What Is Content Experience? Definition, Components, Framework and Examples
Feb 28 2019 | 07:44 PM | 15 Mins Read | Level - Basic | Read ModeIndrajeet Deshpande Contributor, Ziff Davis B2B
Connect with Author
Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting www.guitargabble.com.
He’s studying Stoic philosophy, experimenting with productive habits and documenting the progress. Get in touch if you’re keen to know how you can implement pro-wrestling tactics in your marketing, community building and storytelling.
Top 20 Landing Page Design Examples for 2020 7 months ago
E-commerce Marketer: Key Role, Skill Set, and Job Description 7 months ago
Top 10 Digital Marketing Books to Read for 2020 8 months ago
Content experience is defined as the overall experience of accessing, consuming, engaging with and responding to a stream of brand content - across diverse devices, platforms and channels, through the journey from prospect to customer.
In this article, we look at the concept of content experience, its components, framework, and best practices to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
CONTENT THAT CONNECTS: WHY INFLUENCER MARKETING IS THE FUTURE OF GEN Z ENGAGEMENT
Gen Z is a business opportunity you can’t afford to miss. As 40% of the population commanding upwards of $40 billion in spending power, modern marketers need to build compelling strategies to engage with Gen Z.
DownloadTable of Contents
- What is Content Experience?
- Key components of Content Experience
- Content Experience Framework
- Content Experience Best Practices
- Top 5 Content Experience Examples
- Advantages of Upgrading to Content Experience
Â
What is Content Experience?
Content experience is the overall experience of accessing, consuming, engaging with and responding to a stream of brand content - across diverse devices, platforms and channels, through the journey from prospect to customer. Successful content experiences deliver a high degree of relevance, personalization, timeliness, consistency and convenience; by focusing on a holistic approach that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It is important to realize that we all deliver content experience – good, bad or ugly. Since this happens inadvertently, even when brands put out disjointed pieces of content, it is sensible to create a focused effort around ensuring the experience is a productive one.
Let us examine 5 of the key terms and phrases in this definition of content experience:
- Stream of brand content: this is distinct from individual pieces of content with their own performance metrics that a prospect may consume in a disjointed fashion. A stream implies a continuous flow of content where one piece logically flows from the previous one and adds up to cumulatively progress the prospect along their journey.
- Across diverse devices, platforms and channels: implies a seamless and consistent experience across all the prospect’s preferred touchpoints
- Through the journey from prospect to customer: implies an engagement that goes beyond a single interaction with a piece of content, sustaining over time
- Relevance, personalization, timeliness, consistency and convenience: all of these indicate an enhanced experience versus an isolated experience.Â
- Holistic approach: an ‘experience’ approach that is greater than the sum of its parts, compounding the impact of individual content marketing components such as content creation, content marketing and content distribution activities.
Â
Before we go deeper into the components of content experience, let’s understand the concept better by looking at what differentiates content experience from more traditional content marketing.
What is the Difference Between Content Experience and Content Marketing?
Are content experience and content marketing the same thing?
The short answer is no.
While content marketing pertains to the creation, distribution, and analysis of content – and often individual pieces of content - content experience is a much more holistic approach across creation, consumption and measurement criteria. The genesis of the content experience approach is an understanding that, as per Editor-in-Chief of MarTech Advisor Chitra Iyer, “prospects and customers don’t look to consume an individual piece of content, but rather are on a journey where they need ongoing resources to help move purposefully forward in their buying decision�.
The marketer’s job, therefore, is to ensure the brand helps the prospect by delivering the right content at the right time, and that each piece logically progresses from the last. This delivers a holistic, seamless and engaging experience with the brand, instead of a one-off interaction through a single article found via search or any other source. In fact, as Randy Frisch, CMO of Uberflip says in this interview to Martech Advisor, the experience begins after the first piece of content is discovered. He says, “Once you’ve captured someone, then what? That’s the big question. Most of us are obsessed with the first click. But to me, true content discovery happens once you’re found. It’s so easy for people to click back to Google results after the first piece you serve. It’s the same on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The challenge is to keep someone engaged. On average, it takes seeing seven assets before someone is ready to buy, according to IDC. So, build content journeys that can accelerate sales velocity. That is true discovery!�
Key components of Content Experience
A successful content experience first needs the foundational components of content marketing to be in place. Here are the 5 foundational components of content marketing that you need to master before you can elevate and transform from a content marketing to a content experience approach:
Step 1: Content Audit
Â
A content audit helps assess your existing content, such as blog posts, e-books, case studies, infographics, reports, videos, podcasts and so on; and segregate them based on the topic rather than content format. That way you know exactly what you have and don’t have to serve different prospect segments at each stage of their journey.
Performing a content audit will benefit you in three ways:
- Find gaps in the existing content strategy that need to be filled with new content
- Identify bet and worst performing content and understand what type of content resonates with your audience
- Identifying duplications in content that need to be rationalized and streamlined
Â
Pro Tip: When conducting a content audit, it’s a good idea to perform a competitor analysis as well. Knowing what type of content is working for your competitors will give you some insights and inspiration for your strategy.
Step 2: Content Creation
Â
Content creation is the process of identifying content topics that your audience looks for, deciding the content formats for optimum consumption, and then actually producing the content, all based on findings from the content audit.
Content creation includes:
- Keyword research where you identify keyword phrases that your target audience and customers actively searches for. The ideal shortlist of keyword phrases are those with high monthly search volumes and moderate to low competition.
- The ideation step includes coming up with topics based on the keyword phrases. After coming up with topic ideas, identify which format to use for the content. This could be a blog post, infographic, video, podcast or some form of gated content.
- The final step is to produce, edit and upload/ publish the content on the chosen platforms, from the internal content management system to external platforms such as social media etc.
Â
The focus should be on creating content pieces that are standalone but also logically connected to each other rather than several disjointed pieces of content. This will help deliver the logical ‘stream of content’ in the experience approach.
Step 3: Content Management
Â
The goal of content marketing is to provide unique content to your audience at the most opportune time in their buyer’s journey. However, content management needs to go beyond content storage. In the experience approach, plan to centralize, organize and store content in a way that they are logically and intelligently connected for easy and timely retrieval (the right content to the right prospect on the right channel at the right time in their journey) - whether manually or with appropriate technology tools.
Step 4: Content Distribution, Amplification and Discovery
Â
You can’t just create content and wait for it to be discovered or go viral! You need to be proactive when it comes to increasing the reach of your content. Content amplification or distribution is the process of promoting content through various marketing channels. You can amplify your content through three media resources:
- Owned media: posting the content on all owned platforms including blogs, brand social media handles, brand website and other owned channels
- Earned media: includes free coverage or sharing of your content by the press or media publications, sharing on social media platforms, PR, any content contributed to third-party media as a guest byline etc.
- Paid media: promoting the content on external platforms including affiliate sites (pay per click/ PPC), native content discovery platforms (such as Taboola), social media ads, influencer marketing, native placements and advertorials etc.
- Content repurposing: make your investments in content creation go further by repurposing a longer format content into several other shorter pieces, which can be used on different platforms and devices. For example, did you publish an e-book? You can convert the key takeaways into an infographic. Longer text interviews can be turned into one-minute videos with key takeaways. You can promote this refreshed content through your owned, paid and external media resources as well.
Â
Step 5: Content Performance AnalyticsÂ
Â
Content analytics allows you to measure the effectiveness of the content experiences you provide. There are different types of metrics that you need to track. Traditional content marketing metrics focus on individual content performance - traffic, search rankings, page views, time on site, downloads etc. These are typical consumption Metrics. Also progress the measurement to include retention and engagement metrics such as returning visitors, scroll depth, pages per visit, and social media engagement (follows, shares, retweets, forwards and comments etc.). But in a true experience approach, you would also include ROI metrics – measuring the business performance or outcomes of content, by way of leads generated, offers or promotions redeemed, and actual conversions.
Learn more: What is Dynamic Content? How to Implement it?
Content Experience Framework
Once your foundational elements are in place and primed for a logical elevation to the content experience approach, begins the process of building the content experience plan. The focus is to build the content experience around 3 vital aspects, as Ms. Iyer highlights in MarTech Advisor’s Content Experience Explainer:
Â
- Content organization: This aspect is crucial to ensure prospects can easily and conveniently discover and access the right content at the right time, at each stage of their journey. Based on your unique business context and your audience needs and preferences, decide if you will organize them by format, by stage of the journey, by persona etc. If you have published a long-form article, does it contain anchor links to skip to different sections easily? Can the right people across the organization access the content they need easily, especially in customer-facing roles such as sales and customer success? The right tags and descriptions will go a long way to ensure the right content gets found, and linking/grouping and recommendation engine logic will ensure the right streams can be curated to the right persona.
- Content personalization: After the initial contact, every piece of content the visitor or prospect receives should be in keeping with their stage in the buyer’s journey and their need and intent at that stage. Personalized content is relevant, contextual and timely. It could range from dynamic landing pages to highly personalized streams of content curated specifically for an individual prospect. The key to personalization is to create or curate a dynamic ‘stream of content’ from the existing content repository, based on the individual’s identity (if known) or behavioral indicators of intent (if unknown). The idea is to offer a rich and engaging content experience to your best prospects!
- Engagement and relationship nurturing: Content experience, when done right, can add tremendous value to overall marketing outcomes; especially in the B2B context. B2B buying journeys can be long and need the right resources at each stage to keep progressing along the funnel. Ensuring the content engages the prospect and helps build a relationship instead of just a one-off interaction with a piece of branded content is crucial. The content experience approach focuses on creating a stream of relevant content that engages the prospect over a sustained period of time. Whether you are executing an ABM strategy or an email nurturing campaign, building a content experience plan that strives to build meaningful engagement instead of disjointed interactions will always deliver more compelling business outcomes.
Â
Learn more: What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Content Experience Best Practices
Let’s look at five best practices that would allow you to deliver an exceptional content experience.
1. The Halo and Horns Effect
Â
How many times have you left a website right after landing on it because the interface wasn’t good or it looked unappealing? Well, that’s an example of a concept known as the horns effect in practice.
The halo effect is a cognitive bias that makes humans perceive attractive people as kinder, funnier and more likable. In much the same way, the horns effect is when one negative trait leads to an overall perception that something is bad. That’s why first impressions are so important.
Having an intuitive website interface is essential to providing a seamless content experience. That means, the content should be easy to locate, the interface should look pleasing, and the website should form a favorable impression in the visitor’s mind.
2. Introduce the Topic-Cluster Model
Â
The way people use search engines has changed in recent years. The introduction of Google’s Hummingbird update introduced semantic search that considers the context of the query rather than the meaning of individual keywords. To accommodate this significant change, websites introduced the topic-cluster model. In the topic-cluster model, the pillar page remains at the heart of the category while cluster pages link back to it.
Graphical Representation of Topic Clusters
Source: HubSpot
3. De-Silofy Your Content and Teams
Â
Silos around content get built in two ways — the way content is organized, and the way teams work.
Let’s look at how to dismantle both silos:
Many businesses make the mistake of organizing content either by content format or by date. This proves to be a huge mistake because the content is not easily discoverable by visitors. Centralizing content by topic/category and further filtering according to content format will help you organize content in a way that allows visitors to find the desired piece of content correlating to their stage in the buyer’s journey.
Multiple functions within the marketing department own content experience — the content marketer, digital marketer, UX and graphic designer, product marketer, sales manager, etc. Often, these teams don’t work in harmony due to different reasons, and the CMO needs to intervene to bring all the teams on the same page and work together to deliver a superior content experience. Don’t wait for that stage to arrive. Build seamless collaborative processes that benefit all teams.
Â
4. Encourage People to Engage with Your Content
Â
Don’t have users passively consume your content. At the end of every piece of content, ask questions, urge them to leave a comment, and be proactive in replying to every comment. Add social sharing buttons to make it easy for your readers to share your content and engage with you on social media.
You could also integrate lead magnets such as exit overlays, pop-ups, sliders, and banners so that visitors are nudged to take the desired action to view another piece of content or fill up a quick form.
5. Focus on Personalization
Â
Right from e-commerce stores to video streaming websites, almost every successful business utilizes personalization in some way. Using recommendation engines is the best way to get started with personalization. Recommendation engines will suggest new content to your visitors based on their behavior.
User-generated content and interactive marketing are also excellent tactics to personalize the content experience. Use polls and quizzes in your content to engage your audience. Ask users to share reviews, photos, videos and suggestions specific to their area and use it to improve personalization and localization.
Learn More: 10 Content Marketing Trends for 2020 Content Experience Strategy
Top 5 Content Experience Examples
Creating relevant content is a surefire way to establish your credibility as a B2B brand. Here are five examples of B2B content experiences that will give you plenty of ideas on how you can create content experiences that have good recall value with your customers.
1. MailChimp
Â
Known for its iconic brand mascot — Freddie the intuitive UI, MailChimp is arguably one of the coolest brands when it comes to delivering content experiences.
MailChimp has segregated its content experiences into categories that cover the fundamentals of email marketing, practical marketing tips, product guides and tutorials, success stories, and product updates.
Here are a few strategies MailChimp has integrated to enhance their content experience:
- The marketing tips section focuses on helping business owners increase their revenue through e-commerce marketing strategies, A/B testing, automation workflows, etc.
- MailChimp’s biggest offering in terms of content experiences is MailChimp Presents — “A collection of original content that celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit.� MailChimp Presents features Going Through It (a podcast featuring exceptional women), documentaries, and episodic video content.
Â
Learn More:Â Content Experience Strategy: Creation, Key Transformations and Insights
2. Close
Close is a CRM software that offers lead management, email sequences, predictive dialer, SMS, etc. Through its blog, Close heavily delves into various areas of sales including appointment setting, sales objection, prospecting, sales skills, and so on.
Close also has a resource section that enlists email templates, ebooks, checklists, sales scripts and blog articles bundled into different courses geared towards entrepreneurs and salespeople.
Â
Image Credits: Close
Close Gives Away with Its Startup Sales Resource Bundle
Close stands out through its impressive content experiences in the following ways:
- A dedicated resource library that contains checklists, CRM-ready templates, calculators, etc. to help salespeople
- They send out a daily emailer — Daily Sales Motivation that sends you a 60-second sales motivation video, quote, and an action item
- They have in-depth content on the fundamentals of CRM, tips on how SMBs can choose a CRM tool, and so on.
Â
3. HubSpot
Â
Known for pioneering the term “Inbound Marketing�, HubSpot’s claim to fame has been its ability to create content in various formats. Very few companies have been able to sustain such a content creation process, and HubSpot is one of them.
Currently, HubSpot has divided its blog into four distinct categories, viz. Marketing, Sales, Service and News & Trends.
 HubSpot Covers Blogs on Marketing, Sales, Customer Services, and News and Trends in Its Blog (Screenshot)
HubSpot has developed bots that deliver its latest articles through Slack or Messenger.
Along with its blog, HubSpot has managed to build a colossal content experience machine through the following strategies:
- A resource section that currently has over 400 content pieces: ebooks, templates, marketing kits, quiz, guides, and courses
- A research section that publishes one piece of original, valuable research per month, on average
- 12 free certification courses covering the fundamentals of inbound marketing, content marketing, inbound sales, social media, and sales enablement
Â
Learn More:Â 3 Trends for Content Experiences
4. LeadPages
LeadPages lets you design websites, landing pages, pop-up forms, and header bars. It shares copywriting, digital marketing, landing page, conversion rate optimization (CRO), lead generation tips and tactics through its blog.
LeadPages has successfully solidified its position through the following content experiences:
- A free 5-part training webinar that teaches entrepreneurs and marketers how to drive more traffic, generate more leads, and bring in more revenue
- A landing page guide that covers the landing page fundamentals, copywriting strategies, and conversion tactics
- A podcast titled ‘The Lead Generation Podcast’ that features entrepreneurs sharing their success stories
Â
Screenshot ​​​​​​ of the Lead Generation Podcast by LeadPages
5. Moz
If you have learned SEO the DIY-way like me, you possibly came across Moz at some point of your journey. Moz is a SaaS company that has built tools to simplify SEO and content marketing.
The biggest strength that Moz has in content, is its blog. This blog covers topics right from the basics to the most advanced, technical aspects of SEO. The blog covers a wide variety of topics such as SEO, blogging, analytics, copywriting, design, content, email marketing, and so on.
Screenshot of the Weekly Whiteboard Friday Series by Moz
Here is how Moz wins at the content experience game:
- Moz has a resource section that includes the SEO learning center, training material on how to use Moz products, a forum where you can interact with the SEO community, etc.
- There’s always a Whiteboard Friday — A weekly instructional video series covering various aspects of SEO
- Although the YouMoz Blog is no longer active, it was widely regarded as one of the best community-driven blogs due to the quality of the content published
Â
Learn More:Â How to Create a Content Experience Plan
The Advantages of Upgrading to Content Experience
Content experience has been an undefined element of marketing that has recently started gaining prominence due to the proliferation of content. Let’s close with look at the advantages you’ll gain once you upgrade to a content experience approach:
1. Experiences will become a way of life
Â
Adopting the concept of content experience to your business will ensure you don’t just have a repository of content, but a repertoire of experiences tailored to your niche. This will turn your customer experiences around and keep your content relevant.
2. Brand authority will keep you on top
Â
Creating content experiences will ensure your audiences gain value, knowledge and satisfaction, which leads to brand value and loyalty. This will have your customers returning and recommending you to their peers, which in turn will greatly impact your brand and domain authority.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities can get you immense visibility but the kind of domain authority you can get from genuine, organic traffic through good content that incorporates SEO best practices is priceless, to say the least. Make sure to always add value, give users what they want/need and strive to be their first choice in your industry.
3. ROI will spike
Â
When it comes to content experience, your primary investment should be time and effort, not hefty budgets and high-priced software. If MarTech tools for customer data management (CDM) and customer relationship management (CRM) are presumably already at your disposal. Use them to analyze your customer data and strategize the what’s and how’s that will make an impact on your audience. With minimal investments, you can create valuable content experiences that will give you the returns you’re looking for.
Key Takeaways for Marketers
Creating content experiences entails so much more than just creating content. It is about building a content ecosystem that guides your prospects through the marketing funnel while solving their biggest pain points.
To deliver memorable content experiences, you need to understand the psychology of your prospective customers, figure out what they’re looking for, and create content that addresses their queries while giving them a memorable experience that triggers positive emotions and associations.Â
Of course, the right tools and technologies at your disposal also helps to execute your content experience strategy consistently, securely, and at scale.
We hope you found this all-encompassing guide real insightful. Read all about Content Experience, the news, tips, trends and more, here.
Have you tried the content experience approach yet? Tell us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!