Personalization is a powerful way to improve engagement and conversions. But let’s be honest - it can also feel overwhelming. How do you make sure you’re reaching the right people with the right content?
The first step is data. Without the right data, personalization is just a guessing game at best and futile at worst. Great content is only great if it reaches the right audience. Imagine pouring hours into a detailed, well-researched blog post about personalization - only to realize later that your audience doesn’t even care about the topic. Frustrating, right? That’s why using the right data upfront isn’t just helpful; it’s essential.
What to expect from this post
In this blog, we’ll show you how to identify your audience, measure their engagement, and set the foundation for real personalization. By the end, you’ll be able to confidently say:
✅ I know who my audience is.
✅ I can track whether I’m reaching them.
✅ I’m ready to personalize content that actually works.
💡 We sprinkled in a few tips on how you can use AI to boost your productivity. This will become increasingly useful as you start expanding your personalization efforts.
Let’s dive in!
Before you can personalize anything, you need to know who you’re talking to.
Personas are fictional representations of your key audience groups. They help you understand:
Who they are (job role, industry, interests)
What they need (pain points, goals, motivations)
How they interact with your website
💡 Try this: Use the following prompt to generate data-driven personas:
Act as an experienced marketer specializing in website personalization and persona development. You are skilled at applying Cialdini’s 7 persuasion principles in content without being excessive. Your focus is solely on website content personalization. Write in clear, concise English. Confirm you understand; a simple yes will do.
Once confirmed, use:
Analyze the website at [URL] and identify the 3 most relevant personas likely to visit and convert. For each persona, provide:
- A brief description (gender, age, profession, interests, etc.)
- Their key goals when visiting the site
- Their main challenges or pain points
ℹ️ Why does this matter?
Research shows that 71% of consumers expect a personalized experience online1). If you don’t understand your audience, you risk losing their attention.
💡 Feel free to adjust the prompts to your liking. You might have existing personas - use them! Or try to augment them with the prompts, create engaging images, and get inspired for goals and challenges. And remember to keep and share the prompts that work; they can save you and your colleagues time in the future and be helpful when you start creating personalized content.
Once you’ve defined your personas, the next step is figuring out which visitors belong to which segment. This is where Content Scoring comes in.
Each piece of content on your site is given a score, usually from 1-10 (or 1-100), based on how relevant it is to a specific persona. As visitors interact with different pages, their cumulative scores help assign them to a segment, which can be used to trigger personalized content.
💡 How It Works in Practice:
Low-scoring content (1-3) → Not particularly relevant to the persona but still accessible.
Mid-range scores (4-6) → Somewhat relevant, useful for general audiences.
High scores (7-10) → Core content for a specific persona; should be prioritized in recommendations and personalized experiences.
By tracking which content visitors engage with, you build a clearer picture of their intent - allowing your personalization platform to show content that matches their needs.
For example, if you’re running an e-commerce site selling coffee equipment, you might have:
A blog post about choosing the best home espresso machine → Scored 9/10 for "Home Baristas" but only 3/10 for "Café Owners"
A guide on bulk coffee bean suppliers → Scored 9/10 for "Café Owners" but only 2/10 for "Home Baristas”
ℹ️ Why does this matter?
Personalized content performs better than generic content. Content scoring ensures that your audience is labeled correctly, setting you up for effective personalization.
Even with the best personas and scoring, you need proof that you’re actually reaching your audience.
Segment reporting shows how well your audience targeting is working.
You’ll see which personas are engaging with which content - and where you might need to adjust.
💡 Try this: Look at your visitor segments and analyze them.
Are the right personas engaging with your content?
Are some personas underperforming?
Do you need to adjust personas or scoring?
ℹ️ Why does this matter?
Companies that have good personas, proven segments, and analytics effectively see more conversions than those that don’t.
🚀 If you can answer YES to these three questions, you’re ready to start real personalization.
Once you’ve defined your personas, having consistent way to identify them makes internal discussions and marketing efforts much clearer. You can use stock photos, icons, anything that can easily help identify personas and content for them.
Or maybe try to see if AI can help make personable representations of your personas. Note that AI-generated images are quite resource-intensive and the outcome can be a bit hit-and-miss; it’s still early days for image generation, and also depends on which GPT/AI you're using.
💡 Try this: Generate persona images using this prompt:
Generate a separate profile picture for each persona, ensuring consistency in style. Each image should:
- Show a face and shoulders on a plain white background.
- Vary only by skin tone, gender, hair type/color, facial hair, glasses, and clothing style (casual/business).
- Maintain identical lighting, color tones, and framing across all personas.
- Be free of text, backgrounds, or additional elements.
- Output the images in a high-resolution format suitable for digital use.
ℹ️ Why does this matter?
People connect better with visuals. A clear, realistic persona makes aligning teams, refining messaging, and ensuring consistency across campaigns easier. Being able to visually identify your target audiences will help immensely in making your personas shine.
Here, you can see an example of just how easy it is to implement the above steps using Umbraco Engage.
The site from the video is live at thebeanery.coffee. You can browse the site and be segmented as a coffee, tea, or cookie-lover. You might even see some of the content change after browsing the site for a while.
🎥 Want to see personalization in action?
Explore how Umbraco Engage personalizes content dynamically in our guided product tour.
Or take a broader look at all features in our overview tour.
You’ve identified your audience - great! But what happens next? How do you ensure they receive content that speaks directly to them at the right moment? In Part 2, we’ll dive into a simple content personalization strategy that will help you deliver personalized content at the right time for improved conversion.
🛠️ Before Part 2 Drops...
Try the prompts to generate or validate your personas.
Audit your content - is it aligned with your audience segments?
Analyze your segment reports - are you reaching your key visitors?
Check out the product tour of Personalization in Umbraco Engage
Stay tuned for the next post in this series!
1) McKinsey & Company: The value of getting personalization right - or wrong - is multiplying
Introducing Umbraco Engage, the new add-on for Umbraco CMS that gives you the tools you need to succeed with content. Umbraco Engage provides reliable analytics, customer profiling, A/B testing, and personalization tools - all accessible directly in the backoffice - with reporting to verify that your hard work drives measurable conversions.