What is the future of content marketing? 🤔

I’ve seen so many “future of content marketing” write-ups in these past few days, and two things have been pretty consistent. The future of content marketing includes personalisation at scale and automated, interactive content.

CRM campaigns sit right in the middle of this! You honestly cannot leverage personalised and automated content without using CRM workflows/projects targeted at leads, users, and/or active customers. You have to learn how to set up campaigns that cut across emails, push notifications, in-app notifications, SMS, retargeting via ads, and even social media communications.

However, personalisation at scale starts with segmentation. You cannot skip to hands-free, user-focused content without the right segmentation strategy customised to suit your audience type and your important business metrics. So, I’ll start from there as well.

Audience Segmentation for Personalisation

While segmenting your users, you’re trying to understand how to resonate with them based on shared characteristics. There are four major questions to ask to get this done effectively.

1. Who are my users?

Demographic segmentation groups users based on gender, age, occupation, marital status, etc.

2. Where are my users?

Geographic segmentation groups people based on their location.

3. What are my users like?

Psychographic segmentation groups users based on their personality, values, beliefs, or interests. Here, you try to understand their motivation.

4. How do my users act?

Behavioural segmentation groups people based on behaviour exhibited on your platforms.

During this audience segmentation planning, you need to define the types of customer data important for your growth as a business. Is it their job title? Account balance? Region? Conversion status? It’s about them as much as it is about your business!

Also, identify the right tools you need to bring this to life. Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Brave, Customer.io are all great platforms to use, decide which suits you best and which easily integrates with your existing engineering platforms.

Then you can introduce content personalisation, based on your identified segment.

Content Personalisation Strategies to Consider for CRM Workflows

Persona-based Personalisation

Share content that resonates with people’s unique traits, and addresses their needs at that particular time. This goes beyond emails and extends towards every user touchpoint. The example below portrays this on Pickit‘s website, segmenting its solutions by persona-based personalization.

Buyer-Journey Personalisation

Here, you’re delivering content based on their stage through your marketing funnel. Ask yourself, what does the audience really need from you at this stage?

Top of the Funnel:
This is the problem stage. Your audience is aware of a problem and needs options to solve the problem. Here, you can create awareness about your products and content education tailored to your solutions.

Middle of the Funnel:
This is the research stage. At this stage, your audience knows about your product, but are trying to compare and get more information to be sure they’re making the right decision. Comparison articles, case studies, answers to frequent objections, etc, are important tailored content needed here.

Bottom of the Funnel:
This is the decision-making stage. How-to content, answers to FAQs about the brand, referral content, etc…all become necessary at this stage.

Imagine sending how-to-use-this-product content to an audience who is not even aware of what your product does? The result will be underwhelming.

Individual-specific Personalisation

This can be tough, but it has proven to be highly rewarding. Deal with your audience as humans. Segment your users by specific data, then create content that aligns uniquely with each user, and their segment.

While I was at Cowrywise, we leveraged individual-specific personalisation in its email marketing and push notifications content strategy.

First step: Break the customers into different tiers, based on their wealth profile.
Second step: Customise how messages are worded, tailored to their wealth profile for relatability.
Third step: Measure and review results in isolation

Nurturing Leads With Hands-free Content/CRM Workflows

There are 5 important CRM workflows everyone should setup. I always ensure I have at least two of them active in my CRM/CLM strategy.

1. Hot Lead Workflow: A workflow for MQLs triggered when they hit a particular lead score. Assign points to specific actions, and then trigger your workflow based on a high score.

2. Lead Nurturing Workflow: Engaging leads to perform an action or to reach the MQL stage, triggered by new leads generated within a specific segment.

3. Re-engagement Workflow: This is triggered by inactivity after a specific period, especially for previously engaged contacts.

4. Theme-based Workflow: These are tailored to a particular theme, triggered by gated content, webinars or events. If a user downloads content or attends an event, they get into a workflow tailored to that.

5. New User Onboarding: This is your opportunity to set a good impression about the product to ensure activation, specific feature adoption, and retention.

All of these campaigns go beyond just emails. They cut across push notifications, in-app notifications, SMS, retargeting via ads, and even social media, depending on your platform setup.

Before we wrap up, note this:

1. Avoid invasive overpersonalization
2. Do not ignore consent and privacy
3. Pay attention to data accuracy to avoid personalisation errors
4. Do not over-rely on automation

And don’t forget to measure, optimise, and repeat!

You may like these:

How to get started in marketing as a beginner How to Create Landing Pages That Convert