As the importance of customer experience (CX) continues to be front and centre for businesses, it is crucial for brands to constantly engage with their customers through personalised content.
However, research by SoDA has shown that whilst most C-level executives (97 percent) recognise the importance of a personalised digital experience, less than 40 percent use even the most basic targeting criteria for personalisation.
Tailored content is essential for creating meaningful dialogue with customers and it can act as a catalyst for enabling unrivalled customer experiences and business growth. So why do many marketers see content as something that is difficult to control and manage?
The rise in demand for personalised experiences has led to an increase in challenges marketers face in their efforts to truly deliver a personalised CX. In fact, 44 percent of senior marketers believe they can’t produce content fast enough to power personalised marketing, which is a must-have to meet the expectations of today’s customers.
This recognised importance of personalisation is a reminder that it must be a priority for marketers – lack of budget or talent is not an excuse, and neither is legacy software and systems. Fortunately, there are a number of cost-effective steps which can meet the need for high volumes of quality content without breaking the bank.
- Relocate centrally: Marketing teams often have trouble managing and sharing their assets because their content exists in siloes. To build a solid content foundation, organisations must get assets into a central location, such as Sitecore’s Content Hub, where all teams can access and edit all content.
- Map the content lifecycle: Determining starting points and priorities requires that the milestones of the content lifecycle be broken down and defined. This can be a useful exercise to align content needs to customer journeys, allowing organisations to understand when and where assets are required and implement existing content where it can be most effective.
- Embrace automation: Research from SoDA found that 39 percent of senior marketers believe their processes are too manual to meet content needs; automating content creation and management increases efficiency and productivity. This technology investment enables marketers to achieve true end-to-end content lifecycle management and improve workflows, while also reducing costs.
- Establish leadership: Finally, once content is stored in a central platform for all users to access, the organisation must determine who is responsible for the management of different assets. Separate teams can then manage, edit and personalise content with ease across marketing, HR and social channels.
Star Cooperation is one example of where taking control of content, by managing it centrally and reusing it effectively, has shown impressive results. The company, which services a number of luxury automotive brands, needed to help one car maker serve differentiated content about a range of car models, to many different personas, across a variety of channels. This required content needed to be created quickly, mixed and matched for different purposes, and organised effectively. Star Cooperation supported the carmaker to create an end-to-end content management system, that connects and merges all content, making it easy to adapt and translate assets for different markets as and when it is needed.
Through the implementation of a content hub, Star Cooperation has helped the customer create millions of pieces of content per year, and to significantly reduce the time it takes to create them. What is more, because content is stored centrally and can be easily adapted across markets, the brand has seen faster time to market and increased sales, as well as better and more consistent brand communication across all channels.
Personalisation is at the heart of CX, but its execution and management across an ever-increasing number of channels is a problem faced by many marketers. To combat these challenges, rigorous processes need to be put in place, which can help identify the starting point based on the ideal outcomes for the business.
Centralising all content and shared assets in a single location enables widespread access and maintains brand consistency. It also allows for personalised customer interactions to be created with the right content and served at the right time and place. This level of personalisation provides customers with the ability to make informed decisions about purchases, which in turn highlights the role of CX as a driving business factor for online-first customers.