Content targeting

Key concepts from content targeting in advertisement market place can be easily applied to online services provided such as consumer banking, credit cards or health care management portals. Companies have vast data sets to perform real-time modeling and predict customer propensity to consume certain services. In financial services, customer profile data can be mined to predict future products are like to buy. Traditionally, content was targeted to broad segments of customers. Using content targeting solutions, content can be targeted to individual customers rather than complete segments. Also, targeting solutions constantly evolve and improves relevancy to maximize accuracy. Once customers enters the sales funnel, relevant content drives customer through the sales page and brings incremental revenues. 

Companies that have strong online presence such as Amazon, Walmart, and others continuously invest in building such services to leverage long tail. However, there are potential roadblocks to building such features. First, certain industries are heavily regulated and it's huge deal to sharing customer profile with external vendors, who provide niche services to develop and deploy content targeting solutions. Secondly, big corporate houses have multiple lines of businesses, making it difficult to bring everyone on the same table for one solution. Thirdly, if companies were to develop solutions in-house, it would take longer to implement due to long internal bureaucratic process, increasing time to market for any new product. However, once developed, content targeting solutions can provide tremendous lift in conversion rates.

To start building such a system, the first and foremost step is to find out what customers need to do what they want to do. It almost requires data collections about customers that can help determine correlation with customers' behavior. Once we determine the attributes, user experience/Editorial team needs to develop creative messaging that can resonate with targeted customers. Content targeting solutions such as Test&target can deliver content based on demographics, location, behavior and other factors. So, let's begin!!