Session Recap

Content Marketing and Personalization: 2021 Outlook

February 18, 2021 — The virtual discussion featured a conversation with martech leaders — Jessie Dawson of Autodesk, Kristina Alfano of ClubCorp, and Cecilia Pérez-Verdía of UTD Center for BrainHealth — on organizing digital asset management systems, collecting the right data for effective personalization, and matching content with the right audiences.

Featured Experts

Jessie Dawson

Director of Content Technology

Autodesk

Kristina Alfano

Director of Email Marketing and Personalization

ClubCorp

Cecilia Pérez-Verdía

Digital Brand Manager

UTD Center for BrainHealth

Framework: The Decisioning Process of Content Personalization

Customer Insights

Who is our customer? Who are you trying to reach?
By understanding on a base level of who are customer is you can classify them into an existing segment or persona.

What do you know about them already?
Understand what you know about your customers already and utilize this information to drive your next decisions. This allows you to put the customer into context.

When/where is it best to meet them?
Based on the information you have collected about your customers, consider what channel makes the most sense to connect with them on. At what point in their journey are they most likely to consider your message?

Why even do personalization?
Personalization helps ensure that you can scale the effort to maximize your return. It can also give you insights into which KPIs you want to capture and measure for performance.

How do you bring this to life?
It pays to consider all the data points you want to gather about your customer and how you will use the data to create different segments and personas.

Content Activation

Organize your content and segmentation data to help you make better offers and actionable next steps in buyer journeys.
Curate specific content and offers for certain segments and personas, and preferably content that is responsive to where people are in their buyer/customer journey.

There is no smart marketing without data, but be selective.
Ensure you’re collecting the right information regarding your audience to effectively align it with your content.

Utilize a headless CMS system and strategy.
Headless CMS systems empower marketers to manage content that can be delivered to email, recruiting, social, website, etc. This allows you to manage and syndicate content throughout your martech stack instead of being limited to specific platform delivery.

Framework and Discussion: Advice From Our Experts

Each expert discussed the ways they utilize data for effective content personalization at their organizations. Here’s how they summed up their advice on activating content personalization:

Dawson: Be an “asset librarian” — organize and maximize your digital asset management system capabilities. Having a central storage and operating system allows you to manage your content once and efficiently deliver it to many platforms.

Alfano: There is no smart marketing without technology and data. Collect the right information. Start with what you have, leverage what is at your fingertips, and let the data work for you. Identify your pain points and pick the tools that will help you.

Pérez-Verdía: Organize your content library and prioritize who you need to target to figure out what content you can leverage in order to meet your strategy.