Drive Engagement: Serve More Relevant Content to Personas

In our third installment of this six-part series, we will explore the benefit of personalizing content for target personas.

Most marketing organizations create marketing personas when creating a go-to-market strategy. Depending on your organization, some personas may not make it past the PowerPoint slide. Others warrant a robust content strategy to speak to these personas in marketing materials and on the web. While this sounds all well and good, mapping a persona to web pages is not as simple as it seems—especially if there is more than one persona mapped to a web page. So how do you reach multiple personas on the same page? This is where personalization can really help.

The Persona Dilemma

If you have a key action or identifier, you can create a personalized experience for multiple personas. Think about your own website. I would wager that you have multiple personas, with different interests, different challenges they are looking to solve and differing opinions about what’s important to them. So how do you speak to them all on the same page? What can you use to truly identify the user?

As a digital marketer, I am often looking for the latest tools and innovations to help me do my job better. Often times, these tools and innovations are not just applicable to me, but also the development team that supports us. If the content is too technical, I know I will quickly leave the site looking for another solution. And if the content is too marketing focused, we can expect the same behavior from a developer. But if the content is something I can relate to, then I will continue to invest my time on the site, clicking through to additional pages and interacting with different assets. So how can this website provide a unique experience that can truly attract and engage the marketer and the developer at the same time? 

Define Target to Boost Content Relevancy

One way to do this is based on the URLs a user visits, or is referred from. Some sites have specific pages dedicated to a target audience. If this is your case, you can create a user segment based on the pages users visited. Then, you could personalize pages based on a users’ previous behavior. If they visited pages that were dedicated to search engine marketing or advertising solutions, you can infer that they are marketers. If the user visited pages about development tools, or APIs, you can assume they are of a technical nature, thus a developer.

If you do not have pages written for a specific target market, you can also use the URL they were referred from. You can easily find this information in your web analytics platform. How are users getting to your site? Are there key sites driving users to your content? Maybe there are developer forums that are driving traffic, or marketing blogs. If so, you can quickly isolate this audience by creating your user segment based on their referral URL.

These are just a few examples of how to isolate your target personas. There are several other attributes you could leverage as your key identifier such as location, age, device, etc. You can even combine attributes to further define your target.

Why Personalization Drives Better Engagement

So how do you take a marketer such as myself from being a disappointed visitor to an engaged prospect? You simply define an audience segment in Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight using various criteria, such as where the visitor comes from, what they search for, their location, duration of their visit, which content is viewed and so on. Based on the definition in your user segment you can infer that I am a marketer because I came from a marketing blog while looking for new tools to do my job better. Using solutions such as Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight personalization by persona, you can now deliver more relevant messages to your users, highlighting the information that’s important to them. By delivering more relevant content, you will increase overall engagement, thus driving them to take the next step with you.

If only all things were personalized.