How do you measure the effectiveness of content personalization? While marketing, in one form or another, has been around for as long as people have made and sold things, the digital realm is still in its infancy. Within that relatively short timeline, content marketing is still regarded as new, and content personalization is out towards the cutting edge.
It is no surprise, therefore, that a vast majority of marketers admit to struggling with content personalization (83% according to a survey of 500 organisations).
To find out more about how to use personalization, follow this link to see five ways to use it to boost conversions from prospective customers.
In this post, we will outline how to overcome the challenge of measuring personalization and to analyze and report on your success. Follow this guidance if you are planning to build a business case for content personalization or looking to secure additional investment to put such a marketing plan into action.
Choose Your Key Performance Indicators
Selecting your personalized content success KPIs can vary from industry to industry. However, there are a few common areas on which any firm can focus. If it’s carried out effectively, personalized content can deliver the following benefits:
- Improve your sales performance
- Grow repeat purchases
- Strengthen brand engagement
- Grow converting traffic
- Extend product/services reach
- Improve lead generation
- Increase content ROI
- Save time and resources
- Improve brand loyalty
When content is automatically analyzed and sorted into topics, it becomes much easier to put together a bespoke message and distribute it to individuals (rather than all customers or very large segments). “The hardest part of the business is how you create content at scale while making it relevant,” confirms Brian Harrington, CMO at Zipcar.
Testing Personalized Content
Are there any special metrics to measure personalized content? Conveniently, you can call upon time-honoured tools from the non-personalized world. For example, performing an A-B test in a similar way to how you might test two pieces of contrasting content will also show you whether a personalised page is working better than a conventional one.
A study of 380 CMOs by The Brand Publishing Institute and Forbes reported that marketers who deliver personalized web experiences are seeing double-digit returns in marketing performance and response.
Likewise, you can analyse a sales conversion funnel for a specific time period (it could be days or weeks if necessary). Amalgamate data for the period without personalization, then enable personalization and monitor the same conversion funnel for an identical length of time. This will demonstrate the impact of the change.
Justify The Investment
The content consumed by your customers is very revealing – of their interests, what they need and the products or services they are engaged about. Monitoring your content means being able to take advantage of digital tools that help you identify topics of interest for your users on an individual level and predict what they will respond to best in the future.
This eases the pain of content marketing creation because it makes the end result more relevant to the consumer. You can also justify the investment of time and budget for this when you have shown how the data stacks up in relation to your KPIs.
“The recent development of Web-based marketing services makes it possible for businesses to reach more potential customers without spending a fortune,” said Matthew Toren on Entrepreneur.com.
Selecting the right KPIs is a critical step in getting the budget for your content personalization plans. The specialist team at Knexus supports companies through this step so they can grasp the importance of content success measurement. Our platform takes an integrated approach so that organizations can measure their personalization performance more effectively and demonstrate the value back to senior executives.
