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Smart content is content on a website that changes depending on a user’s interest or past behaviour. It uses information from your customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as HubSpot, that you have collected about the user that is using your website to personalise their experience and provides them with a better user experience. Smart content can be as simple as changing the text on a call to action, to displaying completely different content.
Enhanced Personalisation
The importance of personalisation isn’t new. For a number of years, marketers have personalised emails by adding in the recipient’s name or sending them an email with products they’d be interested in. Smart content allows marketers to personalise web pages based on users’ interests and past interactions. The page will be relevant to what they want to find, providing them with a better experience and increasing the chances of them converting. 87% of marketers have seen a measurable increase in key metrics such as conversion rates when they use personalisation.
Automatic Optimisation
Once smart content has been set up on your website, it will automatically show content that is relevant to the user visiting your page. Artificial intelligence (AI) will learn from the actions the user takes on your website and optimise itself automatically. Gone are the days where you spend time with A/B testing trying to find the best messaging to target your users.
Better targeting
Using the information that has been collected in your CRM, you can create content that is specifically targeted towards your buyer personas. You can also have the content changed as they move through the customer journey. Without smart content, you would need to create a number of different pages with different content. Not only is this very time consuming, but also would be hard to ensure users to your website visit the right page.
Who are you targeting?
Before creating smart content, it’s important to decide who you are creating the content for. Knowing who the content will be for will help you to decide which smart rule to use to show the different content. Depending on whether you are targeting unknown visitors or your current contact list, some smart rules will be more relevant than others. HubSpot currently has six different smart rules:
Where will you add the smart content?
Once you have decided who you are targeting, you need to decide where you want to add the content. Are there pages on your website that get a lot of traffic but have a high bounce rate? Are you sending different types of users to the same landing page? Remember, smart content can also be used in emails. You could add a smart CTA to an email and create some smart text or smart form on the landing page.
What will the default content be?
In order to have smart content, there needs to be default content. This is the content that will be shown to any user that doesn’t match the smart rule you set. As the default content will be shown to a wide-range of users, it should be as generic and as broad as possible. This way, you can ensure the content is appealing to all.
What value will your smart content bring?
As we have mentioned, smart content brings many benefits. However, it’s important when deciding whether to add smart content or not, the value of this content needs to be determined. Are you looking to enhance the customer experience? Target specific countries with tailored content? Grow existing relationships with relevant, valuable resources? You don’t have to add smart content to all your pages to achieve this and we’d recommend against it. Only add it when you believe that it will offer something to the audience that you want to target.
Now you know what smart content is and the benefits, you can start implementing it on your site. HubSpot makes it simple to create smart content that you can add to your landing pages, web pages and email. Remember not to jump straight in and plan who you are going to target and with what smart content. When done right, you should start to see conversion rates increasing and your bounce rate decrease.
