It’s pretty fun getting to work on content, write about your methodology, and know that it’s bringing sales or marketing value back to your job in more ways than one. Working for a company that wants to help people build better, personalized, and meaningful content makes it even more to dogfood the product.

Throughout the year, I’ve been writing a lot about the intersection of data science, content, and personalization. As Content Strategist and Editorial Lead, I oversaw all of the content contributed by our engineers, data scientists, and marketers. I even got the chance to experiment with web-first content builds and delivery using Go, HTML, CSS, and JS. Here’s a collection of my contributions that I’m proud of, and that explore personalized and adaptive content.

[EDIT, 2017: I’m no longer at Lytics as of March 2016, but I enjoyed every moment! I’m the Sr. Content Strategist at Cloudability now.]

Are You Making the Most of Your First-Party Data?

Before we can create meaningful content for our users, we need to know every bit about them. This includes demographic data, psychographic data, and also web interaction data. Unifying them all, especially your first-party data (data that you own on your properties) is the key catalyst for content success.

Read more about my perspective.

Exploring Basic Content Personalization

Personalized content can be simply changing simple elements of an asset by hand for a given audience. Or, you can go deep, using your user’s data to help programmatically change content to be more meaningful for them.

My team and I worked on a programmatic way to customize and adapt content to the kind of user that visits your website. Check out our experiment and its results here.

Are You Building Data-First User Personas?

Personas drive a lot of strategic marketing decisions for teams that realize that they need to influence a real-life human being. A lot of this data begins as qualitative and quantitative research via demographic and psychographic reports. User data adds a whole new depth to persona definitions. It also adds an obligation to continuously adapt these personas to catch up with new engagements that they make with your brand and the trends that follow.

Read more about how we build our data-first personas.

How Data-First Personas Inform Adaptive Content

As a follow up to the previous article above, data-driven user personas are the best bedrock for informing adaptive content. Read my article to see how we define adaptive content, how we build the data-first personas that drive them, and to what results.