Personalise your Digital Marketing with Smart Content!

The fast-paced world of digital marketing means that conversations in the industry are often buzzword galore - and hot off the buzzword presses, comes the term 'smart-content'. If you've heard about smart content and you're unsure what it means or you're wondering how you can utilise it to complement your marketing strategy, let's get started - all will be explained! 

What is Smart Content? 

No, it's not just content with glasses on. Smart content is another name for dynamic content. Sound familiar? You may have heard about dynamic websites and their difference to static websites. If not, I'll clue you in. At their most basic, static websites are hard-coded and display exactly the same info to all viewers at all times, whereas dynamic websites pull their content from a database and construct webpages on the fly - meaning that the data displayed changes for each viewer! Dynamic (smart) content works in much the same way, changing and adapting dynamically - depending on who is reading it. It takes into account behavioural, contextual, demographic and firmographic data to serve up the most relevant content possible. This way, creating a more individual and personalised experience guaranteed to boost conversions. Rock. on. 

How does Smart Content work? 

Smart content buddies up with your CRM and other software to uncover info about the individual that is using it. This could include things like: 

• Name 
• Age 
• Location 
• Email address 
• Social media interactions 
• Items they've bought from you before 
• Other websites they've visited 
• Previous activity on your site 

Marketers are defined by their ability to build lasting relationships with leads and potential buyers (meaning that simply writing blog posts isn't always going to cut it). Building relationships is all about creating impactful experiences that inspire trust and delight website visitors at every stage of the buyer's journey. One of the best ways to do this is through the personalisation of content! As visitors' experiences with your company grows, their needs and interests change - what they're looking for in the awareness stage is vastly different to what they want in the decision stage. Smart content allows you to nurture your leads by providing additional value every time they return to your site, so you can ensure your offers are always hella' relevant and applicable to their goals. 

The best part? The potential of smart-content is two-fold. For your prospects, your website becomes a rich library, a vast ecosystem of conversion opportunities if you will. Likewise, every landing page, form, CTA, or email has the potential to reveal new content, services, or products to reconvert a visitor. 

Why use Smart Content? 

1. Enhanced Personalisation 

All marketers know that personalised content performs far better than generic content. For example, personalised email messages are 26% more likely to be opened than emails with non-personalised subjects, with 78% of consumers saying that they are unlikely to engage with brand promotions if they're not tailored to their previous interactions. These numbers don't lie! Smart content gives you the power to create content that's highly personalised and relevant to the person reading it - resulting in a better experience for the user and a higher likelihood of conversion for you! 

2. Better Targeting 

The info collected by your CRM, combined with the automation and intelligence of smart content software means that you can create content that's super targeted toward specific groups of people! In the days of old (back when traditional marketing was a thing), it just wouldn't have been practical to write any more than a few different versions of content. The process of creating various versions and then measuring the results would given even the most chill dude a major nervy b. Luckily for him (and hey, all of us really), smart content enables you to create an infinite number of different variations of one piece of content, targeted for as many groups as you want! 

3.  Automatic Optimisation 

Smart content really heats things up when it utilises AI-powered automation to optimise for conversions in real-time. This kind of machine-learning means that your content can optimise itself automatically with each user visit, learning from the interactions of each previous visitor. No need for time-consuming and resource - intensive A/B testing to optimise your marketing messages - the software has got your back. 

4. Improved and Measurable ROI 

Lastly, smart content offers an impressively higher ROI than static content (but you probably would've guessed by now right?). Marketing software with smart content functionality makes it easy to see how people are interacting with your content, showing you how long they're reading it for, where they're clicking, and whether or not that click leads to a sale or conversion. 

Sidenote: 

While smart content is a brilliant way to personalise your content - it's important to point out that it's not all sunshine and rainbows. A fundamental part of smart content is its reliance on cookies to gain data on users. The reason this is such a bummer is that with the phasing out of cookies across various browsers, and the increased blocking of cookies by users, we don't know how much longer it will last...  For this reason, by all means get smart content savvy, but ensure that you flesh out your marketing suite with other personalisation strategies so you're not left in the dark when Google finally pulls the plug. 

It's not all doom and gloom though - if you're keen to start setting up some smarty-pants content, be sure to focus on these seven things - these'll be your best bet for creating content that converts! 

Checklist for Smart Content: 

1. Create smart content for your ideal customer. 

2. Make it helpful, informative and entertaining. 

3. Be consistent! 

4. It should be able to spread quickly and easily. 

5. It should always be linked to one of your products and services. 

6. Always throw in a call-to-action. 

7. It needs to be measurable and generate ROI.

Using those better-than-fish-and-chips takeaways, you're well on your way to creating smart content that'll give your customers a reason to smile! - oh, and buy from you!