How do you leverage dynamic content?

[Anonymous]

Making sure the right content goes out at the right time to the right audience is critical to our business.  How do you leverage dynamic content to ensure your prospects and customers receive a personalized experience?

[Anonymous]

I'm really curious to hear what people have to say on this topic. We don't make much use out of dynamic content, but I have a feeling it could make a lot of our activities a lot easier.

My understanding of dynamic content points to primarily using it to easily regionalize content by language/phrasing. Are there other, easy to implement use cases?

[Anonymous]

Hi Shea Cibulsky​, Andre Washington​,

Regionalization is a great use for dynamic content. We also use it to send different comms based on account type (customer/prospect) company sizes (Enterprise/SMB), or use case (B2B/B2C). These are just a couple of examples; there are many more ways to personalize depending on the granularity of your segmentation. We personalize the subject lines and/or body copy of emails, based on the content of the email. Hope this is helpful!

[Anthony_Dykstr1]

We just started using dynamic content in more of an abstract way that doesn't use any database segmentation and uses URL parameters instead. We use it with our library of recorded webinars. This allows us to have one campaign with a single landing page and a single form for ALL of our recorded webinars. In short, a user clicks a link on our website which brings them to our Marketo landing page, the landing page has a script that looks for specific parameters we've added to the URL, based on those parameters the script knows what content to display on the page. The script also passes a value to a hidden field on the form so we know which recorded webinar they've signed up for.

It's pretty much a time saver so we don't have to build out individual landing pages for every single recorded webinar, the script does it all for us.

[SanfordWhiteman]

FYI, URLs and segmentations aren't mutually exclusive. You can pass segments in the URL: pages.example.com/webinars/?Recording=123 will show dynamic content for segment "123" in segmentation "Recording".

[Anthony_Dykstr1]

Is there a particular benefit to setting up custom segments over using Javascript to achieve the same goal if the traffic to the page is organic and serves both known and unknown users?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I'd say there are several benefits:

• The big one: Marketo's LP editor has built-in awareness of what you're doing, including per-segment rich text editors and previews by segment.
• You don't need to clutter the editor with extra elements.
• You don't need to align JS with CSS classes or other markers you're using for show/hide.
• Your leads don't need to download all segments in your pages, just the ones that will display for them (with 10 segments you're using 10x the traffic you need, which could well be noticeable over mobile).
• You don't need to include any 3rd-party code (i.e. URL parser).
• You don't need any 1st-party code. Even though I'm a developer, if you fully follow the "lazy developer" paradigm you shouldn't write code for anything that can be completely realized without it.

Of course there are additional things you can get with JS-driven meta-templating (templates within templates) but for basic segmenting functionality it's overkill IMO.

[Anthony_Dykstr1]

Interesting. The script I wrote only populates the page with the content that matches the URL parameter, otherwise the page is blank because there is no "default" content. I mainly avoided segmentation because I wanted all of this to happen for anyone visiting this page regardless if they were in our database or not based on the URL parameter alone. I've been under the impression that segmentation only applies to known leads.

I will say that I do wish the method I chose offered the same LP editor awareness. I had to manually visit each URL to make sure the correct content loaded which was tedious and annoying but this was a unique scenario and something we haven't done before.

[JD_Nelson]

Mind.Blown.

[Brooke_Bartos1]

We have been using dynamic content to personalize emails for some of our ABM programs. Within the program, we have used segmentations to dynamically modify body content based on company name and/or industry. We also leverage dynamic content for emails to send in either English or Spanish based on preferred language, combined with tokens for company name, sales rep name, and contact info for a more personalized experience.