Overcoming Personalization’s Content Challenges in Sitecore

By expanding their portfolio of products, Sitecore has provided you with a lot more options for your personalization needs. Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is a strong product with useful marketing functionality fully integrated into your digital experience platform (DXP). Another option is their cloud-based content management system—Experience Manager (XM) Cloud—that has embedded personalization. Or you can leverage Sitecore Personalize, a stand-alone, cloud-native personalization, and testing solution that helps you expand your omnichannel personalization efforts.

Regardless of whether you’re using embedded personalization in XM Cloud, Sitecore Personalize, or personalization rules in Sitecore XP, you can’t avoid the content challenges that come with personalization. Organizations are working hard to keep up with the content demands of today’s empowered consumers. They need to deliver more content on more topics, with more utility, on more channels, and in more formats than ever before. All of this ‘more’ is putting stress on content teams so adding personalization on top of the content efforts that keep the lights on can seem like a daunting task, that is, if you don’t have the right strategy.

We’ll do some simple math to reinforce why content is the big personalization challenge.

Three audience segments that you want to deliver tailored content to multiplied by three pages/experiences that you will have personalized content on = nine new pieces of content beyond your default content that you need to create.

That adds up quickly. So, what can your organization do? We’ll tell you.

Knowing that content and personalization go together, your organization can wrap its arms around personalization by having the right plan in place. Not only will having a strong personalization strategy help provide purpose to your efforts, but it will ensure you’re setting teams up for success. Instead of just helping them thrive in the short term, you’ll set them up for long-term success with scalable personalization programs that can mature over time.

Here are some tips on how to overcome personalization's content challenges by developing this kind of plan.

• Define your audience and how personalized content will impact them in their user journey. This is the foundational step to starting with realistic personalization scenarios and planning for long-term personalization maturity.
• Map out segments and the goal of personalization scenarios by user journey phase. This allows stakeholders to understand the goal of personalization efforts and helps prioritize content creation for them.
• Organize everything! Once you have a map of where and how you want to personalize, you need to organize your content team to create and keep track of the additional content you need. You should also organize your content tree and campaigns to see if there is content that can be repurposed. This is also where a solution like Content Hub Ops is really helpful in terms of creating content calendars, planning, ideation, and execution.
• Measure personalization to see how scenarios are performing and if the content being delivered is producing value. Make sure you have success metrics defined for various audiences and how they engage with personalized content so you can identify where personalized content is winning.
• Iterate on scenarios because personalization is NOT a one-and-done. There will be ongoing content creation and additional scenarios you can put in place. A clear roadmap for ongoing content creation is key to implementing robust personalization and maturing in the Sitecore platform.

No matter how you choose to execute personalization, having a strong strategy in place is critical not just to getting started with personalization, but making personalization a permanent part of your customer experience strategies. Interested in learning more? Contact us to discuss your personalization goals and how we can help you achieve them!