Crafting Content for The Customer Journey

Austin Distel, Chief Marketing Officer at Proof, and MarketMuse Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Coyle discuss how to craft content for the customer journey and the success Proof has had in applying personalization to their own site.

The Value of Experience

Turning your product into an experience is a guaranteed way to increase its value. Austin uses a great analogy here. The amount of grapes (the commodity) that go into a bottle of wine cost 37 cents. The wine (product) itself costs $10 in a store. In a restaurant that same bottle of wine is now $40, included as part of a service. Transform that service into an experience (say a cruise with a sommelier matching the wine and providing the story behind it) and the price jumps to $185.

Serving Multiple Personas Hurts Conversion Rates

Trying to coordinate dozens of landing pages and audiences is chaotic. The typical solution is to build separate landing pages for each situation, duplicating them for each keyword. Companies are starting to solve the problem using personalization.

Dumb vs Smart Websites

Dumb websites are restricted to only acquiring customers through education and conversion. Smart websites take this a step further to retain customers (through activation and engagement), and encourage them to amplify (through expansion and referral).

Content Examples

Personalization can be used in numerous cases including sales lead generation (CTA’s), recovering abandoned signups, delighting current customers, and upgrades.

Result of Personalization

So does personalization work? Proof experience a 54% increase in demo registrations and a 32% increase in new trials.

Three Steps to Personalize the Customer Journey

Here are the three critical steps to personalizing the customer journey.

1. Collect and unify data
2. Personalization strategy
3. Implementation and tracking

The three core data categories to target personalization are:

1. Company (revenue, employees, tech stack, industry)
2. Personal (income, job title, age, interests)
3. Behaviour (lifecycle, activity, traffic source, lead score)