Struggling With Personalization? How AI-Driven Content Intelligence Can Rev up Your Marketing

Personalization is a major priority for brands, but most have hit a wall with effectiveness. Rethink your opportunity by looking inward first and understanding your content as well as your customer, says David Schweer, director of product marketing, Aprimo.

Two years ago, Gartner reportedOpens a new window that by 2020, over 80% of marketers expected to be competing on the basis of customer experience (CX). Despite the tremendous disruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, this expectation still holds, and for a good reason: the customer experience remains the number one source of competitive advantage for many brands, especially in tough times.

The closest recent comparison to current day events, the Great Recession that began in 2008, was a similarly disruptive time period. During that recession, according to global consulting firm McKinseyOpens a new window , “companies that prioritized customer experience realized three times the shareholder returns compared to the companies that did not”.

For consumers, their expectations have only risen as well.  According to Salesforce’s 2020 State of Marketing reportOpens a new window , almost 70% of consumers globally expect a connected experience across different channels.

This is the intersection of the personalization problem: companies know the customer experience is a differentiating capability, but market innovation and customer demands make it hard to scale.

Learn More: Why a New Kind of Data-Driven Personalization Is Critical To a Virtual Economy

The Myth of the “Good Enough” Personalization

Scale, defined here as being able to deliver a personalized experience to every customer where they want, is critical because a just “good enough” customer experience is almost never good enough for customers. A studyOpens a new window conducted by web CMS provider Acquia found that 82% of companies think they are delivering an exceptional customer experience—but only 10% of their customers agree! This disconnect invites your customers to look elsewhere, something they readily do.

The challenge for marketers is that a customer experience is directly tied to a customer feeling like a company study is talking directly to them with a message or offering. Despite major advances in technology and the general trend towards the digitization of the world, your customer experience remains a blend of digital capability and human touch.

Personalization: A Combination of Data and Content

Personalization can mean different things depending on your starting point, but a broad vision is simply getting the right content, with the right tone, to the right customer, at the right time. That means you must be able to connect what you know about your customer (e.g., customer data) with something to send them (e.g., your content) to deliver a personalized content experience that strikes all the right chords and increases the likelihood your customer takes the action you want them to do.

Personalized content is at the intersection of content and customer data.

The concept is simple, but as most practitioners know, whether you are in marketing, IT, or another service department, it is really difficult to implement! Another GartnerOpens a new window prediction is that by 2025, “80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both”.

You should not be surprised, as ForresterOpens a new window notes that, “layer in resource constraints and organizational silos — since personalization can manifest in marketing, service, sales, product, and other types of experiences — and it is no wonder personalization is a challenge.”

Likely, marketing has made big investments in acquiring, organizing, and activating customer data, and most companies will start to see decreasing rates of return on further investment in customer data. So, instead of giving up on your personalization efforts, rethink the problem by adding in an untapped source of rich data: your content data!

And artificial intelligence (AI) is just the tool to help you do that.

The Use Case: Artificial Intelligence and Content

AI is an extremely broad term and can be applied to everything from deriving novel vaccines to Siri on your iPhone. The AI application here is when you upload content to something that is AI-enabled, such as an enterprise Digital Asset Management solution. It can auto-tag the content in seconds and put it in its proper organizational place (e.g., the right folder). It does this by using a pre-determined library of terms (in multiple languages) that further describe an image, or use speech-to-text capabilities to identify and tag the person speaking in an audio clip as well as transcribe the words and make it ‘searchable’.

AI also can “read” an image and perform sentiment analysis. This would enable the AI solution to automatically add other types of sentiment-oriented descriptive tags, such as “happy child” or “sleepy child”, to an image of a child. That would help me quickly find the image I want by searching using these emotional terms to ensure I choose the most accurate image for my project.

Artificial Intelligence Leads To Content Intelligence

Forrester ResearchOpens a new window definitively states, “there is no personalization without content intelligence”. Content intelligence is roughly defined as knowing your content as well as you know your customer so you can use and reuse content more often and in all the right places and moments.

For those new to content data, we are specifically talking about all those descriptor words (hopefully) accompanying a piece of content. Another common term is content metadata—and the more of it you have, the more you know about your content and the more “content intelligence” you possess.

Now you might be thinking, “yes, but that work is so tedious, and it takes ages to do!” and you would be right if you only relied only on human effort to do the work. That is why AI is so revolutionary.

So, what does it look like to marry customer data and content data? Let us say you have ten attributes, or you know ten things about one of your customers. If you only know one thing about the content you have created, such as the title, or a file name, you have ten potential matches (10 x 1). But, most content has a lot of visually descriptive and non-visual data attached to it (e.g., part of a specific campaign, in a specific location, etc.) that can form more combinations. So, if you know ten things about your content to go along with ten things about your customer, you have 100 different potential combinations to create.

Learn More: Personalization vs Data Privacy: What Is The Future of Customer Experiences in a Post-Pandemic World

Need To Know the Business Case? Here It Is

We talked earlier that “good enough” for your CX is not enough, and it can mean a lot for your organization financially.

Forrester ResearchOpens a new window found that a 1-point improvement in its CX index can mean a positive revenue increase of:

Over $1 billion for an automotive company

Almost $500 million for a retailer

About $350 million for a hotel

And just over $100 million for a bank

Making the commitment to a differentiated customer experience can accelerate revenue growth regardless of your industry. The easiest, most cost-effective way for you to do this in 2021 and beyond is by increasing your organization’s content intelligence.