2022 Website Trends: Personalization with Jeff Coyle

We spoke with Jeff Coyle, the Co founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse an AI platform that accelerates content planning, creation, and optimization.

Jeff is also an expert in AI and content, and the host of MarketMuse Fireside Webinars, where he interviews guests about content, SEO, and all things marketing.

In this interview we discuss:

• Personalizing your website for different personas
• How to create urgency for conversions
• Content upgrades to move visitors down the funnel

I've been doing content strategy, usability theory, lead gen SEO content since 1999, 2000. And I've been a product manager for my entire life.

So I love usability theory, site design. I've executed multiple major site redesigns that cover massively scaled websites, hundreds and hundreds of migrations when I was an in house and acquisitions.

Now I have thousands of customers who are all focused on content strategy and predictive return on investment for their content marketing dollars.

Website #1: Mutiny

One is a personalization SaaS software company called Mutiny. MarketMuse has used Mutiny to personalize our own site and that explains why sometimes when you're looking at a site, you're actually only seeing the site you see and why it's converting for you.

Mutiny is a software product that has a clear value proposition. It is “I want to see this on my site. I want to personalize my site” and they put this across in a really fun way and a creative way.

If I'm a PLG company, this is a way that I can customize my experience for my site based on who's coming to my site. I immediately see the value proposition manifest.

Explore an interactive demo of the Mutiny homepage:

See why Jeff choose Mutiny as one of his gold standard websites.

Website #2: Marketbeat

The second one I want to highlight is a site called MarketBeat, which is a website that I love for a little bit of a different reason. From a conversion rate optimization perspective, I feel like they push the envelope a lot. I learn a lot from this site about ways that maybe will be psychographically or psychology driven marketing.

They're not always user experiences I love, but I’ve learned a lot about ways that people are using content in order to drive conversions of all shapes and sizes.

This is an experience on a website who wants to convert you at every possible spot.

Whether you like the topic or not explore the site - the conversion rates on this site must be through the roof because of all the interactions.

And don't just convert for the email. Keep going down the process, go through the experience until you are at the ideal state that the owner of this site desires you to be, you will feel the urgency to get there.

For a SaaS person try to emulate this so that all of your experience has this place of wanting. I want to be a paying customer of this site in order to get everything that possibly I can and you really can explore that here.

Personalization is critical. It is the path, I believe, if you're going to do PLG hybrid, personalization is a core. If you're even going to be in a hybrid zone, you've got to recognize who those hybrids are.

And being able to recognize that earlier in your process removes that awkward situation where you put somebody in the wrong car. You put the person that could buy the Ferrari in a Hyundai.

If you are a true end user to buyer sequential hybrid where you actually have the end users accumulating mass and then you would upscale, you also want to be doing personalization if and when that role enters your PLG experience.

If I've got 50 writers and they all buy the free offering or they're buying the low end offering and the CMO drops in, I want them to have a different experience. Personalization is critical for straight PLG or PLG to team purchase.

The other one is the content upgrade. It's really something that I've seen and it's really focused on user intent.

So what's the next five questions that I could be answering?

How can I turn that into whatever it means for me to monetize? Is it a click? Is it a way find? Is it an entry into my application or product led growth experience? Or is it a lead more traditionally or purchased?

I'm waiting to see deceptive external advertising networks drop.

If you're promoting your software product or via those third parties, I would just say from an ethical perspective, consider dropping out of those syndication networks. The way that they get the majority of their interactions are in a deceptive manner.

I would say research placement networks, ad networks, really well even in some cases where you might be getting a positive return on investment, I would just always be doing network research to understand how that data is sourced and how those clicks are sourced.

I would love it if I never were scrolling through an important application on my phone and I see a weirdo ad and I click on it and it's just a thing for me to click on again and then click on again and then finally land somewhere.

And maybe I could land somewhere good. But having that middleman sometimes is a little bit uncomfortable. Something people should think about.

I mentioned one Mutiny is one for personalization. I'm really thinking about new ways to do no and low code automation for savvy marketers. So Zapier is one that I think everybody needs to learn but also there's another vendor called Paragon that everybody I think should be looking at for no and low code.

I'm a huge supporter of MadKudu, they have a machine learning data studio which has many functions but one of them is predictive lead scoring which for a PLG solution or for a hybrid solution is an amazing thing.

If you are creating content and understand the value of content and turning that content into return on investment, whether you are batting really well from an efficiency standpoint or only one out of ten of your content items that you produce is successful - MarketMuse can increase both your hit rate and magnitude of each hit as well as doing it a lot faster.

We're focused on content quality and comprehensiveness and making that work for every type of organization so come check us out marketmuse.com me Jeff@marketmuse.com Twitter @jeffrey_coyle anyway I will get back to you.