to the average consumer. They rely heavily on mobile devices to aid in their decision-making process – in fact, 48% of shoppers want to be able to use their phones while shopping. Adaptive content allows brands to meet customer needs as they evolve, and many of these needs relate to the growing popularity and adoption of mobile devices and technology.

By evolving along with the customer, brands can deliver stronger relationships with the audience and customize experiences based on the customer’s previous interactions with the brand. For example, a website would be considered adaptive if it delivers different a different experience or information to a first-time visitor than it does to someone who has visited the website before. The needs of every visitor are different, meaning that it is vital to deliver customized information in order to deliver the best experience. Smart marketers are already deploying this across their platforms and properties, but not all marketing teams take advantage of adaptive content at this time.

For greater effectiveness marketers can break down adaptive content even further and incorporate buyer personas in the pieces of content they create. Content should sway people to make a decision or do something. Content that relates to a business’s buyer personas is more effective because it addresses the variations in types of content as well as the right mix for each piece of content. The right content will connect with a reader by being relevant to them and where they are in the buyer’s journey. By understand the buyer persona, marketers will also better understand the best distribution channel to use to get the content in front of the right audiences. It also shortens the research stage, as the persona research will have already been completed.

Having knowledge of the buyer personas lets marketers create content with empathy in mind. By empathizing with the consumer, a marketer can create content that solves the customer’s problem as well as creates loyalty and builds a stronger brand/customer relationship. When a marketing team knows all about the consumer and has a rapport with them, they can create personalized, adaptive content right from the outset. This saves time and resources at later dates, as content will not need to be updated or discarded as often.

Businesses that want to build strong content marketing strategies and campaigns need to consider how consumer behaviors change and evolve along with technology, and update strategies based on this data. One branch of an adaptive content strategy can feed another if the content is dynamic and meets customer needs. Adaptive content allows marketers to account for interaction between consumer devices and reach customers on any platform. Reaching the right customer with the right personalized content will be the key to success in the future.

About the author: Nick Rojas is a business consultant and writer who lives in Los Angeles and Chicago. He has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years. You can follow him on Twitter @NickARojas.