How to produce modular content to drive personalization at scale

This article was co-authored by Rene Cizio.

The proliferation of marketing channels and evolving consumer behaviors have created new challenges for content creation and delivery. To meet these demands, organizations are turning to modular content. Learn how this approach supports a comprehensive channel strategy that aligns with brand objectives, addresses consumer needs and optimizes the content pipeline. 

The complexities of content creation across multiple channels 

Adopting a holistic channel strategy and creating content for use across various channels and interaction points can significantly enhance sales revenue performance. However, this approach is complex and requires customer-centric, cross-functional methods and well-orchestrated customer journeys spanning multiple channels based on customer needs, with effectiveness measured across these channels and variables.

Marketing teams often struggle with continuously publishing fresh, relevant content across channels. Personalization adds complexity by necessitating multiple content versions. As CMOs and marketers invest in personalization, stakeholders’ expectations for rapid content creation rise. This is where a modular content approach comes into play.

What is modular content?

Modular content involves breaking down full-form content into smaller, reusable components. Each component has a defined purpose (e.g., the intro, visual, body copy, closing and call to action) and can be reassembled in various combinations to create customized, channel-agnostic content experiences.

Successfully adopting this approach involves:

• Optimizing content for reuse and focusing on creating and tagging specific areas that team members can reassemble in new, channel-agnostic formats.
• Scaling personalization by creating multiple content components, each with a clear purpose to drive a desired response. Components can then be combined to create customized experiences with minimal new content creation.
• Shifting your capabilities to adopt a modular content approach. This includes operating models, governance, skills and understanding key use cases for generative AI.

Creating and delivering modular content

When developing modular, consider how you will segment stories into a structure that allows customized messaging. You must also answer two questions about content components:

• What are the smallest sections of content I can tailor to create a personalized experience?
• What are the largest pieces of content I can keep topical enough to use in multiple situations?

Scaling personalization with multiple components

Defining multiple components with a clear purpose allows you to quickly scale the personalized experiences you can provide.

Emerging technology, like generative AI, has increased expectations for personalized content, but modular content creation isn’t tied to a specific technology or platform. You can manually break content into useful components and then restructure them for personalization. However, this often requires new operating models and governance. In regulated industries, close collaboration with compliance teams is essential.

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Modular content maximizes customer relevance while isolating personalization efforts to as few and small components as possible. Combining components can build meaningful, personalized experiences. This strategy’s advantage is that less content creation is needed to produce an exponential variety of customized experiences.

Dig deeper: Scaling personalized experiences: From anonymity to insight

Building your capabilities for the modular future

Developing modular content requires a different content structure and operational capabilities. Evaluate your current capabilities in these areas:

Audience understanding

Effective personalization requires a nuanced understanding of the differences and needs among audiences. Research-backed personas and journey maps can capture and highlight critical insights and suggest areas ripe for customization. 

Current content

Conduct a content audit to determine how easily it can be crafted into modular components. Content visibility through proper tagging is fundamental to successfully shifting to a modular content approach. If you’ve already structured and tagged content in a CMS, DAM system or product information management system, that’s a good head start.

Tagging strategy

Moving to modular content components means you have an exponentially larger number of items to store. In addition, you must be more granular in your tagging approach. At the very least, you will want to tag each component’s target persona and journey stage to facilitate easy retrieval and reuse. Some CMPs have begun to automate tagging as part of the content creation process.

Current skills

Determine how good your team members are at systems thinking. Can they zoom into a detailed level while determining how all the details fit together? The number of possible variations with modular content can quickly become overwhelming. They’ll need the ability to see the content not as just one big piece but in its parts.

Current processes

Besides affecting your team’s content editing and approval operating models and governance, moving to modular content may have repercussions outside your direct department, from compliance to quality assurance.

Consider modular content bundles to support the cultural shift necessary for the future volume of content combinations. If you are in a regulated industry, reassess your legal review processes to align with the publication of components rather than full-form content.

Generative AI content creation and augmentation

Ideate and create text, image, video and audio content. The generative AI capabilities embedded into existing martech or point solutions can increase productivity, variety and velocity of content creation. Many marketers use generative AI to create text content, but human review and approval are still needed to ensure accuracy and brand alignment. 

Dig deeper: Transforming content marketing lifecycles with AI

Streamlining marketing efforts with modular content creation

As marketing channels continue to diversify and consumer expectations evolve, modular content offers a strategic solution to meet these challenges head-on. By breaking down content into reusable, purpose-driven components, organizations can streamline content creation processes, scale personalization efforts and efficiently deliver relevant experiences across multiple channels.