7 critical steps to creating personalised content

By 2024, digital natives will dominate the consumer pool. For marketers, this means preparing for a shift in behaviour and expectations – and a need for highly personalised content. Australian Business Growth Fund CMO Trisca Scott-Branagan shares how you can get there.

Marketing is a lot like hiking, according Trisca Scott-Branagan. There’s no such thing as bad weather, just poor preparation. And preparation is one of the most important elements in marketing.

“It doesn't matter what the weather or your competitors or executives throw at you,” Trisca explains. “When you're prepared and you've got your toolkit, there's nothing you can’t get through.”

Over the past 20 years, Trisca’s career has seen her lead high-performing marketing teams across finance, professional services and education – and has earned her a place among the coveted CMO50 three times, including twice in the Top 10.

In March 2022, ADMA IQ students got a chance to gain practical insights and tips from Trisca during ADMA’s iconic Digital Marketing Certificate (DMC). As part of the 10-week certificate course, students get the opportunity to learn first-hand from the country’s top marketing leaders, like Trisca, through online lectures.

In her session, Trisca shared how marketers can prepare for the new consumer landscape and develop personalised, relevant content that connects with audiences. She also walked students through her seven steps to creating personalised content.

Here they are,

Step 1. Set Goals

A marketer’s job, as Trisca pointed out, is to build a brand and revenue.

“We need to invest at least 20% of our budget in brand because that builds revenue in the long-term. Just spending money on generating revenue is like a drug – you get an immediate hit as soon as you put the money down; but as soon as you stop the campaign, the revenue falls off.”

The trick, Trisca said, is to bring the two together so you get a long-term lift in revenue that sustains both. You need to align your goals against these two focus areas to create a balance.

Step 2. Competitor Analysis

To understand the landscape you’re working in, you need to understand your competitors.

For Trisca, this means finding out as much as she can about them.

“I talk to colleagues, people in my network, draw on available research and do my own desktop research online. I look at their website and social media, physically go to their events to see what they were doing, to truly understand who their target market is.”

She also reviews their products and services, digital assets and their content – and asks questions such as:

• How good are these products? Does it really have quality?

• Where are they playing?

• Where are their strengths?

• What are they known for? What do they want to be known for?

• What are they talking about in their content?

• Are they communicating in a traditional way or are they edgy? Does that tie with their brand and who their target market is?

Trisca suggests signing up or subscribing to your competitors’ content, buying their products and/or using their services.

“If I can, I do all these things to get the full experience. This gives me a wonderful platform to talk with confidence and authority about our place in the market and how it compares to our competitors.”

Step 3. Understand Segments and Develop Personas

Trisca looks at a number of things when developing segments and personas.

“In the B2B world, job titles are really important. You also look at the ideal customer profile which is the business itself. Ask what is the ideal business you want to sell to – by revenue, size, location or their technology stack,” Trisca explained.

In the B2C world, she suggests looking at geo-demographics and psychographics, and understanding where people are in their journey.

And regardless of where you play, you need to look at motivation.

“What are they motivated about? What is getting them out of bed? Why are they even considering your product? What's the trigger point for them to need your product? Then think about how to engage them on the channels they're hanging out on.”

Step 4. Map Your Customer Journey

Journey mapping helps you understand how customers move through your organisation – not just on a sales, but also a services and operations too.

Trisca looks at six areas:

1. Lead generation

2. On-boarding

3. Servicing

4. Cross-sell

5. Intermediaries - organisations you sell-through

6. Third party - organisations you sell with

“When it comes to journey mapping, lead generation is often where businesses focus first. But another important area is onboarding. I've often found that while marketing is doing a great job attracting new customers, the company is losing many prospects because of a poor onboarding experience. When you plug those onboarding holes, you stand to gain a lot more customers and make a lot more revenue.”

When it comes to a sales journey, map out your pipeline from awareness to purchase and work through the actions that prospects need to take in order to make a purchase with your organisation.

“And most importantly, think about their pain points and mindset, because this is where the story comes to life – and where you can really make a difference. Ask why they are not moving to the next phase of the journey,” Trisca advised.

She then recommends you dive deep into those pain points and mindsets to work out what you need to do to shift them one step forward.

Step 5. Develop Key Messages

Often, consumers need the right message at the right time to make a mind-shift. Based on the journeys you’ve mapped, work out what key message they need conveyed to help them through each step; then compile these together to develop a message hierarchy that supports their entire journey.

“You can only share one message at a time, so prioritise. Often you will see where those messages overlap across different journeys, pain points and lead states. That’s when you get a really good picture of the content you need to produce for where that person is, at that point in time,” said Trisca.

Step 6. Build Your Content

Once you have your key messages, you need to work out how you’re going to build the content around them, keeping in mind the channels the content will appear in.

“Some things are more expensive to produce than others. If you have a limited budget, you can't build a different content type for every single message. So again, you need to prioritise.

“Sales talking points and articles are a lot more cost effective and affordable to do. And while video is more expensive, it is highly immersive. If you’re investing in video, think about how you can create multiple shorter videos from a longer video as different channels are more conducive to longer-form or shorter-form videos. It’s important know what channels you will be leveraging in advance so you can develop content assets that are appropriate for the environment they will appear in.”

As you build out your content, remember the golden rule “personalisation is about getting the right message, at the right time, in the right channels, to the right person.” How you go about getting this content into the market through paid, owned and earned media, is for another topic of discussion.

Step 7. Set Up Metrics

Now that you’ve done the work, you need to make sure it’s delivering to your brand and revenue goals. The two areas that Trisca focuses on when setting her metrics are inputs and impact.

“Inputs are what marketing has put out into the market. I look at how they’re performing at the channel level – earned, owned and paid. I also look at how those channels, content types and call to actions are performing. I’ll analyse what's performing and what isn’t, then look at it from a segment or persona level.”

Trisca also assesses what impact the content has had on the goals she had set around brand and revenue.

“Simplistically, how people think and feel about your brand can give you an indication of what people intend to do in the future; versus revenue, which tells you exactly what they have done.”

Set yourself up for success and learn from marketing masters like Trisca through Australia’s most sought-after Digital Marketing Certificate. In this exclusive 10-week virtual course, the country’s top CMOs will become your personal mentors, helping you supercharge your digital marketing skills.

Get practical insights, build a detailed digital marketing plan for your business and connect and network with peers and industry leaders.

Don’t miss the next intake of DMC, starting 7 June. Places are strictly limited, so register today.