Personalization in marcom and techcomm

Personalization—the delivery of custom, curated information tailored to an individual user’s needs—is becoming an important part of content strategies. Approaches to personalization vary depending on the type of content being served. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models, for example, will have very different requirements. Within an organization, you’ll also see marcom and techcomm groups personalize their content in their own ways. 

Marcom

In a marketing content strategy, personalization focuses on selling the right products to the right people. That means you’ll be studying your audience to understand their wants and labeling your customer base accordingly.

Your metrics will likely center around demographic information (such as age, location, or income) and common interests associated with each group. Some marketing departments create user personas to help direct their sales to the right people.

Techcomm

In techcomm, personalization is about putting the right content in front of people to help them use a product. This requires a different approach—instead of categorizing your user base, you’re more likely to categorize your content around what information a user needs. 

In this case, your metrics will probably focus on which products people own and how they use them. This might mean capturing information about users’ experience levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced) or roles (employee, administrator, owner).

Joining forces

What happens with these different approaches to personalization when your company adopts a unified enterprise content strategy? Your marcom and techcomm teams can work together by:

• Identifying areas of overlap. Both groups may be gathering similar metrics for different purposes, which means they can benefit from combining their data.
• Closing gaps. What metrics are missing, and how can both groups collect that information in ways that serve them?
• Coordinating strategies. Can some of your technical content (such as specifications) be used to help market your products? This gives techcomm and marcom an opportunity to align on their personalization strategies.

If you need to personalize content across your enterprise, talk to us.