How to optimise your website UX with smart content

What is smart content and how can it help improve the user experience of your digital offerings?

But what exactly is smart content? And how can you use smart content to optimise your digital experiences and your user experience?

Let’s say you work for a business that offers services to different industries, like retail, energy, and healthcare. Smart content allows prospects from the retail industry to see articles about shopping trends when they visit your front page, while prospects from the energy and healthcare industries sees content about their respective interests.

Thus, smart content is tightly knit with personalisation and user experience, allowing for content that is:

By now you might be convinced that smart content sounds, well, smart. But how do you achieve this highly specialised and targeted strategy? Below we’ll go through some building blocks you should know about and have in place to get started.

Without a plan, you won’t get anywhere. First off, decide what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing and your digital experiences. What content makes sense to personalise and target to your preferred groups, what content should be present for everyone?

Also, you must go through the hard and tedious work of defining buyer personas, map and tag your current and future content, and set up logic to determine what will be shown to whom, and where.

You should be aware that the users of your digital experiences vary widely, from completely anonymous visitors to logged-in customers, and that the different levels present different challenges and advantages. This fact is independent of industry and work function.

Anonymous users: It is obviously difficult to present smart content to completely anonymous users. A user is anonymous if it’s the first time he or she visits your digital experiences, if it’s a new computer or if cookies have been erased, or if he or she uses anti-tracking software.

One example of smart content use in regard to IP is to present content with different languages to different locations, based on the visitor’s IP. This is relatively safe and harmless.

Cookie users: When users visit your digital experiences over time and leave their traces, either by navigating or filling out simple forms, they can be identified by cookies. A cookie is a tiny text file that is downloaded and stored on the local drive of the users in question. When you’re visiting a website you have been to before and see a form already filled out with your credentials, that’s cookies at work.

With cookie users you can see their interests over time and tailor content based on what they appreciate. If a user is constantly visiting the kitchen section of an online interior store, it makes sense to show articles, boxes, or ads with kitchen appliances across your site to this group.

However, be wary when using smart content. If Charlie the chef finds the front page of the interior store interesting and shares it to some chef buddies of his, they might see a completely different site, as they probably don’t have any previous experience with it.

Logged-in user: This final echelon of users present more possibilities than the previous two. These kinds of people have decided to set up a user account at your digital experience — the most common examples being online banks or online stores, like Amazon.

When users are logged in, you get a full utilisation of CRM information, as well as access to core systems. Now you can personalise even more, based on a detailed and certain navigation history for e-commerce, prompting relevant recommendations. Or if you’re fitting a specific demographics, you can get personalised advices or offers in banking and insurance while navigating your online banking site.

For the fullest use of smart content, the systems of your organisation need to speak together, they need to have some type of integration. To present the right content to the right user at the right time, your digital offering must present a tagged piece of content, corresponding with a similar tag from your customer database, and so on.

A user segmentation is not the same as user levels. User levels describe what level of knowledge you have about the users, and limits the methods you can use to reach out to them. A user segmentation, however, takes for granted that you know something about your users, thereby enabling segmentation by factors like:

This is the juicy part of smart content planning. In this step you can “make or break” your future endeavours. If you want to reach out to executives of large businesses in the manufacturing industry, you can do this with the right inputs from all your systems.

On the other hand, it makes little sense to target 18 year olds with the title “student” from a small business if you want to reach out to the aforementioned group. Use segmentation wisely.

This could be done by simply tagging your content in your digital experience platform in a rather straightforward process: if it fits tea lovers, tag it with “tea”, if it fits coffee lovers, tag it with “coffee.” Also remember to have regular quality checks, to ensure that your content is correctly tagged and up-to-date.

Don’t over-use smart content. Heavy personalisation can confuse users, rather than help them. A matching might be totally wrong, or you have the issue of sharing what you think is a static piece of content, as mentioned earlier. If you are going to use it widely, reserve it for your logged-in users, if possible.

If you don’t have the option of pursuing a dedicated customer data platform, you can research whether or not your current CMS or e-commerce system features the functionality natively.

Be aware that this might be a proprietary solution and can keep your digital experiences in silos. However, many platforms support custom development and tailored solutions, but they are in danger of being more hard-coded — meaning more manual maintenance.

Smart content can be a great asset to your digital experiences and organisation, if used properly. Before starting out, consider what really drives value for your business through personalisation.

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