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With the sheer volume of content available on today’s internet, online users are experiencing information overload. The introduction of generative AI tools used to mass-produce content has only made things worse. Brands are struggling to stand out and are desperately searching for a solution.
Most companies understand the need to personalize their digital experiences to differentiate themselves from other brands and connect more meaningfully with customers. However, personalization is complex, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. This is changing now with AI and automation technologies.
Three Reasons Personalization Needs a Makeover
Before AI tools were ubiquitous, personalization required manual processes that complicated workflows and slowed down time to market. Implementing and scaling those processes often required brands to hire developers and other IT team members.
Now, even with technological advances and the deployment of AI powered by large language models (LLMs), Contentstack finds three main reasons the pursuit of personalization at scale is broken.
Fragmented Content Production Means Heavy Reliance On IT
Content variants in multiple systems, which are all governed by different workflows and teams, hamper content production and, in the end, are far too reliant on developer intervention.
Companies are looking for more flexibility and more precision, not more complicated processes involving endless support tickets. For example, content production works best if marketers can intuitively access and adjust content for different audience segments directly within the entry editor, maximizing content reuse and minimizing time spent outside the content management system (CMS).
It Is Challenging to Generate Scalable, Brand-Aware Content
Content generation is time-consuming and cumbersome. On top of that, many of the AI tools used to help create content don’t know the brand they’re creating for or speak in its voice.
When LLMs catapulted onto the scene, companies rightfully rushed to assimilate third-party AI personalization tools into their workflows to create content more efficiently. But “efficient” isn’t the same as effective. Even when prompted very specifically, LLMs fail to produce the kind of authentic, personalized content brands need. Generic LLMs simply don’t have access to enough relevant information, leaving them tone-deaf regarding brand voice.
It Is Difficult to Operationalize and Make Repeatable
Finally, producing anything of quality at scale and in a repeatable manner is nearly impossible, so it rarely happens.
Enterprises wishing to modernize have hastily attempted to fill the personalization gap in the market, but most of the products currently on offer are poorly integrated add-ons that require far too much integration work to scale. In other words, those same companies have realized they are trapped in legacy CMSes built for a bygone era.
The Math Behind Personalization Is Mind-Boggling
To illustrate the massive implications of personalization at scale, let’s do a simple math problem. Say you work in marketing for a B2B SaaS company and have been asked to manually personalize one copy block. Being the go-getter you are, you believe you can do it. Now that you’re on board, you are told you need to personalize this block of copy for audiences in four different geographic locations, six different industries, four separate personas, and three distinct customer segments.
You run the numbers and realize: that one single block of copy has now multiplied to 288 pieces of content.
Contentstack Personalize—A Solution For Today’s Digital World
To address the above issues, the right personalization solution needs to do three things. It must integrate the decision engine directly into the CMS to serve highly personalized content that enables true experimentation and segmentation. It must provide field-level variants in the CMS that combine and layer to unlock endless variations of micro-segmented content. And it has to deliver a unified entry editor, authoring, and workflow experience in a simplified way for business users to simplify content production.
Done correctly and elegantly, this can unlock personalization at scale.
Contentstack Personalize delivers a new, intuitive approach to personalization. It is an integrated solution built directly into the CMS that unifies the authoring experience—allowing business users to easily tailor content to a specific audience and make decisions confidently with A/B/n testing insights with unmatched speed and performance, and without a huge lift from developers.
Next is the need to create personalized, brand-aligned content that truly knows a business, its products, and its voice. Contentstack’s solution to this is Brand Kit, a powerful new capability integrated into its CMS to ensure AI-generated content is programmed to truly “know” a business and speak its voice. This turns any LLM that businesses choose to use from generic to brand-aware, making generative AI useful.
To reach the scale businesses need and also make the process repeatable, Contentstack released Automate, an integrated, no-code solution geared to automate the entire personalization and content lifecycle. Like the personalization engine, Automate is deeply integrated with the CMS, giving creatives and developers the freedom to build and automate unique, brand-specific content all from within the platform.
Reimagine Personalization
The stakes are clear: to have the biggest impact, content must be targeted, personalized, and speak a brand’s voice. Traditional methods aren’t cutting it—they are too cumbersome, complicated, and manual.
To get it right, it’s a matter of embracing the latest technologies, but also taking into account the underlying architecture. How does the personalization engine, the AI engine, and the automation engine come together?
Contentstack has been thinking about this for quite some time, which has led it to the solution it’s produced.
We love talking about it. Contact us… let’s get personal! For more information, visit Contentstack's website.
By Conor Egan, VP Product, Contentstack
