There have been many articles, white papers, videos, and webinars all about personalized marketing. Yet, when we look at products that support that functionality we really do not see a good translation that’s more than just adding a name to a page. Hubspot and other marketing automation platforms have worked hard to integrate personalization capabilities yet they are embedded inside their robust environments. This makes them difficult to use in the context of all the other features. It’s great they exist yet not so easy to concentrate upon above all the other capabilities.

The state of the art for personalization is about email content based upon segregation, lead nurture targeted content along with segmentation, and more elaborate capabilities like rules based web page presentation. These are great but do not touch on the top of the funnel.

At the top of the funnel – at our earliest contact with a prospect – is it possible to have personalized marketing? Well, here’s the state of the art currently. We utilize SEO and SEM to drive traffic that has an interest in a particular topic to a page or content. The idea is to convert them utilizing a form. Behind the form is content. The thought is this content matches their interest. That’s great right? Now you have a lead that matches your content. However, anyone who has been utilizing this methodology, which we refer to as contact-for-content (C4C) marketing, knows about it’s many limitations and failings.

If the C4C approach is combined with other techniques – which includes a tight alignment of content to the customer journey and lifecycle stages – there’s better intelligence gathered. However, we still are not into personalization. So, what else can be done for the top of the funnel?

What if we had a means to deliver content based specifically upon intelligence provided by your prospect? And what if the content was packaged up so that it matches your customer’s degree of qualification. Do you see how significant that potential is? Rather than a form that anyone can fill out and which results in