How Well Can AI Personalize Headlines and Images?

Its AI gathers data and learns how to personalize content for different audiences. Will it improve how content is targeted?

Personalization for content marketers

In the uber-competitive content marketing landscape, personalization plays an ever greater role. Nobody can write for everybody. The more you know about your target audience and the better you’re able to use this set of data, the more chances you have to retain their attention.

Marketing campaigns targeting specific customer groups can result in up to 200% more conversions versus campaigns aimed at general audiences. According to braze.com, 53% of marketers claim a 10% increase in business after they customized their campaigns.

On the other hand, 83% of marketing creatives see content personalization as their top challenge and 60% of businesses struggle to produce content consistently, while 65% find it challenging to produce engaging content.

Artificial Intelligence to support content personalization

Can AI help overcome these challenges? Adobe is trying to find out. They developed a tool that automatically personalizes blog content for each visitor. Using Adobe Sensei, their AI technology, the tool can suggest different headlines, blurbs, and images that presumably address the needs and interests of the particular reader.

Writers and editors can still edit Sensei’s suggestions and see the AI’s “thinking” behind making the specific choices. AI, to be clear, does not change the content itself - it just proposes different ways it can be promoted.

AI displaying online content tailored to a specific user is nothing new. Adobe’s idea is to take it a step further. Sensei makes the kind of decisions an editor would traditionally make (even if it doesn’t have the last word on what headline will be displayed). Whether it manages to be relevant might depend on how much data the reader decides to trust the content provider with. If readers see a benefit in content being personalized this way, perhaps they might be willing to share more relevant information - just like with personalized ads.

Content individualization

Studies of online behaviors and habits have shown that small details can play a huge part in “winning” the customer. So it’s possible that early adopters can win big.

But there’s another dimension to the issue. Individualization works best when the targeting of a specific group happens in a genuine, human way; when there’s empathy behind the process that allows for the hard-to-achieve connection. We want to read content from authors who “speak our language”.

• Can this be automated?
• Can a specific photo on a food blog or usage of certain words in a headline attract a certain type of user?
• Can the content be made truly more attractive just by adjusting these small details?

If the headline is not relevant to the content, it might seem like clickbait and push readers away instead of attracting them to engage with the whole text. And this, whether written by AI or a human, won’t work in the long term.

The fight for attention that we are currently experiencing will only keep intensifying, as will the search for tools that could help one win. The ones that are taking on personalization but are not trying to change too much are best positioned to succeed.