These days, there’s a lot that inhibits brands from standing out: there’s an onslaught of competing content, user attention spans are shortening and budgets (not to mention time) are tight, making it difficult to rapidly produce and experiment with content that truly sticks.

That latter point is perhaps the most significant, because the biggest indicator of whether or not a user will engage with your content is whether it’s relevant to them. This desire of relevance elevates personalization beyond just a simple business need—in today’s market, it’s expected by users and required from brands.

This results in an imperative for efficient, cost-effective production that cuts through the noise and lands directly in front of the right consumer at the right time. A report recently released by SoDA showed that brands understand the need for personalization, with 83% of global business leaders increasing their investments in it for 2019, and nearly a third increasing their personalization budgets significantly.

People who touch an item feel an increased sense of ownership toward it—and personalized experiences are poised to persuade and push them over the edge of purchasing. Coca-Cola’s 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign was massively popular simply by creating a situation for customers to engage with the brand in a personal and social way. Marmite has taken a similar approach with its personalized jars, which provide a point of identification for the user.

But making strategic use of personalization remains a key challenge, particularly with production of content that benefits from personalization. In the same report, 55% of business leaders cited a clear focus on producing content quicker, and 47% sought greater cost-efficiency in content production.

But producing personalization at scale doesn’t have to be burdensome for brands. Through an integrated production process and technologies that enable dynamic delivery of content, organizations can produce a staggering volume of hyper-targeted content with ease—though it may require them to rethink their creative approach.

Levels of Personalization

Personalization in marketing certainly isn’t new, though most organizations operate on a relatively low level of personalization maturity. Rather than relying on basic data metrics like greeting a user by their name or using rules-based segmentation, brands can achieve best-in-class, highly relevant creative by optimizing content for omnichannel journeys (remembering the user along the way), integrating behavioral recommendations and applying AI to predictive personalization.

Now, don’t get too scared—all of the above likely sounds complicated, especially if you don’t yet have a distinct personalization or data strategy in place. But the good news is that personalization is less about the amount of data that you have, and more about what you do with the data. Minimal personalization can make a big impact.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a great example of an omnichannel campaign that reacts to user behaviors in a way that’s surprising to users, grabbing their attention by speaking directly to them. When Danish gum brand Stimorol decided to branch out into a new form of candy, they needed an awareness campaign that would challenge consumers to likewise extend outside their comfort zones. But how can you challenge someone to try something new without knowing what they habitually do? That’s where the creative opportunity behind personalization emerges.

We solved this problem by producing an integrated campaign that responds to user behaviors. Key to the campaign are YouTube bumper ads that respond to the types of videos that individual consumers are watching. While watching sports videos, for example, users may be treated to an ad that prompts them to try playing sports instead of just watching them.

These bumpers make use of one key data point—the type of content that users are watching—but does so in a clever way that immediately grabs viewer attention and prompts them to identify with the message in a personal way. While they might not be willing to change their own habits, trying a new Stimorol candy sounds like a sweet deal in comparison.

Personalization that Enhances, not Inhibits, Production Quality

Isn’t it unsustainable to produce several variations of content like the kind mentioned above? Not if you have already outlined the variables that differentiate individual pieces of content, or have clearly mapped out the touch points to be supported by an omnichannel campaign. We optimized production for the Stimoroll campaign by limiting it to a single-day shoot at a single location, resulting in over 150 format-ready deliverables capable of greeting the right consumers at the right place and time.

According to Salesforce, 57% of customers are happy to provide personal data in exchange for personalized marketing—which means data can inform awesome content and vice-versa. The key is that the data exchange should provide consumers with obvious value.

With the technology available today, brands can achieve an even greater level of relevance with their content, dynamically stitching together personalized content reactive to several data points. With Google Vogon, for example, brands can automatically translate a single base video into dozens of personalized variations on the fly, resulting in a high volume of unique videos that don’t push film crews to their limits or sacrifice quality.

Our dynamic video content for Booking.com was designed from two base videos: one featuring a giraffe browsing for travel destinations while another focused on a dog doing the same. But the type of animal featured is just one of several variables that enable 54 permutations tailored to hyper-specific segments and interests. These include the target market, different destinations found within those markets and a key passion (like shopping, dining or sightseeing) that provides added inspiration.

Both campaigns discussed above demonstrate how brands can efficiently target key segments of their audiences through personalization. Whether employing just one data point or many, personalization at scale can grab user attention and leave an indelible mark on them, and the right creative and production strategy enables brands to take advantage of these benefits without wearing themselves thin.

As customer attention is placed more and more on a variety of digital channels, it’s increasingly important for organizations to appeal to them at the right place at the right time. The challenge? Most organizations feel limited—in terms of team size/bandwidth, awareness of local markets they might be catering to and more—in their ability to execute relevant, fresh content strategies.

From driving traffic to brand websites or engaging on social media with share-worthy, relatable content, a good content strategy is essential for boosting a brand’s presale capabilities. This is likely the reason why digital work makes up more than half of all US agency revenue today. So, how can brands of any size take better advantage of the technology available?

Good Content Begets Better Content

This method of creating and distributing content is powerful because it can react to users’ experience along their journey. Think of it this way: good content leads to more sales, which feeds into welcoming new customers or building advocates through a great experience. This in turn should fuel your marketing efforts, opening a feedback loop: what about the customer experience really resonated? Where could messaging be stronger?

When it comes to marketing, I feel the traditional ad model sticks to a channel-based approach, but it’s important to remember that today’s consumers view digital as a series of experiences across several platforms and channels. Likewise, your content shouldn’t be relegated to a single channel—don’t set up a blog and call it a day. Instead, you should relate to the user on all the platforms they visit across the user journey in a way that makes sense, then use that activity to better inform your content and continue to provide value. While the model of expanding a big idea worked in the past, it doesn’t translate well to digital. A modern content strategy instead starts with a strategic foundation, which is then retailored, varied and personalized across the different platforms available, which in aggregate build into a creative direction.

The good news is that today we have a myriad of new ways to give context through content, allowing for more engaging experiences that relate to the users no matter the platforms they frequent. By making use of the latest technologies available, brands of all sizes can boost their creative capabilities and deliver more engaging content at scale, paving the way for better customer experiences.

But before going further, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page for what a content strategy is. Your content strategy encompasses the planning and development of all consumer-facing communication from your organization, including your CEO’s talking points, your PR strategy, how you introduce your organization in interviews and more. As the VP of Marketing at MediaMonks, I’ve led content marketing initiatives for organizations of all sizes. Through that experience, I’ve discovered a few strategies and takeaways for how brands big and small can take a more modern approach to their blog content.

The best place to begin devising such a content strategy is to define your organization’s purpose, so take a moment to consider your brand’s purpose and what it wants to achieve. Honing in on a purpose is easier for some brands than others; challenger brands by their very nature exemplify some sort of purpose, for example, while legacy brands might struggle to articulate the heritage and personality that they’ve built up within a fast-changing landscape.

Speak to Experiences

Today’s consumers are more concerned with experience than product. This shift might prompt a best-in-class grill manufacturer, for example, to devise a content strategy focused more on celebrating the act of grilling than the grill itself. Through content that seeks to inspire and inform, a key purpose for such a brand would be helping people make memories together.

If you’re uncertain on how to articulate your purpose, begin with your most profitable offering or differentiated value. From there, consider the white spaces—the stuff your audience is working to resolve or understand. This process helps you define talk tracks, or a handful of topics that your content will focus on. You should be able to examine a talk track from several viewpoints; for example, a talk track about “emerging tech” can explore AR, VR, artificial intelligence and more in terms of both their development, benefits and challenges. For our grilling example above, cultivating a sense of togetherness was key, which manifests in recipes, inspiration for entertaining or helping prospects discover which features of a grill or its accessories suits their lifestyle.

It may be tempting to chase several talk tracks, but keep it down to only three to five. Since you’ll consistently measure effectiveness for your content, you can always switch up or change talk tracks later.

The Demographic Death-Knell

On a basic level, you’ll need to divide your content up on where it sits within the sales funnel: whether someone is researching your product for the first time, is coming back from a retargeting campaign or is a repeat customer. Each step of this journey offers different questions the customer needs answered, which your content should support.

In addition to planning around specific steps of the funnel or consumer journey, specific forms of content should be built around user personas: who are your best customers, and what do they respond to? How does that differ from your second-best? How do different talk tracks relate to different segments? When developing personas and segments, it’s better to group users by preferences and interest than demographics. Why? Because demographics are dead: an older, midwestern man who likes American Crime Story might have more interests in common with a teen girl from LA who also likes the show, than his own demographic peers. Simply put, “Demographic information doesn’t tell us anything,” says MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar. “It’s all about the user’ preferences.”

Defining personas makes it easier to develop content because you know what sort of things to include or exclude. If writing for an individual who prefers content geared at business-related tips and tricks, but also watches sports and is interested in local events, you know to play up those preferences in your content. Some organizations have several personas to accommodate; for example, a travel booking site would need to generate content for all their destinations, and perhaps interests as well—is the customer a partier, someone who likes historical places, a foodie? For organizations who need to develop content on a large scale, we offer them a modular approach: where we define what variables exist in your content, which can be tweaked and revised in different ways for different personas. With this plug-and-play, modular method, we’re not just generating content but creating an entire content framework that not only targets users but A/B tests what’s effective. This lets us dynamically produce content without additional cost.

These kinds of assets at scale are increasingly necessary with the rapid demand for always-on, personalized content. From dynamic videos custom-built to preferences without any user input to thousands of pieces of localized content for markets around the globe, brands face many challenges in providing timely, relevant content at scale. Even though most brands don’t have the resources that Netflix or Amazon do—which have perhaps two of the most-effective recommendation engines in the world—partnerships can help them fill those gaps. For those just starting out and who prefer a little more flexibility, an embedded team that can handle your content production is easily capable of scaling up if your needs or situation change.

For example, we just announced a new always-on content hub that will accommodate Avon’s million representatives spread across more than 50 markets. These assets are designed to maintain brand consistency while allowing representatives room to customize to their local markets’ needs. With each piece of content tailor-made for different channels, reps can effectively engage with their customers and clients wherever they’ve built those relationships—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or somewhere else. In addition to reaching consumers in more relevant ways, the move helps Avon provide its reps with more autonomy in their messaging without risking the brand’s identity, supporting digital growth in the process.