Reduce your IA with dynamic web content

Building out a website’s Information Architecture (IA) is an interesting stage of a website rebuild. The main sections start innocent and simple enough:

  • Home
  • Products
  • Services
  • Case Studies
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact Us

But if you start to add customer-centric content, the IA can start to get complicated, really quickly.

  • We serve a number of industries and we can speak to them all in their own industry-specific language, so let’s add an industries section!
    • Actually, now that we’ve done that, should our case studies have industries in the case study section, or should those case studies live under each industry page?
    • Oooo, actually, should our blogs be in the industry section or attached to service pages? Maybe we could filter or categorize our blog posts?
  • We also have 4 unique personas from a front-line worker to a CEO. We’ll need to speak to those people differently too!
    • What about the case studies?
    • What about blogs?
    • Do we have different personas per industry?
    • I’m never going to finish this website, am I?

When you add lenses to a website like this, they compound the number of pages and IA complexity that you have to face. You have to multiply the IA by each lens you add on, or you have to use more complicated UX like filtering or categorization. The simple navigation, design, and content requirement from your first IA is completely out the window and now you’re looking at a 6-month rebuild instead of a 3-month website project.

You’re building all this complexity to try to be more personal with your audience, segmenting and offering more specific content and hoping that they self-select and go to the right section. The only reason you have to do it this way is that your website is dumb: it doesn’t know who’s browsing it so it can’t offer up the exact right content. Why not make your website smarter?

Reduce Through Dynamic Personalization

Imagine a person ran your website and could choose the content to serve up. They see a visitor come in off a PPC ad for Service 1 but land on the homepage. Wouldn’t you change the homepage to be more about Service 1?

Similarly, if you had a prospect land on Service 2’s page, but then go to the company about page, why not push a nice image on the side of the page that encouraged them to check out your tight case study on how you rocked it for a client using Service 2?

This level of personalization is possible with marketing automation like ActiveDEMAND.

Real World Examples of Dynamic Content Targeting

In most of these examples, we’re going to refer to dynamic content blocks and popups.

dynamic website content

Target by what Service they’re interested in
Look to identify what top service visitors of your website are interested in based on Google or Facebook Ad campaigns, and based on what service pages they browse on your website. Now pitch case study pages specific to those services to those visitors.

Target by PPC keyword used
Google ads can send the keyword that triggered your ad, so why not use that to personalize your website? If they came in off a keyword that included “custom”, why not pitch your custom services in your dynamic block and try to drive those visitors to your custom services page?

Target by buyer persona
A resort has several buyer profiles:

  • Single males
  • Single females
  • Families
  • Seniors groups

Using Facebook as your ad platform, you can target each of those profiles using different ads that are specific to that persona. Now make your website just as targeted by swapping out the hero banner based on the persona. The family-targeted Facebook ad shows kids having fun and so does the website once they click through, but if single males click through the Facebook ad, there’s a curious absence of kids featured on banners throughout the website.

Messaging that’s specific like this is more effective and now that we have control over what the website shows, we don’t have to water everything down to the lowest common denominator. We can be specific and speak more directly to our buyer persona.

Target stage of the buyer journey
For many companies out there, especially B2B companies, targeting the right content based on the stage of the buyer journey is crucial.
You can change your Call to Action (CTA) based on what stage of the sales cycle you believe the visitor is at. For example:

  1. Download white paper
  2. Sign up for a trial
  3. Book a meeting
  4. Share your experience with friends

Target by Country
If you sell globally but haven’t translated your website, add a dynamic block that has a pitch for your offering in the visitor’s native language. It’s not the whole site, but it shows that you value their business.

Target by What They Say on Phone Calls

Use call recording and automatically transcribe the calls to text using ActiveDEMAND, then target users based on keywords they say on the call.

Separate Job Seekers
People looking for a job are NOT prospects and should not be pitched as such. If your website sees someone coming in from Indeed/Monster.com/Workopolis, or that visitor browses through your job postings, hit them up with dynamic content about why your company is the best place to work at!

Target by Asking
You could just ask. That’s one of the tactics we do on our website:

target customers

By telling us who the kind of business they are, we can deliver better-targeted content for both agencies and in-house marketers. Because the message is explicit and from the prospect, it’s a very strong, clear signal.

Take it Beyond the Website

Now that you have better targeting for your website visitors, why not take it beyond the website? Build a custom audience list based on your newfound targeting and make more specific Facebook ads, change the video ad you’re showing on YouTube, and offer different pitches in your email newsletters: all based on what you now know about your users.

Specific marketing is more effective, period. Take your targeting to the next level with ActiveDEMAND.