What Is Smart Content? Examples, Benefits, and How To Use It

What Is Smart Content?

Smart content is content that changes to suit the user accessing it.

Any business in 2024 knows the value of content for converting online traffic. However, personalizing that content to make the most impact on your visitors might not be so clear.

Smart content is a way of customizing your content to each user who visits your site to give them the best experience (and chance of converting). If you want to make sure that every user gets helpful information that moves them down the sales funnel, smart content might work for you.

Let’s break down smart content in marketing, including what it is and how to use it, below!

• What is smart content?
• How does smart content work?
• Benefits of smart content
• Smart content examples
• Should you use smart content?

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What is smart content?

Smart content, also known as dynamic or adaptive content, is any aspect of an ad, website, or email that changes to suit the demographics and behaviors of the user accessing the content. This content can range from small calls to action (CTAs) to complete pages.

How does smart content work?

Smart content leverages tools like your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, cookies, and other software to learn information about the users accessing your site. From there, you can target users with different content as they come to your site.

Some factors that may influence smart content include:

• Location
• Device type
• Referral source
• Language
• Previous behavior on your website

Since smart content in marketing is data-backed, you need to have some sort of data collection strategy in place to learn more about the people visiting your website.

Read: What Is Customer Data Management?

Benefits of smart content

Personalization makes a difference in your marketing’s effectiveness, no matter how simple. In fact, 89% of marketers see a positive return on investment (ROI) when they use personalization in their strategies.

Smart content is a simple way to personalize content to the user without having a lot of data on them. Other benefits of smart content include:

• More conversion and opportunities: As users move throughout your site, they will be less likely to see the same offer, product, or service twice with smart content. This benefit means they have a better chance of seeing something new that could pique their interest.
• Better audience targeting: Personalization helps you find and speak to your target audience. You can learn more about what content works best for particular groups of people, and work with your findings to improve their experience.
• Increased awareness of the buyer’s journey: Along with understanding your target audience, you can better suit your content to the buyer’s journey. This improves your chance at conversions by giving users the right message at the right time.

With these benefits, you can see why many companies that want to improve their content strategy turn to smart content.

Smart content examples

Smart content can be as basic as a personalized email subject line. If you have ever received an email including your name, you’ve experienced a piece of smart content.

However, it can be more targeted and sophisticated.

For example, if you’re looking for healthcare tracking software, you’ll easily find the company MedBridge as a sponsored result. Their ad directs you to a contact page where you can reach out to learn more about their software:

This ad is different from what you would find on their homepage organically:

While this is a basic example of smart content, it shows how tweaking your pages to suit different audiences can make a big difference.

Should you use smart content?

If you want to efficiently target new and repeat users on your website, you should use some sort of smart content. How that fits into your strategy, though, is up to you. It’s best used in moderation to have the most impact on users.

You could start by making sure you personalize your email marketing strategy. From there, you can learn more about data collection and management for optimizing your conversion process and finding what works best for certain groups.

Our digital marketing campaigns impact the metrics that improve your bottom line.

See More Results

WebFX has driven the following results for clients:

$6 billion

In client revenue

24 million

Leads for our clients

7.14 million

Client phone calls

Integrate smart content into your strategy today!

Smart content can make all the difference when getting users to convert. However, above all, you should prioritize quality content that helps visitors learn more, whether it’s personalized or not.

If you want help finding a balance in your marketing content, WebFX can help. We have 28 creating content for our 2,000+ clients. We also have plenty of resources to help you learn more about digital marketing content!

Check out our free marketing guides to learn more about marketing your website effectively. Then, contact us online to discuss whether smart content is the right fit for your business!