Tailoring content for different audiences

Personalization is when you send different content to your audience based on what you know about them. Depending on what you do, the knowledge you use can be from a variety of sources including:

• Country or region of residence.
• Preferred language.
• Age or income group.
• Past purchases.
• Content they’ve favorited, or consumed earlier.
• When they last interacted with you.

How you personalize content for them is just as flexible. Here are a few ideas:

• Offer special deals to high-value customers.
• Recommend content based on a preference or past purchase.
• Show different content to viewers from different places.
• Communicate differently to people who haven’t interacted with you in a while.

Localization is simply a form of personalization that focuses on content targeted towards your audience‘s location. You may have encountered localized content on a website, where applying a region or language preference lets you use the site in a way that makes the most sense for where you are.

While language translations are really common, localization can be much more than that. Great localization experiences can tailor news feeds, images, currencies, shipping settings, and much more in order to make the customer experience as relevant as it can be.

Sanity lets you tailor content in a way that makes the most sense to you. You provide tailored content exactly the same way you do other fields or types in your content model. It’s possible to choose between field and document level localization, or a mix of the two. Be as simple or complex as you like.

This flexible, needs-based approach should outlast a preconfigured solution in the long-run and is a pathway to better content experiences because you can blend personalization and localization needs any way you like.

Tailored content can be as simple as adding new fields to your document, or an embedded object. Here‘s a Title field in English, Swedish, and Norwegian:

// schemas/documents/article.js

export default {
  title: 'Article',
  name: 'article',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [

    {
      title: 'Title',
      name: 'localizedTitle',
      type: 'object',
      fields: [
        { title: 'English', name: 'en', type: 'string' },
        { title: 'Norwegian', name: 'no', type: 'string' },
        { title: 'Swedish', name: 'sw', type: 'string' },
      ]
    },
    // etc...
  ]
}

You can also apply customization at the document level. This basic example lets you set the language type when creating a new document:

// schemas/documents/article.js

export default {
  title: 'Article',
  name: 'article',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [
    {
      title: "Language",
      type: "string",
      name: "language",
      options: {
        list: [
            {title: 'English', value: 'en'},
            {title: 'Norwegian', value: 'no'},
            {title: 'Swedish', value: 'se'},
          ]
      }
    },
    // etc...
  ]
}

These examples are simple, but the principles are extendable to any use case.

• Localization Docs
• A Studio-only starter with document and field level translation examples
• The Kitchen Sink starter template (with built-in locale support)
• Internationalization input plugin

We learned that it’s possible to create tailored content for audiences of all persuasions. We broke down the difference between personalization and localization and looked at ways to provide for both using Sanity. Next up, we’ll customize Sanity Studio for faster flows and better content.