Is it common practice to customize marketing page content for different types of users?

Question

I've recently been working with a client who really likes to hide all content that a prospective customer might not be interested in. The reasoning is that they'd like to "avoid confusing the user" or "showing them things that don't make sense in their context."

For example: XYZ company offers services to Individuals, Small Business, and Enterprise Orgs. Said company wants to hide/show/adjust page content based on which context the user represents.

To accomplish this, the company proposes one of two solutions:

Option 1: Have "toggle buttons" at the top. When the user clicks "Small Business" at the top, it hides/shows/rewords content throughout the page, but leaves much of the content the same (or very close).

Option 2: Have links at the top that point to a dedicated page for each context. Each of the destination pages are mostly the same, but contain subtle adjustments here and there (hide/show/reword).

Personally, I don't like either option. I think the user will be very unclear as to what content is different or the same between the different contexts, since at a glance they appear nearly the same. I'd prefer the client rework this into either (a) a static page that shows everything, and the user can decide what they don't care about, or (b) there are individual pages for each, but they don't share any content and appear very distinct from each other.

But at the end of the day, I'm just wondering if it is common practice for marketing teams to want to hide/show content on each page for various user contexts? Or is there another solution (such as the ones I mentioned) that is more preferred by many?

Answer 1

It's one thing to craft targeted pages for Small Business, Enterprise, and Individuals, but it sounds like you understand it's another thing to create multiple pages that "leave much of the content the same (or very close)" and "appear nearly the same".

Typically I've seen companies go for the Option 2 of creating separate pages, since it makes it easy to rank each page variant separately in search engines, and cover more specific keywords / intents, but of course their pages are targeted at each demographic with unique content, they're not "nearly the same".

Personally I would consider going with Option 2 but having just a single "main page" in your top nav, then linking the individual targeted variants in your footer. That way the top nav doesn't get cluttered/confused for the user, yet the variants still have a chance to surface for targeted queries in search engines.

Of course, as you mentioned, making each page more unique is the ideal option.