Today’s blog takes a look at content – a critical element that impacts all steps of the “Idea to Doorstep” continuum.

Engaging, high-quality content is one of the most powerful assets you have to differentiate your digital marketing efforts, your website and the overall shopping experience. According to a 2016 FitForCommerce survey, retail and brand executives agreed that a strong content strategy is critical to success.

Creating a strong content strategy requires diligent evaluation of how your customers navigate through the decision-making process and identification of the touchpoints where relevant and personalized content will inspire and drive conversions. Great content is critical, but it falls short if it is not relevant to your customers and their context. With the right data, content assets, and technology in place, you can determine the content and personalization strategy that is right for your customers.

Smart retailers invest in tools that enable them to streamline content creation, centralize content assets, collaborate across the organization, and capture and leverage data to personalize customer acquisition and retention strategies, and the overall shopping experience.

Guest Post by Meyar Sheik, CEO & Co-founder, Certona

As retail marketers are turning focus to connecting with shoppers via digital channels, they’re ramping up content and shoppers are experiencing overload. Stand out by delivering meaningful, personalized content. Retailers who leverage content personalization can reduce the unnecessary noise and ensure all shoppers receive their preferred content (images, offers, articles and videos) at the right time in the shopping journey.

Content Personalization is a strategy that aims to relieve resource bandwidth challenges by automating marketing efforts. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), behavioral profiling, machine learning and contextual information, marketers can present the most relevant content increasing engagement and conversions.

The most powerful capability of content personalization is the real-time aspect of behavioral profiling and predictive targeting. Combining real-time shopper data with historical information lets marketers leverage deep customer profiles improving targeting and automating individualized messaging, product content and promotions. By layering in shopper contextual information such as physical location, time of day and weather, marketers can increase page views while reducing abandonment rates through personalizing hero shots, promotions, articles, videos, buying guides and more to drive higher engagement.

Marketers should also leverage these same personalization techniques to optimize their outbound content marketing initiatives. Avoid displaying irrelevant re-targeting ads, email communications and landing pages that don’t resognate with shoppers.

By understanding individual preferences and shopping behaviors, marketers can improve messaging and display the right content within the current shopping session or at the point of email open.

A/B and multivariate testing is an important aspect of content personalization. Content marketers should be able to quickly understand the impact of their initiatives to take the guesswork out of delivering the right targeted content.

As AI gains momentum, its influence on the future of content personalization is bright. We’ll see a convergence of automated real-time testing and optimization as well as improvements around real-time cross-channel interactions specifically offline and online integrations. Currently, real-time testing requires resources to manually decide and curate what needs to be tested. This is a time-consuming process which can be a limiting factor. By leveraging real-time behavioral data and predictive analytics to automate what tests should be introduced based on real-time consumer insights, marketers can streamline processes and expand past previous testing limitations.

Shopper intent frequently changes so ensuring a real-time understanding of their needs and preferences provides a leg up for marketing initiatives.

The more retailers know about their customers’ shopping behaviors, the more relevant and individualized the experience. This drives significant increases in customer engagement, loyalty and lifetime value.