3 More Tech Trends for Content Marketing – Part 2

Welcome! We’re so glad you found us. We previously wrote a blog called “Our Top Three Tech Trends for Content Marketing”, and we discussed just that. Today we bring you part 2, because there are just so many tech trends out there. As a business, it’s important to use these technologies to stay ahead of your competitors.

Here are Your 3 Content Marketing Tech Trends:

1.    Data Analytics & Customer Personas

Any business with an online presence (and in this day and age, that should be everyone) knows the importance of using customer data to help guide business decisions. Many brands are beginning to make data analytics a priority, however, marketers still have a ways to go, says Curtis Tingle, CMO of intelligent media delivery company Valassis.

Access to customer data goes far beyond simple demographics. We now have the technology to access consumers’ online (and offline) behaviour, preferences, locations, purchase history, promotion sensitivity, the list goes on and on. As marketers, we need to more than aimlessly gather data. We can use these insights to personalise messaging and offerings down to the nth degree, and improve marketing efforts across all channels and campaigns. We can also build highly detailed customer personas.

A “young male living in the city” persona offers very little in terms of targeting. When we start to glean data from other sources such as social media and transaction history, we learn more. Our young male living in the city enjoys art and music, and makes multiple purchases during seasonal sales. With this extra data we can build better personas and use them to create more detailed and effective targeting campaigns.

2. Atomic Content

The problem with content (which content markers are painfully aware of) is that content doesn’t have any real meaning unless you know the perspective of the person reading it.

Well, duh.

This is why personalisation is so important. It improves the customer experience and strengthens relationships, a strategy Gartner’s Chris Ross calls Atomic Content.

An Atomic Content strategy is powered by the creation of tiny, customisable content elements, or “atoms,” that can be built into marketing efforts. Grouping certain combinations of these elements can transform the overall campaign into an experience that meets the requirements of a specific, targeted recipient based on where they are in the customer journey.

For example, when an email with a 35% off discount for a vintage record player Gulliver had researched online shows up in his inbox, it feels like the email was typed and sent just to him. It has the player he was researching, and since he had already been researching it, the discount is timely enough to make the decision to buy easy.

The email Gulliver received was a curation of atoms—individual pieces of content like subject lines, copy, and a call to action. Atomic content requires marketers to really think about the way they create content. Persona-driven content requires a carefully planned channel strategy, with the knowledge that different channels require different strategies.

Applying your customer insights doesn’t have to be rocket surgery, though. Use the features of your existing content management tools and use their features to support your atomic content creation. These efforts can help marketers meet their goal of creating customer experiences that increase loyalty and ultimately ROI.

3. Progressive Web Apps

Basically, a PWA is your website engaging like an app on a mobile device. Google describes progressive web apps as the “new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web.”

We drafted a simple table to show the differences on a mobile device:

	Website	Mobile App	PWA
Delivery	Loads from a mobile browser	Accessed from a user’s home screen	Can be accessed from user’s home screen
Offline Functionality	No	Yes	Yes
Installation	Not applicable (not installed)	App store	Install from web page (no need to go to app store)

Here are the benefits of delivering your content to mobile users through a progressive web app:

• Engage your customers through push notifications
• Deliver your content faster
• Offline access to your content
• Users will revisit your site by seeing it on their home screen

PWAs can do all this without needing to invest money into developing a standalone app. So how do you implement this trend? Use web design platforms that support PWAs. For example, Duda, an innovative website builder, allows publishers to easily enable PWAs on their sites.

We hope you find these tech trends useful for your content marketing!