Knowing your audience is crucial for businesses in a number of ways, ranging from product development to marketing to brand management. Many companies executives will agree with that fact, but few are actually taking that knowledge to the next level and creating marketing campaigns that capitalize on their audience. While producing personalized marketing materials may be difficult, solutions such as digital asset libraries can aid in and simplify the creation of this content.
According to a report from the Content Marketing Institute, a slim 23 percent of businesses actually personalize their content for their prospects. Instead, they create materials based on other factors, such as the stage of the sales cycle that customers are in or the perceived values of the brand.
The Time-Consuming Nature of Personalized Collateral
There are a variety of reasons businesses may not be reaching customers specifically and opting for more generic content instead. Lack of budgets and resources is one of the leading reasons brands aren’t leveraging personalized content, with 39 percent of respondents citing this challenge as a key barrier. Personalizing content and ensuring that it is brand compliant takes a lot of time and effort, and many marketers feel like there is no easy way of doing it.
Nonetheless, tailored collateral improves the success rates of campaigns. Among best-of-class businesses, 71 percent said they personalized their content specifically for the decision maker or client they were trying to engage. On the flip side, the companies struggling with content creation only customized their materials 41 percent of the time.
A separate report from the Content Marketing Institute highlights the problem of content creation. According to that study, the average salesperson spends 30 hours per month trying to create relevant collateral for prospects. This is difficult because the assets provided to them by marketing departments are often irrelevant to the specific clients they are trying to engage. Furthermore, they are discouraged from creating their own collateral for fear they may misrepresent the brand that marketing has worked so hard to develop.
By leveraging pre-approved and brand-compliant assets from a pre-made library, marketing and sales teams are put in a better position to create engaging, relevant content without jeopardizing the message that has been established.