Personalizing Content to Connect with your Consumers

With so much digital content out there, it’s becoming vitally important to personalize content in order to connect with consumers and convert to a sale. How much digital content are consumers ingesting?

A recent survey by Adobe found that consumers have not only increased their daily dose of digital content, but 55% are doing so across multiple devices simultaneously. “Indeed, 67% of respondents said it’s important for brands to automatically adjust content based on their current context. And when they don’t? A whopping 42% of respondents said they get annoyed when their content isn’t personalized. That’s followed by 33% who get annoyed when content is poorly designed, and 29% when content isn’t optimized for their devices. What’s more, an alarming 66% of consumers said encountering any of these situations would stop them from making a purchase.”

Ouch! Ok, we get it, personalization is important, but what is personalized content? According to AspireIQ, “Personalized content are images, videos, and written assets that appeal to groups of consumers based on predetermined demographics such as age, gender, interests, or location.” So, if you’ve ever seen an add on Instagram or Facebook that got you to pull the trigger and buy, you’ve come across personalized content.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “We know that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and can lift sales by 10% or more.”

Now that I’ve got your interest, what should you do?

First you need to understand your audience. You don’t want creepy personalization. For example, if you were discussing taking a trip abroad and you suddenly started seeing advertising for Italy, that’s creepy and NOT what customers are looking for.

To create personalized content, you need to:

Understand your audience – You can do this through direct and indirect research such as surveys, monitoring comments in social media and leverage analytics to websites and social media channels. This step helps understand where you potential buyers are (locational and in the buying cycle), what are their pain points, how they consume content and where they want to hear from you.

Group your consumers into segments – in the real estate industry we tend to understand this idea and execute well. Think Retirees, First-time buyers, Move-up buyers. And we also understand that geography matters -” All real estate is local”. When it comes to consumer segmentation, the one area we do not understand well as an industry is Psychographics. Psychographics are the detailed characteristics of human behavior. The “why” behind their purchase and decision to select your home or community over your competition. Market researchers align results from activity, interest and opinion statements with geographic and demographic information to create a more “lifelike” picture of the ideal consumer segment.

Tailor your content to each marketing channel. As consumers we expect different content on Facebook (connection with friends & family) vs. Pinterest (inspiration) vs. Instagram (research & discovery). It’s important to understand why consumers use each platform and then add content that feels organic and meets the needs of your target consumer. These platforms are best at displaying visual content and therefore ideal for real estate.

Via Webfx

If you’re interested in learning more about personalizing your content to increase engagement and sales, we’d love to work with you. Connect with us here.