Delivering Experience in Your Content
In every piece of content created, there is an experience around it.
Nowadays, generating high-quality content is often times no longer marketer’s biggest issue; making the content “speaks” to the audience is the real challenge. After all, valuable and memorable contents have great potential to drive more organic traffic.
What’s Content Experience?
Today, we live in the age of content, particularly one that values authenticity and information. Content marketing has become more important than ever. However, most marketers simply focus on continually generating high-quality content without taking into account the experience around the content.
Imagine yourself as a blogger sharing practical traveling information article. You didn’t attach any links, any relevant images, or check for any grammatical errors in your content. Sure, your article might be highly informative, but when your readers read your article, they found that they have to read a certain sentence several times before they understand the main point, there are too many pop-ups appearing, the format doesn’t fit in their mobile devices, and when they finished reading it, they are left with the lingering feeling of wanting more information about a certain destination.
What they experience is what we marketers identified as content experience. It extends beyond what the content looks like and embraces the concept of user experience and personalization.
Content Experience: How to Start
Have you ever thought about how your content is experienced by your customers? How will it impact what your audience does next?
A successfully-delivered content experience should be able to engage your customers throughout their entire customer journey.
If You are a Blogger
People go to blog to seek out useful information. Greet them in conversational and casual tones to capture them right off the bat. It also helps if you give your articles some sort of personalities. You can be friendly, bubbly, or even sarcastic.
The point is to make it easy for people to relate to you.
But, how do you make sure they stay longer in your blog? One of my favorite strategies is link building. You can embed links that includes your personal advice or experiences to other websites or your other articles that are relevant.
For example, if you’re a beauty blogger and you are talking about tips on how to use the correct foundation in one of your articles, you can attach a link to another of your article that talks about how to choose the right lipstick.
If You are an Influencer
Influencers cover and share various types of content, from texts, images, videos, even live-stream. Most of their posts usually have one primary goal: to evoke a sort of action from the audience.
How do you compel action?
My go-to strategies are relevant UGC and calls-to-action (CTA) that are tailored to the followers’ interests.
For example, @bdorts taps into her audience’s interests in travel and photography and uses amazing visual along with caption told in storytelling manner to initiate reactions from her followers during Canon’s #ShootForGreatness campaign. She ends the post with a simple CTA to encourage actions from her followers to check out the campaign and follow her story at the same time. With this UGC-post, she managed to deliver information and experience that her followers will remember.
One more thing. Make sure you keep the quality and delivery of your content consistent as it will lead to greater trust, which over time works better to compel actions.
If You are Running an E-Commerce Website
With customer having shorter attention span, many e-commerce owners are struggling to find ways to keep them enticed. A seamless purchasing process which comprises the integration of social media and mobile payment would definitely help, but that’s no longer enough. Today customers are craving for personalized content as part of the user experience journey.
One of the easiest strategies is via personal recommendation.
Amazon successfully personalized their e-commerce website with this strategy. When visitors visit their site and navigate to their personal page, they will immediately see categories based on their previous onsite search and browsing behavior. The best thing? You can also do it with personalized email marketing.
If You Are a Streaming Provider
If you ask me what my favorite activity to spend on lazy day is, I’ll say Netflix and chill. Technology undeniably has caused massive shift on customer preferences. Marketers can cater to these changes to create content experiences that allow audiences to take as deep a dive as they want.
As a streaming provider, providing binge-able content is a great way to enhance brand experience and improve your relationship with your viewers.
One of the strategies that Hulu, for example, employed with their The Handmaid’s Tale series is to offer the first several episodes at launch before it transitioned to a weekly release schedule. This approach gives the audience a chance to consider how the story develops each week, thus building anticipation for their next chapter.
Not only do they deliver successful content with a compelling story but they also provide the audience with just enough experience to draw them back into their site.
Everyone has Content Experience
Content experience exists beyond blog, website, posts, or any resources page. Anywhere content can be encountered, it can be experienced.
But what are the advantages of content experience strategy?
- The adoption of experience as part of your business’ lifestyle. This way you can make the content experience relevant to your niche and audience.
- Provide your business with brand authority. Creating content experiences will ensure your audience gain value, knowledge, and satisfaction, which in turn leads to better brand value and loyalty. Before long, your brand will be the audience’s first choice within the industry.
- ROI improvement. Content experience is all about time and effort. Use your existing marketing technology tools and skills to ensure minimal investment while still delivering valuable content experiences to your audience.
Bottom line? Content experience is about building a content ecosystem that guides your audience through the marketing funnel while solving their biggest pain points.
So, have you tried content experience approach yet?
