Delivering customized content across channels has become the gold standard for modern marketers. Achieving this, however, is very complex given the number of touch points a customer has with a brand. Multiple digital channels, offline or in-person activity, and sales interactions all need to be coordinated to effectively engage and serve our customers. As with most strategic efforts, creating a cohesive omnichannel experience relies on a few core practices leading up to the activation of your content. We’ll review the critical areas to focus on to help move from one-off, disjointed communications to a more personalized and relevant experience.
3 Essential Steps for Delivering Customized Content
Step 1: Prioritize the Customized Cross-Channel Experiences
Taking the time to prioritize your audiences, campaigns, and content for customized cross-channel experiences is crucial. Despite the term “omnichannel”, it is difficult to effectively do everything for all customers at once. Prioritizing these areas will help develop a realistic plan to ramp up customized content capabilities. By aligning business stakeholders around specific efforts, marketers can develop and execute experiences that have a positive business impact and support key objectives. To provide the insights needed to deliver customized content across channels, consider these questions when prioritizing where to start (or go next) with your cross-channel strategy:
- What goals and objectives is the business trying to achieve? Where do we need to focus efforts to be successful?
- What are the target KPIs (key performance indicators)?
- Who is our target audience or target accounts?
- Who are the key decision makers and influencers?
- What insights do they need to help solve their business challenge or need? What are the key messages to deliver?
- Where do our target audiences engage with the business? Which channels are most effective or impactful?
It may be tempting to start leveraging personalization capabilities in various marketing platforms but without an agreed prioritization of who, what, and when, you could just be creating a scattered approach that isn’t relevant or effective. To help with prioritization, a good understanding of your current state is also needed.
Step 2: Evaluate The Tech & Data That Drives Customized Cross-Channel Experiences
Regular evaluation of existing technology platforms and data is always a best practice for any organization. Having these insights as you ramp up cross-channel activities becomes crucial. Without knowing where gaps exist, you cannot properly plan or execute effective customized content across channels.
Start by reviewing your martech stack against your desired use cases for cross-channel personalization. Think about the customer experience in addition to the level of effort to deliver those experiences.
- Is your technology and data integrated to support real time personalization?
- What are the gaps in the cross-channel experience today? Does your technology roadmap address these gaps?
- Can you easily adapt customer journeys based on behavior or newly received information?
- Can you seamlessly move between channels to target individuals where and when they are consuming your content?
- Do any of your platforms have AI or ML capabilities that are relevant to creating customized experiences? Are you utilizing those capabilities?
- Do you track offline touchpoints? Is this information actionable?
- Is all activity data easily accessible for sales to have meaningful 1:1 interactions?
Reaching out to non technical stakeholders to understand their priorities and desired capabilities will help to define use cases as well as provide valuable insights on the current state. There could be opportunities to educate users on what is possible today if certain features or functionalities are not being leveraged.
Customer and account data can also make or break your ability to create customized experiences in any one channel, let alone scaling across multiple channels. Standardized and complete data is the first step for customized experiences. To go beyond basic personalization, you’ll need to take into consideration how timely and actionable your data is. By digging in and answering these questions, you can have a deeper understanding of your ability to deliver the desired experiences.
- What are the ideal areas or use cases for customization? Think about demographic and engagement data when brainstorming.
- What data do we collect today and how are we already using it?
- What are the known gaps or weak spots within our data? What are the strengths?
- What are the sources of our data? First party data is best, but do you leverage any third party or intent data?
- How often is the data updated? Are there any real-time triggers or events?
- Does the data require any augmentation or manipulation to leverage it effectively?
- Are contacts and accounts properly linked to leverage key account data when engaging individuals?
- Based on the regions we operate in, are there data privacy regulations to take into consideration?
This step may uncover a large number of items to address. If you find yourself in this predicament, go back to the prioritization work to help focus on the technology or data that will have the most impact.
Step 3: Measure & Optimize Customized Cross-Channel Experiences
Whether a campaign is run in a single channel or multiple channels, the best practice is to always create a solid measurement and optimization plan. Before launching any new customized experiences, be sure to define how to measure success. These questions can be helpful as you solidify your approach:
- What are the key insights to provide, or the questions we need to answer?
- What reporting or feedback loops are in place? Are there ones we have to build?
- Is this a new data point or do we have a benchmark to measure against?
- What gaps or pain points do we have related to reporting & measurement?
- How often will we report on the performance? And at what depth?
- What format or tool will be used for measurement and how will stakeholders access the information?
Alongside measurement, it is also a best practice to have a testing and optimization plan when creating customized cross-channel experiences. Testing messages, call to actions, and design elements is something all modern marketing teams should practice. When it comes to cross-channel experiences, optimizing the channels and sequence of touchpoints is another opportunity to explore. This will allow you to improve the overall customer experience as well as optimize budget and resources needed to deliver those experiences.
Taking the time to step back to gain a deeper understanding of the business needs and capabilities around delivering customized content across channels is critical to long term success. Without this information the customer experience will suffer and teams will fall back onto practices that may not be beneficial for the business. If you are planning, or looking to augment your cross-channel programs and would like additional guidance or support, please reach out – we’re always here to help.
