How to use Marketo's dynamic content system for personalization

Imagine marketing personalization as being akin to being a tour guide in a major tourist destination such as Rome. Your task is to guide visitors through Rome’s rich tapestry of historical and cultural landmarks—from the ancient Colosseum to St. Peter’s Basilica and the art-rich Galleria Borghese. However, the interests of the people in your group are as diverse and varied as the history of Rome itself. A one-size-fits-all tour would leave many unsatisfied.

For instance, an amateur antiquity historian might be interested only in ancient Roman sites and find tours of religious sites boring. It would be off-putting if they were expecting a tour of Rome’s ancient ruins rather than its historic chapels.

In marketing, this scenario is analogous to personalization. Just as a top-notch tour guide tailors their tours to match the interests of the group, the best marketing aims to create a personalized experience for each customer. By understanding and responding to individual preferences, we can deliver content that is both relevant and engaging.

So, how is this achieved in Marketo?

Marketo offers a feature called Dynamic Content that enables you to personalize content on landing pages and emails for specific segments of leads. In this post, we're going to introduce you to Dynamic Content and how it can be used to achieve personalization.

What is Dynamic Content in Marketo?

Dynamic content in Marketo is a feature that allows you to display unique content to leads based on their membership in a specific segment. Dynamic content is configured as individual blocks on landing pages or emails. These blocks adhere to your segmentation rules to display unique content to each specific segment.

This feature enables you to tailor content based on contacts’ needs, interests, and past interactions. You can also set up dynamic content to operate on a single part of your asset, or configure multiple dynamic content blocks for a fully personalized experience.

How does Dynamic Content work in Marketo?

Setting up dynamic content to achieve personalization in Marketo requires a few steps:

1. Set up your segmentations
2. Create content for your landing pages and emails
3. Define your personalization rules
4. Deploy campaigns and report on results

Set up your segmentations

Marketo’s dynamic content requires the use of its Segmentation feature to specify the unique content each predefined segment receives. For example, setting up a segmentation based on “Company Size” may result in creating segments for “Enterprise”, “Mid-Sized”, and “SMB.” You can then target dynamic content to each of those segments.

Segmentations are created using Smart Lists and can include any set of attributes found in your Marketo records. Within a segmentation, leads can belong to only one segment, and segments are applied in the order you specify. This prevents messy situations where leads may meet the criteria for one or more segments, and forces you to think through the 'best fit' for each Segment.

Create content for your landing pages and emails

Once you've set up segments, you can start to create content for each segment. This content may vary depending on the segment you are targeting, and the type of content you are designing. You may want to start small and build your way up to more extensive personalization strategies using dynamic content.

Simple yet effective changes, such as using dynamic content in subject lines, can help you gather data on your strategy and test which segments are most receptive to personalized messaging.

Define your personalization rules

Your Marketo instance can have multiple segmentations, but dynamic content only displays content to a single segment. Therefore you will need to think carefully about which segments you target with dynamic content. Each asset where you apply dynamic content will need to be evaluated to determine which segments are most applicable. For example, in some cases you may want to apply a geographcal segment and in other cases you may want to apply an industry segment.

Deploy campaigns and report on results

When the campaign is executed, Marketo automatically populates the dynamic content blocks with the appropriate content for each segment based on the personalization rules you’ve established. As each email and landing page is served to a recipient, Marketo determines the correct version of content to display. You can then go back and report on how each version performs to start to build up a center of excellence for your personalization efforts.

Key components of Dynamic Content in Marketo

Dynamic content is a key feature in scaling your marketing operations in Marketo. Let's take a closer look at three aspects of this and how you can apply them to your own marketing efforts:

• Snippets
• Segmentation
• Personalization

Snippets

Marketo snippets are reusable blocks of content that can include text, images, and HTML. Snippets are designed for use across multiple marketing assets, including emails and landing pages. They are a handy feature for scaling marketing efforts and maintaining consistent brand elements across various campaigns.

One of the optimal use cases for snippets is implementing a standardized footer across all your landing pages or emails. This can be used for compliance disclaimers or displaying standard information about your company. Snippets simplify updating items, such as the current year, ensuring these updates appear across all assets. Why search through dozens or hundreds of assets to update the current year when you can update it once?

With dynamic content and snippets, you can create compliance disclaimers that are relevant for users in various regions of the world. For instance, in regions requiring double opt-in, you can incorporate additional opt-in mechanisms.

Segmentation

Marketo’s segmentation feature powerfully divides your database of leads into distinct groups based on shared characteristics. As mentioned, you will use the Smart Lists functionality to define different segments within a segmentation. You can incorporate any criteria from the lead records to create a segment; however, it’s important to note that segments are applied in the order they appear, and leads can only belong to one segment within a segmentation.

Segmentations apply to your entire database, allowing you to set up dynamic content blocks on any asset. You can be quite creative when designing various types of segmentations in your Marketo lead database. Some examples of Segmentations could be:

• Geographic location
• Age Group
• Gender
• Industry Type
• Job Role
• Purchase History
• Engagement Level
• Subscription Type
• Language Preference

Here are the steps to create a segment in Marketo:

1. Go to the “Database” section in Marketo.
2. Select “New” and then “New Segmentation.”
3. Name your segmentation and begin defining segments by clicking “Add Segment.”
4. Specify the criteria for each segment using filters such as age, location, past purchase behavior, or engagement levels.
5. Review and approve the segments to ensure they are correctly configured for campaign use.

Personalization

While implementing the above Marketo features is a step towards personalization, the key to effectively scaling your personalization strategy is good data. This involves collecting data that reveals your buyer’s intent through behavioral, demographic, and firmographic attributes. Even then, piecing together this puzzle to design highly personalized content is as much an art form as it is a scientific approach to data analysis.

Getting personalization right can hugely benefit your metrics, whether they be email or sales metrics. However, it's not always easy. Using a first name in personalization is a start, but perfecting your messaging for your audience is the secret to long-term success. Sometimes a lighter touch is necessary, as being too presumptuous with your personalization can be off-putting.

Here are some ideas for personalization in Marketo:

• Birthday discounts and special offers
• Dynamic content tailored to user behavior
• Personalized onboarding emails
• Tailored recommendations based on past purchase history
• Personalized event invitations
• Location-based offers
• Renewal reminders

Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale with Knak

Scaling dynamic content significantly enhances the sophistication of your marketing messaging. This poses a significant challenge for marketing operations teams, especially at the enterprise level. Marketing operations professionals often turn to tools like velocity scripting to elevate their personalization efforts.

Knak provides a robust set of dynamic content features that help marketing teams achieve peak personalization in Marketo. Velocity scripting is an exceptionally powerful tool, and Knak enables the use of conditional logic and data manipulation without writing any code. Marketers use Knak's dynamic content feature for several reasons:

• Ease of use: Knak is a no-code tool for creating emails and landing pages, allowing you to craft beautiful emails without any coding.
• Data integration: Dynamic content requires Marketo segmentations to work. Knak can directly pull data from your Marketo instance, enabling the creation of segmentations based on the latest, most accurate data.
• Create custom segmentations: You can create custom segmentations on the fly using conditional logic and Marketo data properties.
• Combine multiple segments: The best personalization strategies often require a thoughtful, creative approach to segmentation. You can use Knak to combine multiple segments together to create unique audiences for your campaigns.
• Reusable segmentations: Segments created in Knak are customizable and reusable. When you define a segment in Knak, it can be applied across multiple campaigns and used by other users in your organization.
• Comment on dynamic elements and segmentations: One of the challenges with Marketo's dynamic content feature is knowing which elements in your emails are dynamic. Knak allows you to comment on dynamic elements, making it easy to identify and modify dynamic content.

Scaling your personalization strategy is about combining a thoughtful approach to your segmentation and create that resonates with your audience. Knak is a key tool in scaling your personalization in Marketo. Learn more about our Dynamic Content features here or watch a full demo here.