Leveraging a Content Marketing Agency for Personalization at Scale

Do you want your content to be memorable?

Personalized content is more likely to be remembered than generic content. It helps build customer relationships and create a more positive brand experience.

Scaling personalization without the correct expertise and resources is a significant challenge. It requires a deep understanding of your target audience along with the ability to create and deliver content relevant to each individual.

In this article, we’ll explore its importance in your content strategy and discuss how partnering with a content marketing agency can help your business achieve personalization at scale.

The Power of Personalization in Content Marketing

Personalized content goes beyond addressing a customer by their first and last name. It’s all about tailoring content based on individual preferences, behaviors, and interests. This level of customization creates a relevant and engaging experience for customers, ultimately leading to increased brand loyalty and conversions.

Benefits of Personalized Content

According to HubSpot, 58 percent of users are more likely to convert when they receive content based on their previous behavior. When customers feel heard, understood, and valued, they are more likely to engage and make purchasing decisions.

Some of the key benefits of using personalized content in your marketing strategy include:

• Enhanced engagement: Personalized content captivates audiences, resulting in higher readership, social sharing, and better retention
• Improved customer relationships: Personalization fosters deeper customer connections by creating a positive brand experience and cultivating long-lasting relationships
• Increased sales: Businesses can drive targeted website traffic, generate qualified leads, and boost sales through effective lead nurturing and conversion strategies

Personalization and Customer Expectations

Today, customers expect personalized experiences across every touchpoint. A survey by Salesforce revealed that 84 percent of customers say being treated like a person and not a number is crucial to winning their business. By meeting these expectations, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and build lasting customer relationships.

Challenges of Personalization at Scale

The biggest challenges are scaling personalization efforts and the costs associated. While daunting, these challenges can easily be overcome.

From Personalization to Individualization

While this level of personalization is highly effective, it becomes progressively challenging as the customer base expands. As customers increase, manually delivering personalized experiences to each individual becomes impractical and inefficient. The time and resources required to manually customize content for a large customer base are not feasible for most businesses.

Moreover, relying solely on manual efforts is prone to human errors, resulting in inconsistencies and missed opportunities. This is where additional resources such as an agency, alongside their expertise and automation can help to personalize your content efforts to each individual.

Conquering the Mountains of Data

When organizations grow, the amount of data they generate and collect grows right along with it. As the amount of data grows, it can quickly become disorganized and offer no help to you if you cannot find a way to analyze it effectively.

Content management systems and marketing automation platforms enable businesses to collect and analyze customer data, segment audiences effectively, and automate personalized content delivery. These tools streamline the personalization process, making it more efficient and scalable. But often, internal teams lack the personnel, bandwidth, and/or expertise to harness such information.

The Role of a Content Marketing Agency in Scaling Personalization

Agencies have the expertise and resources to create and deliver personalized content relevant to your target audience while continually managing your efforts and tracking your results. This allows you to focus on the larger tasks at hand.

The Expertise and Tools Offered by Agencies

Through extensive research, content agencies thoroughly understand customers’ preferences and pain points, developing buyer personas and customer journey maps as guiding frameworks for personalized content strategies.

To scale personalized content delivery, agencies rely on tools such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, CMSs, and analytics tools. These tools help to streamline and optimize the personalization process by enabling marketers to:

• Track customer interactions
• Automate content delivery 
• Measure campaign effectiveness based on predefined triggers or criteria 

Agencies are in the loop regarding industry trends and continually invest in training and professional development, ensuring their teams have the knowledge and skills to implement cutting-edge personalization techniques.

Case Study: Successful Personalization at Scale

Many brands have mastered the art of personalization through the help of content marketing agencies. You may recall a time when Bitmoji’s were all the hype. In 2016, Snapchat launched Bitmoji with personalization top of mind. It allowed users to design cartoonish characters of themselves that could be featured throughout Snapchat’s core areas, such as profiles, Snap Map, and more.

Following this launch, Snapchat created ‘Bitmoji Stories’ that would be visible in the Discover Feed for users. When clicking to view the story, users would find comic-book-like images with your personalized avatar and content to correspond.  It would even include a friend’s avatar in the stories based on the information from your recently contacted friends. This is a great example of how an app partnered with an agency to develop personalized content to bring traffic from one app to another.

Choosing the Right Content Marketing Agency for Your Personalization Needs

To select the right agency and partner for you and your needs, you should consider the following:

Aligning Agency Capabilities with Your Objectives

Ensure a fruitful partnership that drives effective personalized content strategies by aligning agency capabilities with your overall business objectives.

• Determine what personalization goals you aim to achieve and communicate them clearly to the agency
• Evaluating their expertise. Ask yourself if they truly understand customer behavior based on your conversations regarding your goals and target audience. And do they know how to leverage technology to automate the process?
• Ensure they have the necessary resources.  Your personalization needs may be complex. Does the agency have the resources in place to manage those complexities? 

Assessing Agency’s Past Performance and Reputation

You can easily gain confidence in an agency’s ability to meet your personalization goals by reviewing its past performance and online reputation.

• Look for agencies with a proven track record of success in executing personalized content campaigns
• Review their case studies and client testimonials to gain insights into their ability to deliver results
• Seek agencies that have worked with businesses in your industry or similar target markets, as they will better understand your unique needs

Considerations of Budget and ROI

Determine your budgetary constraints and find an agency that offers services within your financial capacity. But, remember to prioritize value first and foremost rather than cost alone.

• Evaluate the agency’s pricing structure and determine how their services align with your expected ROI
• Consider the long-term benefits of personalized content in terms of increased customer engagement, conversions, and revenue generation
• Agencies that provide transparent reporting and analytics to track the impact of their efforts will be most beneficial to your business’s bottom line

Start Scaling

While essential, personalization at scale is quite the challenge. A content marketing agency can help you achieve personalization at scale by providing expertise, tools, and resources. If you’re looking for great content or need help scaling your personalization, we can help. Get in touch with ClearVoice for more information about achieving personalization at scale.