Content continues to dominate the realm of marketing today. Yet, even if your content is brilliant, it may not bring the results you want.
Content quantity needs to be balanced with content performance, or you’re just spinning your wheels and wasting resources.
To boost sales and engagement, then, you’ll need to go a step further and determine how to incorporate smart content into your strategy.
Smart content is all about adapting to the consumer and personalizing their experience with your brand.
It can play a starring role in your overall content marketing strategy, satisfying both customers and your bottom line.
Here’s all your marketing team needs to know to get started and use smart content to your brand’s benefit.
What is Smart Content?
Smart content is dynamic content.
In other words, smart content is content that changes depending on past behavior, engagement, or interests of the viewer, personal demographics, and viewer (personas) characteristics.
It updates automatically based on who your visitor is to your site, changing to suit their status of returning customers, new prospects, or high-quality leads.
Simply put, it is designed to create a more personalized experience for website visitors.
Common examples are:
- Amazon’s recommendation engine.
- Personalization fields in emails.
- Offers on a webpage that change along with the status of the viewer.
What are the Features of Smart Content?
While marketing content, in general, has unique features, smart content stands out in different, distinct ways. The most common features or characteristics are:
Personalization
Smart content is customized, or personalized, based on the demographics and behaviors of the viewer. Each piece is personalized to meet a customer where they are and provide the type of information needed at whatever stage they find themselves in.
Relevancy
Smart content is created based on how relevant it will be to a viewer at different stages. What is relevant to a first-time visitor to a website will differ from that of a recurring or loyal customer.
Focus on Customer’s Preferences
Customer preferences play a key role in the creation and placement of all smart content. These customer preferences are discerned based on compiled data and direct input from those customers.
Targeted
Smart content is targeted to the customers who need or want it at exactly the right time, creating a more personalized experience. The targeting is commonly created based on customer segmentation practices.
Dynamic
Smart content is dynamic, changing, and adapting along with the targeted customer segment. While static websites are coded to display the same content for all visitors, dynamic websites keep the display features in place but replace the content based on the type of visitor.
Benefits of Smart Content
Another way to understand what smart content is all about is by looking at the benefits it provides over static content. These benefits include the following:
Offers a more relevant and personalized experience
Providing website visitors with relevant content is essential. Add personalization, and you have a dynamic duo.
Smart content provides you with an opportunity to create highly personalized and relevant content to match the person consuming it. In turn, the user has a better experience, and you achieve a higher chance of conversion.
This content, then, offers a more relevant and personalized experience to different visitor types and also caters to where they may be along the buyer’s journey.
Improves Targeting
The data you collect provides you with valuable insights into your website visitors, customers, and potential customers. This data most likely includes such information as:
- Names
- Ages
- Residences
- Email addresses
- Social media interactions
- Activity levels on your site
- Purchases from your brand
- Previously accepted offers
- Other websites visited
Combining this compiled data with automation and content software, you can further refine your targeting strategy and boost success rates by creating content for specific audiences or customer segments.
The genius behind smart content is that you are able to create several different variations of the same content in order to target these different groups.
Instead of optimizing a website for anyone and everyone who visits, with smart content you target individual visitors with just the right content.
This improved targeting allows you to alter the content displayed on landing pages, website pages, CTAs, forms, and other types of interactive content.
Optimizes automatically
Search engine optimization (SEO) of content makes it more visible, which also makes it more discoverable.
Smart content continues to automatically optimize, keeping up with the changes to search engine algorithms, organic search standards, and content formats, all without adding work to your marketing staff.
Increases Website Measurability
Smart content functionality in marketing software allows you to easily see how visitors interact with your content and helps you identify what is working and what isn’t achieving expected results.
This measured interaction includes their dwell time, or how long they spend reading the content, their overall click history, and whether or not a conversion or sale occurs.
Boosts Engagement
It’s no secret that viewers are attracted to and have a higher tendency to engage with personalized content.
You can take this even further, creating personalized interactive content which can boost engagement levels and result in higher sales.
Nurtures leads
Once you identify prospective leads, you can use smart content to continually nurture them along their journey and build trust and authority.
This nurturing is accomplished by providing valuable content each time they return to your website.
Builds Customer Relationships
Smart content is tailored to each visitor based on previous interactions, and this can make a long-lasting impression and impact. Trust often results, and along with that, the building of long-lasting customer relationships.
Increases Sales
By achieving higher customer engagement and building long-lasting customer relationships, your conversion rate and level of sales will increase.
How to Create Smart Content
When it comes to creating content, many steps are common in how you go about ensuring the best possible outcome. When it comes to creating smart content, these steps are also common, but with a few alterations.
The following tips will help you make the most of it in your overall digital marketing strategy.
1. Identify and Understand Your Audience
Creating marketing content all starts with identifying and understanding your target audiences. This is no different from creating smart content.
Get to know your audience, starting with the development of a buyer’s persona and taking that persona through the buyer’s journey. Know their pain points, challenges, wants, and needs.
2. Compile and Analyze Your Data
Compiling data and analyzing it is crucial to choose the types of smart content you need to reach your customers and leads.
Focus on the type of information website visitors provide, then cater your content around it. Such information usually includes:
- Location (Country)
- Demographics
- Preferred language
- Previous activities or behaviors on your website
- Device type
- Referral source
Collect and analyze this data and segment your audience so you can create more effective content.
3. Design Your Content and Engagement Strategy
Smart content, essentially, is about user engagement.
Analyze your data to ascertain the interests of your targeted audiences. Also, focus on keyword research and user intent. Then, use everything you learn to create and automate your smart content.
Break your content management plan down by asking questions such as:
- What landing page will appear for a first-time visitor versus a lead or recurring customer?
- What blog posts will be recommended for a visitor to read next?
Your call-to-action (CTA) will need to change along with your audience, providing a more targeted way to engage with them at each stage.
Also, incorporate different types of interactive content that change along with your audiences, such as auto-fill forms, quizzes, or calculators.
Interactive content is a marketing tool geared towards boosting engagement and is a valuable component of any smart content strategy.
Wrap Up
When it comes to researching, creating, and implementing a successful content marketing strategy, you need smart content to boost your overall sales and customer engagement to new levels.
By personalizing what your website visitor experiences each time and designing your content to adapt to where consumers are in their buyer’s journey, you can make a long-lasting impact on how they interact with your brand going forward.
As a result, revenue will rise, and customer loyalty will continue to build, making your content a success in more ways than one.
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