Content continues to dominate the realm of marketing today. Yet, even if your content is brilliant, it may not bring the results you want.
Content quantity needs to be balanced with content performance, or you’re just spinning your wheels and wasting resources.
To boost sales and engagement, then, you’ll need to go a step further and determine how to incorporate smart content into your strategy.
Smart content is all about adapting to the consumer and personalizing their experience with your brand.
It can play a starring role in your overall content marketing strategy, satisfying both customers and your bottom line.
Here’s all your marketing team needs to know to get started and use smart content to your brand’s benefit.
Benefits of Smart Content
Another way to understand what smart content is all about is by looking at the benefits it provides over static content. These benefits include the following:
Offers a more relevant and personalized experience
Providing website visitors with relevant content is essential. Add personalization, and you have a dynamic duo.
Smart content provides you with an opportunity to create highly personalized and relevant content to match the person consuming it. In turn, the user has a better experience, and you achieve a higher chance of conversion.
This content, then, offers a more relevant and personalized experience to different visitor types and also caters to where they may be along the buyer’s journey.
It’s pretty easy to spot when content is clearly generic and not meant for you. People can sense that detachment, maybe not consciously every time, but it shows up in higher bounce rates or lackluster engagement. I’m not saying every piece needs to be a love letter to the reader—but when someone recognizes a question they typed last week reflected back in a headline or a recommendation, that’s when the real magic happens. The tech behind it, honestly, isn’t all that mystical; it just takes data, a few variables, and a willingness to tweak instead of blast out the same bland copy to everyone.
Of course, the more you personalize, the more you set a certain expectation—and the quicker you’ll know when you blow it. No one likes getting served a “special offer” that makes no sense for them, or being recommended content that’s wildly off base. That’s the risk, but also the motivator to actually know your audience, not just pretend to. When smart content gets it right, it almost feels invisible, like, “Well, obviously this is what I wanted to see.” But if it’s clunky, people just tune out faster than you can say “unsubscribe.”
Improves Targeting
The data you collect provides you with valuable insights into your website visitors, customers, and potential customers. This data most likely includes such information as:
- Names
- Ages
- Residences
- Email addresses
- Social media interactions
- Activity levels on your site
- Purchases from your brand
- Previously accepted offers
- Other websites visited
Combining this compiled data with automation and content software, you can further refine your targeting strategy and boost success rates by creating content for specific audiences or customer segments.
The genius behind smart content is that you are able to create several different variations of the same content in order to target these different groups.
Instead of optimizing a website for anyone and everyone who visits, with smart content you target individual visitors with just the right content.
This improved targeting allows you to alter the content displayed on landing pages, website pages, CTAs, forms, and other types of interactive content.
Optimizes automatically
Search engine optimization (SEO) of content makes it more visible, which also makes it more discoverable.
Smart content continues to automatically optimize, keeping up with the changes to search engine algorithms, organic search standards, and content formats, all without adding work to your marketing staff.
Increases Website Measurability
Smart content functionality in marketing software allows you to easily see how visitors interact with your content and helps you identify what is working and what isn’t achieving expected results.
This measured interaction includes their dwell time, or how long they spend reading the content, their overall click history, and whether or not a conversion or sale occurs.
Boosts Engagement
It’s no secret that viewers are attracted to and have a higher tendency to engage with personalized content.
You can take this even further, creating personalized interactive content which can boost engagement levels and result in higher sales.
Nurtures leads
Once you identify prospective leads, you can use smart content to continually nurture them along their journey and build trust and authority.
This nurturing is accomplished by providing valuable content each time they return to your website.
Builds Customer Relationships
Smart content is tailored to each visitor based on previous interactions, and this can make a long-lasting impression and impact. Trust often results, and along with that, the building of long-lasting customer relationships.
Increases Sales
By achieving higher customer engagement and building long-lasting customer relationships, your conversion rate and level of sales will increase.
How to Create Smart Content
When it comes to creating content, many steps are common in how you go about ensuring the best possible outcome. When it comes to creating smart content, these steps are also common, but with a few alterations.
The following tips will help you make the most of it in your overall digital marketing strategy.
1. Identify and Understand Your Audience
Creating marketing content all starts with identifying and understanding your target audiences. This is no different from creating smart content.
Get to know your audience, starting with the development of a buyer’s persona and taking that persona through the buyer’s journey. Know their pain points, challenges, wants, and needs.
2. Compile and Analyze Your Data
Compiling data and analyzing it is crucial to choose the types of smart content you need to reach your customers and leads.
Focus on the type of information website visitors provide, then cater your content around it. Such information usually includes:
- Location (Country)
- Demographics
- Preferred language
- Previous activities or behaviors on your website
- Device type
- Referral source
Collect and analyze this data and segment your audience so you can create more effective content.
3. Design Your Content and Engagement Strategy
Smart content, essentially, is about user engagement.
Analyze your data to ascertain the interests of your targeted audiences. Also, focus on keyword research and user intent. Then, use everything you learn to create and automate your smart content.
Break your content management plan down by asking questions such as:
- What landing page will appear for a first-time visitor versus a lead or recurring customer?
- What blog posts will be recommended for a visitor to read next?
Your call-to-action (CTA) will need to change along with your audience, providing a more targeted way to engage with them at each stage.
Also, incorporate different types of interactive content that change along with your audiences, such as auto-fill forms, quizzes, or calculators.
Interactive content is a marketing tool geared towards boosting engagement and is a valuable component of any smart content strategy.
Wrap Up
When it comes to researching, creating, and implementing a successful content marketing strategy, you need smart content to boost your overall sales and customer engagement to new levels.
By personalizing what your website visitor experiences each time and designing your content to adapt to where consumers are in their buyer’s journey, you can make a long-lasting impact on how they interact with your brand going forward.
As a result, revenue will rise, and customer loyalty will continue to build, making your content a success in more ways than one.
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Why not give WriterAccess a try today? Sign up now and get 14 days of free access to our network of expert writers. Discover for yourself what great content can do for your business!
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