One thing is clear: Modern consumers and B2B buyers want a personalized experience online.
And the stats back it up. seventy-two percent of customers will only engage with personalized messaging.
And over ninety percent of consumers have discontinued communications with a company because of irrelevant messaging.
So how do you create a personalized experience? You can lean on segmentation to provide personalized outreach, engagement, and customer service.
However, to go deeper, you can rely on your CRM to predict customer behavior and track engagement.
And here’s where smart content comes in. When you use smart content on your website, users see what you want them to see and, more importantly, what they want to see.
In this post, we’ll discuss what smart content is, what the benefits are, and whether smart content is still relevant in the current market.
Using a CRM like HubSpot, you can create and deliver personalized and targeted content to your audience based on specific conditions and criteria.
Here are a few examples of how smart content might work on HubSpot:
At Lean Labs, we use smart content for clients. For example, for one of our clients, we set up CTAs so that once someone converts on an offer, we add them to a list. We use that list membership as a rule so they don’t see the same offer again. They’d only get the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Related: 5 Tips for Implementing and Optimizing Smart CTAs
This stops them from seeing a CTA they won’t convert on again, helping to keep our data clean. It also increases the chances of moving them through the buyer’s journey.
Personalized content performs better.
When content is more relevant and valuable to consumers, they’re more likely to engage and take the desired action, such as filing out a form. Most consumers use a filter. They’ll consume a piece of content and either dismiss it, gloss over it without taking the next step, or say, “Hey, that’s me!”
Content that’s intuitive and nudges consumers along the buyer journey builds relationships with less effort.
Speaking of the buyer journey, how does smart content play a role? You might start with relevant blog content, but content for the buyer journey doesn’t stop there. Use smart content throughout the buyer journey.
Tailor your content to the specific stage of the buyer’s journey that each lead is in. For example, early-stage leads might need more educational content, while later-stage leads might be more interested in product demos or pricing information.
Leads often bounce back and forth between funnel stages. They might visit your website and take the desired action to become a lead, but not become an MQL.
All is not lost.
If they’re not ready to purchase straight away, they might still come back to your website and continue their journey.
With smart content, you can provide additional value through relevant offers, targeted CTAs, and email campaigns that re-engage and re-establish the relationship with the lead.
Pro tip: Use automation tools to deliver your lead nurturing content and trigger personalized content based on specific actions or behaviors. This saves time and ensures that your content is delivered to the right people at the right time.
You can build trust with a personalized experience. The more you understand your customers’ needs, the more they trust you.
How does this translate to sales?
Like your other marketing efforts, smart content works, but only if it’s part of an overall strategy. You don’t want to overdo smart content or think it’s a silver bullet.
Related: Your Guide to Developing a Go to Market Strategy: 8 Simple Steps
Every piece of content you produce, smart or otherwise, should add to your user’s experience. Don’t make assumptions based solely on your ICP. Experiment, use data, and ask your current customers what drove them to convert on an offer. What resonated with them? What did they find valuable?
With a clean, well-managed database, you’ll easily segment your audience and succeed with smart content. Here are a few things to consider:
Smart content is a robust tool to add to your arsenal. It should be part of your strategy, especially when using a CRM platform like HubSpot.
However, proceed with caution.
Cookies make smart content work, and many people are now switching cookies off because they’re increasingly worried about what companies do with their personal data.
What else drives conversion? You can use various strategies, but you need to start with a stunning website. Lean Labs creates websites using HubSpot CMS, and you can too. You can even start for free now!
Related: How We Built a 5-Page Microsite in 1 Day With HubSpot’s Free CMS Tools + Free Theme
Want to create a stunning website that links to a complete CRM solution and start using smart content today? Book a HubSpot meeting with us at Lean Labs! We’ll show you how to set up HubSpot the right way the first time. You might even save 60% on HubSpot, too.
Here’s the link: HubSpot Meeting