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If there's one thing that's true in today's digital era, it's that it's never been more difficult for brands to stand out online.
From the myriad ads and pop-ups, emails and signature banners, brands are constantly battling for our attention: click here, read more, download this.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with these activities – after all, how else would brands attract, engage, and convert interested parties without a variety of calls to action peppered across the buyer journey?
But while brands have scaled their efforts to reach target audiences in the moments that matter most, those same consumers are far more digitally savvy, resilient, and expectant of interactions and experiences that meet an ever-changing standard.
The reality is this: it's no longer enough to just get products or services in front of those you want to engage with. Today, every single piece of content must be painstakingly optimized for relevancy, built for search engines, and written for humans.
“We live in an era of connection and the consumer marketplace is no exception. Businesses are expected to not just meet the needs of customers, but anticipate and exceed them.”
– Connecting with Meaning, Personalizing the customer experience using data, analytics and AI, Deloitte
As a result, we're now arriving at the point of hyper-personalization, where brands are analyzing the intricacies of every interaction, signal, and customer behavior at scale to understand what content to serve, when, and where.
I'm sure there have even been times that you've thought about a specific product or service and suddenly, there it is on your news feed or in your email inbox!
It sounds like a lot, but ultimately what brands are trying to do is create better and more meaningful interactions. In fact, it's this kind of approach that's opening the door to “experiences”; where organizations tailor-make 1-to-1 journeys for each customer, consumer, or prospect, ensuring that every piece of content is something they would consume.
Why content personalization matters now more than ever
According to research, 6 in 10 consumers prefer to buy from companies that tailor their experiences to their wants and needs. McKinsey also reports that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don't!
Clearly personalized content isn't just a nice to have – it's become absolutely essential to ensuring customer loyalty.
For consumers, customers, and prospects, any engagement with a brand is more than a transaction, it's the start of a relationship; the level of effort exhibited by organizations in this relationship (through content, support, advice and so on), directly correlates to consumer and customer sentiment, satisfaction, and likelihood of purchase.
As organizations have come to understand the undeniable power of content to attract, engage, and convert interested parties online, from website pages and downloadable content through to product previews and sales demos, more and more have started to ramp up their efforts to produce meaningful material at scale, and across the entire customer journey.
They're starting to move away from “push marketing” – the process of sending the same communications to all customers – and instead looking to diversify and tailor outreach to ensure personalized content is helpful, predictive, contextual, and optimised for across channels.
Part of this also includes self-service content and live agents that learn as they interact with queries and data points, effectively being trained to provide the right advice and support.
Source: Flybits
How generative AI has changed the game
Of course, even with the understanding of the value of content personalization, for years the challenge has been achieving it at scale.
Historically, the practice has been gatekept by established brands with deep pockets, large marketing teams, and skilled writers – all of whom had the time, energy, and expertise to spend on building out individual assets for campaigns.
Just imagine for a moment the amount of time it would take a team to produce hundreds of assets for a retail campaign targeting a specific demographic in a target region – at least a month, if not longer. Now imagine that level of activity across every product, service, or solution offered.
It's only in recent years (and in part wholly attributable to Generative AI) that smaller brands and organizations have gained access to capabilities that can scale content and personalization efforts.
Now, lots of people might argue that while AI enables hyper personalization, hyper personalization in ABM is more than just slapping a target account's logo on a landing page.
Which is true. (P.S. If you're thinking about your ABM strategy for 2025, check this out).
Hyper personalization is more about deep, considered relevancy, built on a plethora of knowledge and insight gleaned using intelligent AI. The result? AI empowers marketers to do what they were hired to do: think strategically, foster innovation, generate high-quality, engaged leads, and build campaigns that truly resonate.
Quality over quantity – does it matter?
People often argue that the quality of AI-generated content and content personalization isn't perfect, but for most part: it's just getting better
Organizations with large and robust customer bases understand this opportunity best: when AI can examine and analyse customer data sets and behavioral data, it can recognise patterns, and styles.
Better yet, organizations with unique AI capabilities and proprietary data sets can start to draw inferences to arrive at ground-breaking conclusions before anyone else. They can then use AI tools to make informed decisions to create new content that – while not perfect – has some semblance of human creativity, is tailored to individual user profiles, and isn't available anywhere else.
Look: the point isn't perfection. Not yet, anyway. There's still a need for creative spark, wit, and a tone of voice that stands out to attract a target audience.
The point is that generative AI provides a level of scalability and accessibility that has previously been impossible or costly to obtain, often limited to the giants of industry. Suddenly, start-ups and scale-ups have the same content production potential as established organizations.
And that's what's driving competitive advantage.
For example, just look at the myriad of AI-powered solutions for streamlining sales outreach (whether it's good or bad is entirely up for debate), driving pipeline growth, extracting market intelligence, and beyond. What's interesting, however, is that we've yet to see any tools that leverage the existing knowledge within sales and marketing departments (e.g. what they know about their target accounts, or existing assets) to create engaging and compelling content.
Personalization strategy and the future
Thinking practically, AI in personalization is helping to solve a longstanding problem for small and medium-sized brands, even large organizations that want to market and sell at scale.
People are onboard, too: overall sentiment towards AI is positive. What's required of us is a degree of nuance when it comes to what data we use, how we use it, and where it's applied. The quality of the outputs using AI is 100% dependent on the quality of our inputs.
In simple terms: the more data, experiences, interactions, sentiments, and so on, these platforms can draw from, the more accurate, resonant, and engaging the content they produce becomes.
Still, even while some can extract this volume of information, turning it into engaging experiences is still a big pain (one we're trying to solve, at least for ABM), but there's definitely hope yet.
It's highly likely that personalized content will become a cornerstone for marketers and salespeople alike as they look to find ways to stand out and attract specific customer segments. If we consider for a moment the fact that customers are more likely to engage with brands that personalize content than those that don't, overall customer lifetime value is going to soar for those that take the time to tailor interactions and experiences.
So, should you create personalized content? The answer is a resounding yes. However, creating a successful content personalization strategy requires a deep understanding of what people need, where, and when. AI can help us scale efforts and analyze behaviors, but it's ultimately up to us to define what's valuable to our organizations, and act accordingly.
That's where the opportunity is.
Author
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
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