Personalization is What it Takes to Achieve True Customer Understanding

In the digital space, people make decisions in a matter of seconds. Deliver the right message, and you'll have a satisfied customer. Miss the mark and your prospect is gone in the blink of an eye. To your prospect your competitors are just a few clicks away.

74% of customers are annoyed when they don't receive personalized website content - according to Statista’s report.

This issue is prevalent because customers are constantly bombarded with messages, most of which are off target. Personalization or the act of tailoring content or offers to customers based on their preferences - addresses this issue perfectly in no time. While many brands can personalize the customer experience, most still struggle to scale their personalization efforts to engage with the customers.

Successful Utilization of Personalization with Automated Modular Content

The real challenge here is to achieve the full potential of personalization.

Then how to find the right approach to ensure the success of personalization? The answer here is - modular content. It is one highly effective approach to expand the life of content as it enables the marketing and sales teams to break more significant pieces of content into smaller pieces of highly targeted content.

In this blog, we will explore modular content and how marketers can leverage it to lead a successful digital personalization at scale.

Understanding the Modular Content

Modular content consists of separate pieces of writing. These particular pieces can be gathered to create lengthier pieces of content, or they can be left as shorter pieces by themselves. These various pieces can be combined in plenty of ways, resulting in newer content elements from the existing modules. Most importantly, you can create a lot of content from the same modules - expanding it as far as possible.

The usage of modular content first emerged in the first generation of web content management systems, and now it has become an integral part of the marketing mix. This type of content has the sole purpose of blending various combinations of content units in several kinds of media such as - landing pages, social media, and print.

This entire process of producing such content is known as Content modularization. With this unique approach, marketers don't need to wait for new content, creating greater consistency in content creation. Modularization helps improve personalization efforts and increase campaign creation speed, as marketers can easily use these pre-approved content blocks to build faster.

An Example of Modular Content

You've written a blog on customer experience trends and published it. Now, this one piece of content will attract a particular readership seeking a detailed piece. However, this isn't going to be ideal for readers who are just looking for a quick overview. By utilizing the modular content creation steps, the blog can be divided into several informative sections targeted at different audiences.

Utilizing the steps of modular content creation, you can break down the entire article into informative chunks like - 'get your customer experience right,' 'bring design thinking to improve your approach to CX,' and 'improve your CX with the right use of UX.' These shorter sections can then be targeted at subsets of the audience.

For example, imagine a client is specifically interested in decision-making. While putting together a resource for the marketing team, you can add a short section like "make better business decisions with CX'. This would be more useful to the client than a longer article because it caters to their particular needs.

Next, think that you need to create a couple of social posts. So, you can use the shorter units of each chapter as they are sections that can be utilized as social posts. Smaller modules can be used as tweets or quotes for more comprehensive marketing collateral.

Why is Modular Content a Big Deal?

Modular content is a super-productive approach to generating a massive chunk of content that can be tailored for individual use cases. Additionally, modular content creation is a time-saving strategy that benefits sales teams.

Sitecore was built from the start to favor a modular content approach. Many built-in functionalities are dedicated to delivering modular content. Let's highlight a few -

Sitecore’s Content Marketing Platform (part of Sitecore’s Content Hub) can truly make a significant difference to any brand's content lifecycle by enabling better use of processes, people, and technology.  Sitecore's headless architecture is perfect for optimizing several content operations seamlessly. For instance, headless architecture would make content detachable and decoupled, allowing it to be appropriately used across all channels rather than being kept in a specific area.

With Sitecore, different elements can be kept as separate components and then recombined for various other touchpoints and channels. This unique approach adds speed to the content lifecycle as marketers now have a collection of pre-approved content to select from. If combined with the correct technology, modular content can make content delivery better through the following approach -

Sitecore Content Hub can help in optimal content creation and management, making it simple for marketers to create and find finished content.

Sitecore Experience Edge can enable a robust delivery platform that delivers all the tools required to allocate content fast and efficiently across all channels.

Four Reasons Why Modular Content Is a Must for Driving Personalization

Modular content has several essential benefits over any traditional approach to content creation.

Modular content models make editors' lives easier by providing these advantages -

Publish Independently and Make Changes to the Content

Having a content platform means the process of publishing content is segregated from the development pipeline, so the content operation is optimized. The design and content elements are modular for easy repurpose and are kept in a unified content hub. 
Editors can make any changes and have a preview of it and then publish it without the help of a developer. This has a more significant impact on marketers and other content creators. They can focus on content creation and quality instead of the whereabouts of handling content in several places and liaising with developers. 

Build New Localized Pages Fast

One of the benefits of modular content is that it helps editors handle content being altered by different teams worldwide. Additionally, if you're working to make your content available in other languages, you can set up locales with the help of developers. Once done, translation can be completed through tools that manage how content can be translated and localized. Brands can quickly build up a repository of content to break into new markets with such content to keep the global charisma intact.

Deploy New Campaigns Faster

With a modular content strategy, you don't have to deal with rigid CMS architecture or infrastructure issues or create the same capability from zero for each service or product. This makes it easier to drop new digital experiences and features that broaden the visibility of the content by making it transposable. Now both teams can achieve meaningful and impactful work faster.

Conduct A/B Testing and Streamline Content as Required

With traditional CMSs, A/B testing would need a lot of developer involvement to produce and handle several digital experiences or landing pages, which can be tedious. Thanks to Sitecore's A/B testing capability in the Experience Optimization application, users can test a new version of any page against the previous version. Doing this would make it clear whether the latest version is working out for the site or not.

Say No to Boring Content

When content isn't kept in small, pre-approved blocks that marketers can quickly find and use, it generally creates content silos that lead to duplicated content and slow delivery times. Content delivery can be pretty slow when content isn't modular, but the creation process is sluggish.

A lack of content modularization can cost a brand as it will get challenging to adapt to the outside changes quickly, and it will derail the marketing efforts as there would be a lack of transparency into what other users are doing across the channels. This will result in more effort being spent on tasks that don't bring results.

Also, clunky content aspects can expose users to rapid changes and curb their flexibility, which can create obstacles like - not quickly adapting to external changes that can impact marketing initiatives.

Wrapping Up

There's no escaping it: modular content is the new standard, and most companies that care about personalized experiences will need it soon. For instance - several enterprises like Novartis and ASICS are utilizing modular content to support personalization at scale. Such is the power of modular content to make necessary and sudden changes to increasingly essential customer communications.

If your organization needs a way to optimize content reuse to put the right content in the right place, we can help you to get there! Learn more ways to combine modular content with content strategy and Sitecore Content Hub with Icreon's Sitecore services.