Key excerpt...

We can see the market is in need of some powerful, progressive personalization tools. Progressive personalization would need to focus on understanding where a visitor is in a visitor flow and when the visitor is ready to progress to the next step.

This is distinctly different from onboarding methodologies and typical sales force/marketing automation platforms, in that the progressive personalization would not be focused on pushing visitors to the next step in the process. Rather, progressive personalization would focus on helping the visitor to complete each step in the process successfully.

Getting there won't be easy. Current personalization engines already endure a high degree of complexity in taking data from systems such as ad networks, remarketing platforms, and the ecommerce engine and using that data to deliver targeted imagery and content.

Enabling personalized marketing and sales to target visitors in a complex buy flow will require a heightened understanding of how prospects identify needs, educated themselves about solutions, and make buying decisions. Implementing a dynamic personalization engine that automates messaging in a complex buy flow will require new tools to be developed within the CMS platform and email marketing platform, as well as new levels of integration with CRM systems.

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's "Age of Context" may be the book of the decade for marketers, laying out a roadmap of what is to come.

Excerpt...

Age of Context presents the full integration of online and offline worlds, where data-driven algorithms, using input from users and environs, empower personalized offerings and choices. Scoble and Israel call this pinpoint marketing in their book.

Pinpoint marketing is the realization of big data and marketing automation. It revolves around permission-based access from users, and smart data-driven nurturing paths that offer highly customized solutions for individuals based on where they are, and what they are trying to do.

Scoble and Israel do a good job of warning readers about some of the pitfalls surrounding context. Specifically, they discuss gaffes driven by algorithms that range from annoying to super-creepy stalker-like updates. Both feel that the technology will slowly evolve (as will society) to embrace the Age of Context. Similarly, people will evolve to accept a world of anytime, anywhere computing, and its lack of privacy.

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Learn what 'smart content' actually is and get tips for implementing it in your marketing.

Digest...

What does 'smart content' even mean? In simple terms, smart content is content that adapts to the characteristics of the person consuming it. The goal of smart content is to provide a more relevant experience than could otherwise be achieved through static content.  

Smart content in marketing began with the personalization of email campaigns. Using data from a contact database, marketers could segment their mailing lists based on a recipient's characteristic. Moving to personalization across channels, particularly on websites, is an important next step in meeting customers' expectations and behavior.

You need smart rules to set the criteria for personalization and a smart content generator to pull up different pieces of content based on those smart rules. For example, a smart rule could be, "if the database says someone has already provided you with his or her company name, show them this piece of content." Smart content generators can then generate any type of content you'd like based on that rule: images, videos, text, call-to-action buttons etc.

Before you begin personalizing your website with smart content, make a list of things that would be useful for your leads and customers. What's useful?

1. Don't show me content I've already read or downloaded.
2. Elevate content that fits my industry, role, or persona.
3. Don't pitch me if I'm already a customer.
4. Make some data from my profile easy to find -- like my account manager or my purchase history. 

With recent posts mentioning the rise of contextual and implicit queries, we are now seeing a deep personalization of search. This takes many forms, and has very real implications for our work as marketers.

Conclusion...

Amit Singhal [of Google] is right when he says that "Answer," "Converse," and "Anticipate"—deep personalization of search, I called it—is going to change search as we know it.

Is this maybe the reason why the Search Team at Google is now called the Knowledge Team? Is this maybe the main reason for "Not Provided" keywords?

What I know is that personalization is already so heavily present in search that avoiding it in the name of a fading neutral search is not doing good SEO.

Moreover, personalized search is clearly telling us how SEO alone is not enough, but that content, social, and email marketing by themselves are also not enough to obtain a real and complete success in Internet marketing.

Personalized search is pushing us to hasten the destruction of silos between Internet marketing disciplines, and hopefully it will oblige marketers to change and embrace a more holistic way of promoting a business online.

Condensed...

What is Propen­sity Scor­ing and what does it do? What propen­sity scor­ing will do is give you the abil­ity to iden­tify high-value audi­ences which have the high­est like­li­hood of spe­cific actions such as con­ver­sion, email opens and responses, con­vert in store after an online ses­sion or even those who are most likely to pick up the phone and ring you up. Check out the release notes!

Mar­keters now have a way to iden­tify the best can­di­dates for their efforts and make more informed mar­ket­ing pur­chase deci­sions. What would you do if you could pre­dict between two email cam­paign pro­pos­als the one which was likely to have the high­est response and con­ver­sion rate? The impli­ca­tions are broad and go across chan­nels of data to be lever­aged wher­ever your cus­tomers are engag­ing with you brand.

Email Marketing - Gaps exist in digital marketers’ perceptions of how consumers want to engage with brands, what influences their purchase decisions, and how they view privacy, according to a recent report ...

Pertinent excerpt...

Customization Over Personalization

• Consumers surveyed said the volume of personalized marketing messages they receive has increased over the past five years. 
• The majority (63%) said personalization is now so common that they have grown numb to it, and 33% of consumers cited superficial personalization as one of their top annoyances. 
• Only 14% of consumers said they are more likely to read personally addressed messages, yet personalization remains the second most popular marketing strategy of the executives surveyed. 
• Though consumers are put off by superficial personalization, they do appreciate customized product recommendations. 

Condensed...

How do you start your personalization plan on the right foot?

1. Find out who they are: Extensive research helps reveal what makes your audience members tick. Your buyer personas make that data actionable.

2. Listen to what they have to say: Listening to discussions on social media is today’s most powerful research tool for content creation. On LinkedIn, active “groups” are gold mines of information about each of your segments.

3. Create segment-specific content: Use your buyer personas to create a content plan for each segment. This part of the process takes a look at what each audience segment is talking about — and what they aren’t talking about but might find interesting.

4. Form a distribution plan: With your segments in hand, reevaluate your distribution channels. Are you approaching them with your audience segments in mind?

Below are three ways LinkedIn works with brands to promote content marketing:

1. Leveraging brand pages and native ads

2. Taking part in the conversation: Not everyone considers the conversations they have in LinkedIn groups to be “content marketing.” But that’s exactly what it is — providing helpful content directly to an audience member without imposing a sales message.

3. Creating personalized social experiences: LinkedIn APIs have uncovered a world of uses for creating personalized social experiences. Just ask PwC Netherlands: The global consulting firm worked with LinkedIn to create a successful professional relationship game based on a user’s LinkedIn network. CMI says: LinkedIn imposes few limitations on content marketers. Extending personalization beyond the walls of the professional network is a realistic goal that you can make happen with LinkedIn APIs.

The industry is waking up to the fact that emails need to be personalised and targeted in order to engage customers, but what does this really mean? In

Digest...

Step 1 – Create a profile: Clearly identify and classify visitors by monitoring and remembering their behaviour. There are tools that let marketers automatically record visitors’ individual behaviours as part of a ‘customer history’ record.

Step 2 – Target:  The marketer can set up simple targeting ‘rules’ (one by one as needed) so, for example, a rule might say “target people who have looked at brand A more than 15 times”, “target visitors who have been visiting for 2 months but have not purchased” or “target visitors who have purchased but not for 3 months”. Then the marketer will communicate to the system what content they want to try on each segment.

Step 3 – See what works: Gathering this data on which content delivers the best results from this target segment (and the control group) is useful to marketers that then need to look at conversion rates, number of sale and, basket size to make their decision.

Dynamic content is the future of website development and content creation. Tips for leveraging it’s benefits and mitigating risks.

Excerpted...

The first thing to consider is what areas of your website should be dynamic. Should it start with a form and calls to action or are there more powerful areas where dynamic content would make an impact?

The second thing to consider is HOW you will segment your dynamic content. There are a variety of ways you can segment your audiences to create dynamic content. Marketo put together an excellent list of options in this post that was incredibly comprehensive and better than what I would’ve provided, so I’ve included it here.

How do we embrace the new world without completely ushering out the old?

Key excerpt...

As marketing practitioners, we now have technology to automate email campaigns to connect with clients and prospects. We're able to communicate frequently and customize our messages to be more relevant. In fact, the technology allows us to create emails that mimic personalized handwritten letters. Here are a few ways we're able to be more personalized with mass emails:

• Field insertion. We're able to insert first names, or other fields from our database, into the email to give it more of a personalized feel.
• Dynamic image insertion. If we're sending a regionalized email out with an image, we can actually deliver the image most relevant to the recipient's location.
• Signatures. Email campaigns can seem like they're coming directly from a person the recipient knows at a company with dynamic signatures, even when the same email is centrally distributed from the marketing team.
• Drip campaigns. An email can actually be triggered based on certain behavior or activity, essentially mimicking a conversation.

One of the things that make marketing both challenging and interesting is the dynamic nature of its art and science. Customer preferences change over time, as do their buying patterns; what worked last year may not work this year, or at least may not work as well. In the meantime, you may discover some rich new source of influence or establish better internal alignment that vastly improves marketing outcomes. This Analyst Insight presents a look at the marketing executive’s agenda for 2013 based on research data collected throughout 2012 across multiple disciplines, from social media marketing and web experience management, to marketing lead management, data analytics for Marketing, and Sales and Marketing alignment.

Here are five opportunities for personalized marketing through automation that go beyond email marketing:

-Personalized Calls to Action

-Hyper-Targeted Emails

-Social Media Integration

-Persona-Driven Content

-Dynamic Landing Page Forms