How to enhance corporate communication with personalised content

By Berulv Tøndel and Charlotte Naversten

Can corporate communication teams take advantage of automation to deliver personalised content to audiences? The answer is yes and it does not have to mean expensive investments. Tailoring content so it is presented at the right time to the right audiences can often be done quickly with existing company tools and can greatly enhance your website.

When stakeholders visit your corporate website, they are vetting you for decisions on employment, investing, partnering, purchasing etc. The more you can do to inform and inspire these audiences, the more you will enable your business to succeed. Applying tried and tested B2C and B2B marketing automation techniques to your corporate content is an effective way to engage stakeholders. This involves presenting the right information at the right time to the right audience. We call this communication automation.

How does automated content help corporate communications?

Audiences expect the content of a website to be relevant to ensure they can fulfil their objectives as quickly and efficiently as possible. Personalising content and delivering timely, tailored messages based on a visitor's digital behaviour is one way to help them meet their objectives. This can be done using the same principles your marketing colleagues apply with marketing automation for customers.

Examples for corporate audiences include analysts being served links to the latest reports on the homepage where other audiences see links to the About or Career sections. Or a newsletter subscriber who has taken a keen interest in the website's sustainability section being presented sustainability-focused news at the top of the next newsletter while other subscribers see something else. Another example is a potential jobseeker being re-engaged after leaving the website with recruitment content on other digital platforms.

A visitor's behaviour can automatically trigger this tailored content, enabling companies to offer targeted information to different audiences. This benefits visitors by improving the user experience and benefits companies by making websites more relevant, which can help build reputation.

How do you begin?

A common and effective approach is to start small and expand the scope as you go, based on the data and insights you collect.

1. Get started by selecting one of your priority target groups.
2. Define the most important user flow and focus on optimising this particular journey.
3. Create variants of personalised messages and develop automatically triggered communication flows.
4. Monitor your web and email analytics and iterate by tweaking and optimising your content based on user behaviour.

Are additional systems or tools needed?

Companies often have the tools of communication automation at their disposal already. For example, website personalisation can be triggered in different ways, but most major content management systems (CMSs) on the market today have this functionality integrated, ready to use. Episerver, for example, offers a relatively simple personalisation option with the help of so called "Visitor groups". As an editor, you can define criteria for a visitor group based on behaviour and deliver specific content to that group.

If your company has a tool for sending newsletters, many of these already offer the functionality to automatically trigger messages and the ability to present tailored content to different target groups.

In larger companies, the marketing team probably already has an integrated system for CRM and marketing automation. All you need to do is to add your target audiences and start building communication flows for them.

How we can help

We believe communication automation can play a critical role in engaging audiences in a conversation about why your company matters. We can support you no matter what stage you are at and can work with you to map the behaviour of your audiences, make recommendations on content and technology configurations and track performance. We can also set up and project manage pilots - a simple pilot with a few configurations and different versions of your content can be launched in just a couple of weeks.

Please get in touch if you'd like to learn more.