Content personalization services come in all shapes and sizes. You might know them under terms such as API-first marketing automation, customer experience management, or digital experience platform. They give you a toolbox for creating a personalized digital experience by recommending the right content to the right customers.
Bird's eye view of personalization with a headless CMS
A headless CMS like Kontent.ai is your content hub. It's where your content is stored. It's also where your apps get content from. Kontent.ai doesn't collect data about your customers or your website's visitors.If you want to provide unique experiences to different audiences, you need to create different versions of your content for them. Even twelve versions of a single page if that's what it takes.To tell your content versions apart, label your content with metadata that tells you for which contexts or for whom the content is meant.To show the right content to the right person, you need to recommend your content based on data. Specifically, the data you have on a given user. For example, what their interests are, what persona they might be, or how they got to your website.
Phase 1: Label your content
Before you can recommend your content, you need to identify which content is suited for which context and audience. To identify your content, you need to label (or tag) your content items with metadata.How you design the metadata depends on your content model and preferences. As a starting point, you can try adding metadata information by using taxonomies and multiple choice elements.Here are a few examples of what kind of metadata you might want to use to label your content:
Location information, such as region or geolocation
Audience information, such as user segments, persona, age group, or gender
Intent information, such as user goals
Marketing information, such as campaigns
Voice & tone information
With your content items properly labeled, you can start recommending content based on what you know about your users.
Phase 2: Find what's unique about your users
When a new user comes to your website, they're anonymous. Yet even anonymous users can have a personalized experience. For example, you can tailor the content they see based on UTM parameters of the first page they visit. For anything more advanced, you need data.You need to collect information about your users, much like Google Analytics tracks the performance of pages. You can use your company's CRM, a service like Intercom for in-app communication, or a marketing automation tool like Salesforce Pardot.Once a visitor reveals their identity by providing their email address via form submission, clicking a newsletter link, or registering for a webinar, the personalization possibilities become much broader.
Phase 3: Recommend content to users
When you've labeled your content and collected data about your users, it's time to show the right content to the right person.Depending on the complexity of your content and the collected data, you have a choice to make. Either create your own personalization logic or use an existing personalization tool to help you with it. In either case, you'll need to invest developer time to add personalization capabilities into your web or mobile apps.We recommend doing your own research so that you pick the approach that best fits your needs. The choice also depends on the level of content personalization you want to achieve. For more complex personalization scenarios, specialized services can make your personalization journey a whole lot easier.
Sign in with your Kontent.ai credentials or sign up for free to unlock the full lesson, track your progress, and access exclusive expert insights and tips!
if that's what it takes.
To tell your content versions apart, label your content with metadata that tells you for which contexts or for whom the content is meant.
To show the right content to the right person, you need to recommend your content based on data. Specifically, the data you have on a given user. For example, what their interests are, what persona they might be, or how they got to your website.
