Write down the metadata

Boris Pocatko, Tomas Nosek

5 minutes

0% complete

Preparing personalized customer journeys can’t be done randomly. When you visit your favorite smaller shop every morning, the owner or employees there probably know you. The better ones even know your name, maybe allergies, personality, etc. This is how personalized customer journeys are done in smaller, face-to-face shops. But how can you do this in your online business?

Personalize content online

For larger online companies, personalization depends on quality metadata. Speaking of content, refrain from designing your metadata based on existing navigation or categorization in existing projects. Take a step back and have a look at your customer journeys at first, and focus on categories and navigation at the end. Map your content types to your customer journey steps and explore how to target these steps with your content effectively. The most basic personalization form can be set up by adding a Persona element to the content types aimed at specific personas. In the example, it’s the CTA content type. For the Article, Blog post, and Widget - Curated content types, the example enables authors to choose from different Voice & tone options that later change the webpage layout for the viewers.

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A different way to implement personas is to tag content items and specify which tags are typical for a given persona in a separate content item. You can also add buyer decision

stages as a taxonomy. Those should cover your basic needs, but depending on how targeted you want to be, there might be more.

Consider the internal point of view as well

It doesn’t matter how many metadata elements you have if no one uses them. The process of adding content and metadata should be logical and straightforward:

Limit what content types can be used where – set validation rules so that the information is correctly included according to the content type.
Set up guidelines for all nontrivial or important elements – use screenshots to show how an element or content type will be shown on various frontends, and describe the voice and tone.
Set up automated tools for keyword extraction – having automated tools can help minimize manual work. This approach is great for SEO-related elements represented by content type snippets.
Use snippets for repeated use of elements – if you notice other elements being used in the same content types as the SEO metadata, consider moving them into the snippet. Those elements could be taxonomies for website navigation, menus, URL slugs, etc.

Advantages of using content type snippetsGrouping elements into content type snippets allows you to extend the list of elements in one place and gives your front end developers a unified data set for all content types. This helps to build a highly flexible content model.

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