Enough has been said about personalisation since the dawn of digital age but with Big Data coming to support the segmentation and targeting of consumers, the importance of personalising your communication for each individual consumer is ever-increasing. Gone are the days of showing same communication to a new website visitor vs a returning visitor, for example. Your communication needs to be nimble and agile to respond to user behaviour in real time. Technology, today, allows you to adapt your messaging to the taste and preferences of consumers and brands investing their efforts into the same will be the beneficiaries in the near future.

What do you do with a combination of data and personalisation? You deliver content to your consumers. Everything that goes to a consumer, apart from core product or service, is a great content marketing opportunity. Hubspot defines smart content as "content that is intelligently personalised to your customer's needs" and it is an outcome of a balanced, data-driven, personalised content marketing strategy. Technologies and platforms will come and go, a marketer has to eventually deliver content to its customers which can be done successfully only when you consider the following:

a. Buyer personas
Mass targeting in a digital age is a sheer waste of money. Even the governments today don't do that anymore who used to target masses of a country. You need to use data to create buyer personas and tailor your messaging strategy accordingly.

b. Mobile friendly ephemeral content
Everyone is talking about how millennials are hooked on to their devices throughout their day and night. Content which is not screen friendly is as good as nothing. Similarly, stop thinking about creating content for a long-term existence, especially when you are targeting the newer generations. Keep consumers returning for more with ephemeral content and this should be your key strategy going forward.

c. Focus on emerging talent
Not every marketer will be able to afford established celebrities for content curation and not every marketer will need to do so. Given the increasing requirement of curated content with micro celebrities, you will need to invest in the new talent for content production. A lot of markets will also be focusing on turning their customers into influencers as they won't be able to rely on one type of influencers to target different types of consumers.

Overall, I believe that marketers will need to be dynamic in their approach to marketing in 2018 to stay in line with their competition. Organisations reacting to these consumer changes will be left behind, only the ability to act real-time will take them over the line.