Learn your customers. This is not news to anyone in sales, but the more you understand about your audience, the better you can appeal to them. With more and more sales moving to digital, companies need to invest in digital empathy and offering a personalized brand experience is the way to go. Gartner agrees, that this is the year that personalization can enable up to 15% more profits for companies who re-engineer their content strategy to align with customer intent on a case-by-case level. For instance, a questionnaire that simultaneously tracks their answers and interests while drawing them to your critical on-site content that aligns with those interests is a win-win. In the end, your customers are satisfied immediately when, after a few clicks, get what they need on a personalized listing page or action report, especially if you gate it, and you understand your customers in real-time. Raise your hand if you want to be a trusted consultant and thought leader with great top of funnel pipeline…

Peak Interest. Peak Opportunity.

You’re being overmarketed. That must sound strange coming from a marketing blog, but the truth as we see it is that there is more noise out there than ever and digital ad-apathy is stronger than it’s ever been. So how can marketers cut through that noise and get their foot in the door? Lead generation today is about taking the time to tailor and target the message to the right person. It’s important to balance marketing automation with personalized lead-by-lead outreach. Is it time-consuming? Absolutely. Is it worth it to increase your ROI? Absolutely.

Marketers overwhelmingly agree that personalization is a huge benefit for developing and maintaining customer relationships. According to Adobe 60% of us are having trouble trying to make the switch to personalized content, but 90% of marketers recognize that their target audiences expect a personalized experience.

So what change is happening to boost marketers’ confidence in 2020?

Empirical Empathy.

You may have the creative personalized ideas, writers, designers, and web developers ready to help go to market, but until your business has the right data to drive your GTM ideas, you might be starting from scratch. Instead, companies who cultivate all of their customer data together, including customer journey tracking, cross-platform reporting, and aggregating lead generation trends across their web, mobile, email, and social channels will find the personalized insights they need to succeed. Harness the bountiful (and cheap) organic user information, across multiple data platforms, into one cohesive customer profile. Then build your storytelling experience, quiz, or dynamic CTA button around what you’ve discovered about your users. Turn your expensive anonymous users into cheaper hyper-targeted users through a foundation of data and let a personalized marketing experience reap the benefits.

On average, marketers within companies store their customer data in at least four different systems, most of which are not shared or have no way to make meaningful connections. Dramatic investments are in store for whatever integration, platform, or process can unite the omnichannel user data and enhance data analysis. Start with implementing data-driven objectives like:

• Location Data
• Overlays
• Survey Responses
• Ad Campaign Interaction
• Tag and Filter Results
• Track Pageviews
• Smart Lists
• Dynamic Content Blocks
• Link Clicks
• Referral Source

With this precise user understanding at marketers’ fingertips, we enjoy the familiarity of personalized campaigns. Yet culling that data together and offering a message or experience to the potential lead based on their previous interactions with your company is vital to getting that foot in the door. Invest in understanding your audience and their behavior and interests and they will invest in understanding you.

Email is Still Mail.

Let’s face it, our inboxes aren’t overflowing with personal communications from friends and loved ones. That doesn’t mean email marketing has to be impersonal. So how do we get a user to click on that one email subject line when they return from vacation to a mailbox full of ads? Personalize your headline copy, customize imagery by location, gender, or season, and insert dynamic CTAs to make the offer relate to what you know about them. Make it pop!

Bonus – add additional personalized flair to your brand experience by implementing a kickback email upon conversion. The most common form of a kickback email is an automated thank you note sent to their inbox once their personal information enters your CRM. Higher engagement rate – check. Great first impression – check. Polite digital etiquette – check.

You’re on the Right Landing Page.

Let’s say you’ve finally convinced the user to engage with your content and click on the CTA button, you know you have their full attention. Making a personalized first impression when they arrive on the landing page both affirms that they are in the right place and encourages them to remain there. In the Calling All Optimists case study, the media campaign was designed to match the messaging that worked in the first place to pull double-duty by complementing the interest on the landing page. Driving the target audience to the site, the user is met with a unique welcome message in the hero-zone correlated to the specific ad they engaged with.

Personalizing your page ensures that traffic from all over the world sees the most appealing content for them. Whether it’s one of your homepages (yes – the more the merrier!) or a campaign landing page, every page should have a purpose correlating to every unique visitor and their previous exposure to your brand.

Make It Personal

Stand out by personalizing your digital reputation. Customers will remember your services, your messaging, and your products if you direct them to what makes sense for them, rather than sending them on a wild goose chase. Content marketing has been top of mind for this industry for years now, but personalizing that content marketing strategy is a way to make your brand feel exciting and special.

It’s time to say goodbye to cookie-cutter content passively thrown into your resources listing page and keeping your fingers crossed that someone stumbles into it. With social media engagement on the downfall and Google’s algorithm prioritizing their own thought leadership over yours, it is imperative to transform your strategy into something that appeals to your ideal customer. Two-thirds of consumers say they will switch to brands that treat them like an individual rather than a data point, a trend that will continue to be driven by younger audiences who value brands that are transparent, authentic, and personal.

No matter the tactic, the fundamental purpose of personalizing any campaign is to boost engagement by telling the user you understand their need. Communicating your own message by listening to their needs first will always prove to be worth the research, planning, and testing effort. Delighting the modern consumer is going to take some analytics-grit, but doing your marketing homework before investing in any large personalization initiative will pay off in 2020.

If you’re looking to digitally personalize your content, reach out to Bluetext to help you succeed. 

It’s rare for a business to offer its services for free. The phrase “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” reigns true in most industries and all business decisions. Originating with early-century saloon owners marketing free, salty lunches as a way to entice beer drinking, even the etymology of the #TNSTAAFL phrase foreshadows the destiny of commerce itself – it’s impossible to get something for nothing.

So, what does a free ham sandwich in 1891 have to do with 2020 content marketers and gated thought leadership? Imagine your business is the bar and that hungry and thirsty passerby out front is the CMO searching for a way to convince their boss on more paid media dollars, or a CTO who needs a VPN alternative. You have something they could want – a delicious, frothy piece of premium content to quench their industry-specific questions. Post that “Free Lunch” sign, give them some snacks, and then charge them for the beer to wash it all down. You’ll have a bar full of returning customers every time.

You Want to Be a Thought Leader?

Let’s break it down. Businesses that are trying to establish themselves as thought leaders in their space usually have two types of content: Blogs and premium content. Typically, you want to spend your time on the premium content first and then chop it up into free digestible portions, which become your blogs. Since the blogs are free and busting at the seams with the same SEO juice that you prioritized in your premium content, both should come up as a result when someone is looking online for an industry-question you have the answer to.

Think about the last time you were researching B2B tactics. You wouldn’t hand over your email address to just anyone at the beginning of your research. You browsed around to see who knows what they’re talking about. Once you found a credible thought leader, then you actually started paying attention to what they were talking about.

Economy vs. Premium Content

According to content marketing agencies, balance is key. The trick is to walk the line between having free ungated blogs that are enticing and helpful to draw traffic but not too helpful and giving away a company’s expertise without gaining any leads. Save the premium advice and info for the premium content. Ask yourself, “Would someone reasonably pay for this service?”

Make it exclusive, insightful, and urgent. Typically, premium content are eBooks, courses, webinars, checklists, and sometimes videos. Those resources take a lot of effort to create, so you want to put them to work for you and your marketing team. This premium content comes with a price or a gate. The key to the gate and unlocking the juicy stuff is usually as harmless as an email.

As a top content marketing agency, Bluetext breaks down some do’s and don’ts behind gating the premium content.

Do Design Gated Content Conversions Using Ungated Content UX/UI

Make sure your tip top-funnel blogs feed into your top funnel gated content. A UX design company will engineer an ungated content user interface to drive invested leads to gated content. Dangle the carrot and then drive them down a rabbit hole of insights.  If your resource page template’s layout has a related topic listing, you can get someone reading one blog to jump to the next, especially when you have click-worthy resource titles.

Create a clear, focused path to follow. Put an enticing CTA at every step of your ungated posts to draw them to the gated content. Theoretically, the user lands on a first blog post via Google search, they peruse 2-3 of your other blogs, and then they are a bit invested by the time they get to gated content. Long story short, using the Free Lunch scenario, clean up your bar so it looks inviting enough to have them buy a drink.

Don’t Forget to Design the Landing Page UX/UI for Conversion

At least make the gated content page template easy to use and worthy of personal info. Best practices for gated content landing page design include showcasing the product, talking about the benefits and insights they can learn, highlighting a quote from the piece, and ideally some social proofing or testimonials. A website design agency will be your best bet to formatting these nuggets of information in a clean, digestible fashion. Like any other business transaction, sell it with foreshadowing what they are about to invest in.

Do Add SEO Excerpt from Gated Content on the Landing Page

The Google Algorithm crawls ungated content, but while you will be losing out on SEO potential by putting keywords behind the gate, you can still put some of those keywords directly on the landing page. Think of it like a teaser, or a sample sip of the beer you want them to buy.

Don’t Miss Out on Capturing User Journey Clues Via CTA Pixel

If the user has followed the intended path laid out above, they have digested other information on the website before converting on the gated content. A digital marketing and analytics expert will implement Google Analytics or UTM parameters to track where users come from and behavioral trends. This is a critical insight that can help your sales and marketing team follow up and understand the lead without asking them. In fact, don’t ask them anything else besides their email (coming up next!).

Trusting a digital marketing and analytics agency to configure the UI/UX back end of your CMS to gather clues (via UTM or Google Analytics) will ensure these tools talk to your CRM when it passes over the lead. Your CRM can then organize to segment those leads into audience pools with the user journey info and UTM parameters. Did they arrive via Facebook or LinkedIn? Did they read about technology or marketing thought leadership? Did they visit SMB or Enterprise blogs before? Depending on what you want to do with the leads gathered from the gated content, a digital marketing agency can follow up with retargeting campaigns. By taking out the guesswork, digital marketing campaigns are then geared toward the topics and categories you know a specific user is interested in.

Don’t Over-Gate with Nosey Forms

Sometimes businesses want more defining characteristics of the user to help their follow up marketing to have some foundational info. Asking for an email is the easiest marketable piece of info you can gather – but should you want more, make sure the form is at least easy to use. For instance, free type is ok, but dropdown select from offers convenience. Ideally, if you need to ask for more info, triage that asks by making some questions optional so you don’t scare anyone away. Remember – you want them more than they want you at this point. You might be the third tab they have open in their research, so think twice if knowing their position is worth losing them to a competitor’s simpler gated content.

Do Gate Content. Don’t Gate Content.

We wish it were black and white, but the answer to the infamous To Gate or Not to Gate question comes down to the following:

• How exclusive is your offer?
• How easy is your form to fill out?
• How SEO friendly is your LP?
• How actionable is your CTA?

If you have your thought leadership on fleek from a UX/UI, SEO, and CMS perspective than you’re ready to start offering free lunches to any potential lead that comes into your digital business.