Most businesses understand that it’s important to produce high-quality content. But have you considered the content experience of your audience beyond consuming the content itself?
Content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every person who reads an article on your blog or watches a video on social media will have gone through a journey to get there.
The content experience considers every experience of this journey, from finding your content to interacting with it from the short term and building a long-term relationship with your content in the future.
What Is Content Experience?
The content experience is the combination of the environment in which it lives, how it’s structured, and how your audience engages with it.
To explain this more fully, let’s use the example of a single post on your company blog. This blog post is more than just words on a page. For one thing, a reader will have to find it. They might do this by typing words into a search engine or clicking a link.
After this, the experience is affected by how the content is packaged. Is it presented attractively with a design that reflects your company brand and with images and illustrations that add value and interest? Is it clearly formatted and readable?
Beyond this, you need to consider how your content is structured as a whole. How easy is it for visitors to find other related content once they land on a single blog post? Is your content organized and structured intuitively?
Engagement is the final part of the content experience. Does your article actually grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to read more? Is it relevant? Is it personalized? Does it drive conversions?
By carefully considering each aspect of the content experience, you can improve and optimize to create a better user experience and build better relationships with your audience. Here are the 5 essential components to dig into.
1. Content Audit
The first step of improving your content experience is to do a thorough audit of your existing content.
Look at your existing content and categorize it into types, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, and so on. You should also divide your content into topic areas so you can see exactly what content you have for each topic.
This should help you to identify gaps in your current content, which need to be filled with new content. This also prevents you from duplicating content that you already have.
The final stage of the audit is to assess the success of your existing content. By identifying your most successful and least successful content, you can find the content formats and topics that resonate most with your audience and use these guidelines to create more successful content in the future.
2. Content Creation
Once you’ve audited your existing content, you can start the process of creating new content to meet your audience’s needs.
This starts with identifying the topics they are interested in and the content formats that are the most suitable for both the topic and your audience.
The presentation of the content is also important. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every blog post has to be a masterpiece of design. But paying attention to formatting so the article is scannable, making sure text is large enough to read comfortably on every device, and including plenty of white space can make a big difference to the content experience.
For visual content including infographics and videos, design is even more important. It’s usually worth investing a bit more time or budget to make sure your visual content makes a real impact.
It’s also important that your content matches your brand in terms of design, style, and voice. Consider each piece of content as a piece of the whole. While it should be strong enough to stand alone, it should also fit with your other content visually and stylistically.
The Moz blog uses its own illustrations with a unique style in all its blog posts. This not only helps the blog to feel more unified despite being written by multiple authors, but it also makes the content of higher quality than similar content using non-unique imagery.
3. Content Organization
Proper content organization and structuring is a vital part of ensuring a good content experience. Your blog and other content should be organized in a way that is logical and intuitive to navigate.
Provide clear navigation on your website so visitors can quickly access content topics that interest them and be generous with your use of internal linking to other related articles and resources.
Not all your content will be on your own website, so it’s also important to consider content on other channels, such as social media and email, and how easy it is for your audience to navigate more of your content from each communication or post.
4. Content Promotion
Your content won’t promote itself, and it doesn’t matter how good your content is if nobody sees it. So, content distribution and promotion is also an important part of the overall content experience.
When you’re devising your content promotional strategy, you must keep the experience of each user in mind to both maximize content exposure and to pay attention to where your audience is spending their time online.
Most brands will get the most out of a content promotion strategy that includes cross-promotion across multiple channels, including SEO, paid advertising, social media, email, and more.
Squeeze the maximum value from your content by repurposing where you can. A blog post can become the basis of a YouTube video or a podcast, and you can turn several blog posts into a downloadable ebook.
5. Content Analytics
Analyzing the effectiveness of your content is a way of assessing the content experience overall and ensuring it improves over time.
Content analytics data can come from several different sources, including website analytics, social media, and your CRM. To ensure you’re consolidating all this information and gleaning the most valuable insights, consider using an integrated analytics platform for content measurement.
Optimize Your Content Experience
DivvyHQ is a full content marketing platform designed to help you to create the best possible content experience for your audience, from content ideas and creating to promotion and analytics. Get in touch today to schedule a demo.