Want to get more form-fills, signups and sales? Customize site design, user ratings and other essential information so content marketing materials drive conversion rates.

Retail giant Amazon has always displayed user ratings to help customers figure out if products are right for them, but now it’s taken things a step further by breaking down ratings for specific demographics.​

Marketing Land first noticed the switch: Amazon usually shows an aggregate score for products based on broad customer reviews, but now it’s started to show Amazon Mom members ratings from other Amazon Moms. The theory is that instead of generic rankings, users will see ratings relevant to their needs and lifestyles, which could instill a sense of trust and drive more conversions.

Make your customer segments reflect your strategy

Even if you don’t ​have ​demographic-focused service tiers like Amazon, you can create resources specifically for each of your customer segments to ensure maximum relevance.

​An approach that drives success for a lot of Brafton customers is turning product and benefit focus areas into content categories. Depending on the business, another approach is customer profiles (which often still overlap with product affinities).  

Example: If you’re a B2B payment software provider, maybe you segment for small businesses, mid-sized organizations and enterprise companies. You could get even more granular by identifying the subsets within those groups (Traditional decision makers who need to buy in conceptually first, versus start-up decision makers who are seeking affordable solutions that can help them grow fast).  

It’s all about knowing your audience

We’ve seen it work in the relatively specialized healthcare IT space. The company knew that a portion of its audience needed help making the decision to switch to an electronic health records systems, so it created an infographic summarizing recent industry developments for that group. While there was some initial skepticism about investing in a graphic that was related to a single product within a much broader portfolio, a leap of faith in the strategy paid off. The graphic attracted qualified traffic with a focused message and rewarded the business with a 25 percent jump in the click-through rate for its calls to action.

​Even viewers who weren’t ready to leap to a purchase proved eager to learn more as the graphic page had ​a 12 percent lower bounce rate and 40 percent lower exit rate than less segmented content. ​Taking a page from this company and big names like Amazon, ​brands should seek opportunities to target individual groups​ through content ​when possible.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.