Make True Connections with Customers through Relevant Content

In a new Guest Spotlight, Sitecore discusses why engaging customers requires businesses to scale up their content efforts, and effectively focus it on identified areas.

Impactful customer experiences depend on personalization. And as customer focus has shifted away from a purely price-motivated perspective, the importance of content for driving personalization has never been greater.

The vast majority of customers now insist on being treated like an individual, not a number, in order to do business. And in a digital world, where tailored content equals personalization, it means businesses must tackle the challenge of producing significant amounts of quality, data-driven content that’s tailored for specific audiences at each stage in their buying journey.

That requires the right tools and the right approach in order to maximize success, while not overwhelming your marketing team. And it’s why the value of a content hub cannot be overstated.

By using a centralized hub, businesses can benefit from a 47% increase in asset creation speed, and 23% faster time to market, while also lowering costs and freeing up time for other tasks.

Without one, trying to cater to so many different customer types and touchpoints becomes significantly harder. Content creation, management, and storage can often end up being siloed, making it increasingly difficult for businesses to deliver consistent messaging across channels.

Harnessing the power of a content hub helps avoid these issues. With the right tools in place, you can then move ahead with implementing an effective personalization strategy.

In order to provide the right personalized content for customers, businesses first need to understand who their customers are and what they want. While traditional methods, such as surveys, feedback forms, and focus groups can be used, it’s now also possible to build a strong customer profile through data.

Every interaction, no matter how small, gives a business precious information that offers details about who the customer is and their intent at particular moments in their buying journey.

Over time, you can start to understand what is driving them, what products they prefer, and help to build lifetime value through a clearer picture of what drives their loyalty.

Creating a superior customer experience means delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time. Leveraging your data-driven insights, you’ll be able to target audiences better because you’ll have a true understanding of their wants and needs.

And these personalization efforts are likely to drive revenue higher, with research showing that 80% of people indicate they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences, while 90% say they find personalization appealing.

With a centralized content hub and a clear understanding of your audience, the next step is to define the goals for your content. Is it to drive brand awareness, to move customers along their buying journey, or to inform prospects of a new discount to drive them toward a purchase?

Being careful to tag your content accurately when loading finished assets into the content hub allows you to effectively “map the content gaps” and take steps to fill them, whether it’s for a particular persona, product, journey stage, or topic of strategic importance for your business.

The next step is analysis. By analyzing how your content is performing, you can see what content is seeing success, what isn’t, and take steps to improve the types of content you produce in the future.

The digital experience has never been more important for customers than it is today. Approximately 48% of customers already admit to leaving a website and making a purchase elsewhere, simply because the experience was poorly curated.

By taking steps to understanding who your customers are, and why they make the decisions they do, you’ll be able to better cater to their needs, and deliver a better overall experience that’ll keep them coming back.