Websites with Dynamic Content: Next Big Thing or Passing Trend?

Mobile-friendly websites were like sooo 2015 – the new it thing is to have a website with dynamic content.

The old trend was to make sure your website could shrink and expand to fit various mobile devices without causing calluses on your visitors’ thumbs and forefingers. Today’s cutting-edge websites can actually conform to user behaviors, attitudes, and preferences in order to deliver knock-out experiences that keep them coming back.

So, is your website dynamic? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Good news! LLT Group can help. But first, let’s discuss exactly what a dynamic website is. Then, let’s see if it is a good fit for your industry. Finally, let’s decide how you might leverage dynamic content to produce the results you’ve been looking for.

The Dynamic Content 4-1-1

Static websites deliver the same content each and every time a visitor arrives. Dynamic websites, on the other hand, create varied, customized journeys tailored to each visitor. The information actually changes based on user preferences. An excellent example of a dynamic content website is Amazon.com. Think of the last time you were shopping around for the latest fidget spinner. Amazon helped you find similar items, kept a running list of items you had previously viewed, and also recommended new and exciting fidget spinners you didn’t even know you needed! Score!

Putting dynamic content into smaller terms, a credit union may display products based on what a user has conveyed interest in. If a visitor is reading about first-time home buying on the credit union’s blog, it would make sense to display current mortgage rates and mortgage product options to them as soon as possible. Along the same lines, a financial lender might target a user’s IP address and display relevant articles and products based on where that person lives in the US.

Dynamic content creates opportunities on your website. But why? The reason is because it vastly improves the UX / UI experience of a visitor. Providing them with information they are potentially interested in upfront simply makes for a better overall experience. Depending on your business goals, an opportunity could be:

• Recommending related products for users to consider
• Displaying relevant information on the homepage about new products or services
• A pop-up offering a PDF in exchange for newsletter sign-up

Each piece of dynamic content allows you to connect with your customers in ways you’ve never considered before. Imagine delivering an entirely different user journey to each visitor based on strategic, relevant content – that’s dynamic.

Your Leads and Conversions will Skyrocket

If you own a small or mid-sized business you more than likely rely on your website to do the heavy-lifting of customer acquisition for you. Dynamic content converts sales faster and acquires new leads better than static content. But in the end, it’s about weighing the pros and cons making the investment. Will dynamic content actually help your website in its current state? In general, some key niches that benefit from dynamic website content include, but are not limited to:

• eCommerce: An eCommerce website is the easiest platform to weave dynamic content into. The ability to make recommendations and track shopping patterns incentivizes customers to make the purchase faster and keeps them coming back.
• Thought Leadership: Your company may be an authority in its market. Presenting users with relevant information moves them to the next logical step of any informational supply chain. A strategic website raises their perception of your expertise within your market.
• Small Businesses: Small business owners are often at a disadvantage compared to the big dogs. There simply aren’t enough resources to hire a staff of business development officers so many small businesses rely on their websites to find new customers and present value propositions to them. Increasing the amount of dynamic content will increase credibility, trust, and engagement as visitors get to know the small business as if they were standing in the same room.

While there are limitless ways to produce dynamic content, many triggers focus on a user’s location, previous clickthrough paths, gender, system details, and shopping preferences. Customized, dynamic website design components can deliver tailored navigation, imagery, and even entirely new website sections depending on user data. Here are a few of the main triggers of dynamic content:

• Recommendations: It’s a myth that dynamic recommendation add-ons are strictly for eCommerce websites. The ability to capture preference and taste information through data-driven recommendations adapts content to actual habits, not assumptions made by the business owner. From travel and service websites to fan-based communities, recommendations can create opportunities for a wide variety of online efforts.
• Calls-to-action: It’s not as difficult as you might think to get more deeply involved with your customers online. Opportunities created by calls-to-action are incredibly important to any website. By prompting visitors to do something, dynamic content can actually begin to create a relationship between visitors and the organization. Dynamic calls-to-action can also control when not to do something, like ask a visitor to sign-up for a newsletter when they are already on your list. By tracking KPI’s (key performance indicators) such as time spent browsing, number of pages viewed, and emails opened, you will create a user-friendly progression across your website that ultimately increases the likelihood of conversion.
• Pop-ups: When triggered at various points across your website, strategic messaging within pop-up screens can create big opportunities. A pop-up could be as simple as advertising a discount code for an upcoming sale when a visitor is inactive for five minutes or as elaborate as taking a 15-minute survey. Pop-ups can even display different messaging depending on which site a visitor was referred by.
• Social Proof: Social proof is often leveraged dynamically to increase a sense of urgency. While daydreaming about your next Spring Break vacation to the Bahamas, you might be met with “12 people just booked this hotel!” or, “Only 4 seats left at this rate!” Knowing what other visitors are choosing not only increases your trust in making one decision over another, it also creates a sense of urgency to convert.

So, what’s the payoff of these triggers? Let’s move into the potential returns your company can expect from creating a website with dynamic content on it.

The ROI of Dynamic Content

Static content was once the norm of the internet because it’s easy to implement. The problem is that static content isn’t personalized so a visitor is likely to bounce from one site to another until he or she finds exactly what they are looking for. Dynamic content increases the performance of your website exponentially by guiding visitors on a customized journey. The ability to change a user’s path opens up a whole new world of placing relevant content in front of the right client at the right time. More personalization leads to more time spent on your site which leads to higher conversions. That fact alone may be worth the time and resources spent implementing dynamic content. But, let’s not stop there.

Dynamic content also has the ability to turn anonymous visitors into known targets. New customer acquisition is costly. By allowing your website to engage with customers 24/7, you are decreasing costs associated with finding new customers and increasing the number of warm leads placed into your sales pipeline.

The Risk of Dynamic Content

Risk? How could there be any risk? If dynamic content sounds too good to be true, it could be… for your business at its current stage, that is. The major risk of implementing a sub-optimal dynamic content strategy is trying to over-predict your users’ behaviors, wants, and needs. Telling your customers what they should and should not benefit from, instead of listening to what they actually want, could very well be the kiss of death for any online strategy. This is the classic case when software MVP’s spend time and resources releasing features and functions that don’t matter to customers. The same goes for dynamic content – listen to your users, don’t make assumptions about their attitudes and actions. I suggest sending a survey to them and acting based on direct feedback.

Dynamic website content is here to stay.

Implementing dynamic content sounds overwhelming, right? Thankfully, there are some very intuitive solutions like DemandBase, KickFire, HubSpot and Omniconvert to name just a few that seamlessly build dynamic content rules and scripts that you can implement within your website without a huge time commitment from you. Once you make the investment and set-up the dynamic content for your site, it doesn’t need to be constantly updated…but it does have to be maintained. Make sure to have a strategic plan or partner that can continually monitor and alter each dynamic module as necessary.

The dynamic content party is just getting started and I hope your interest has been piqued by this discussion. MY goal is to provide some thought-provoking ideas that will take your current marketing strategies to the next level. Dynamic content (and dynamic delivery of that content) is not right for every business, but its future is bright. I predict that this new trend may very quickly become the norm.