The Content Experience Framework: How to Build Content Experiences at Scale in 5 Easy Steps
Content is the driving force behind our most effective marketing strategies—demand generation, inbound, account-based marketing, and sales enablement. And as marketers aim to personalize how their prospects and target accounts experience their content, scaling the creation of those experiences becomes the next big hurdle.
But it doesn’t have to be. Like anything, a little planning and work up front will make the creation and scalability of personalized experiences for your marketing strategies and campaigns painless—and dare I say, fun!
The Content Experience Framework arms marketers with a scalable approach to creating personalized content experiences for any stage of the buyer journey. The framework outlines five easy steps to help you focus, align your team, and deliver truly meaningful experiences so you can rock your inbound, ABM, demand generation, and sales enablement programs!
Whether you have a content experience platform to help you do it, or you manage it with separate tools, spreadsheets, and serious hacking skills, the concepts remain the same.
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Step 1: Centralize Content
Before you can build out content experiences, you need to take stock of all the content you have. There’s a scary stat floating around the internet that says between 60 and 70 percent of content in B2B companies sits unused. Why? Marketers simply can’t keep track of it all. They have content all over the web—on their blog, their social channels, hosted on other platforms, but also on zip drives, in folders, and saved locally.
Centralizing allows you to bring all of your videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, infographics, blog articles, and social posts into one central location and deliver it across multiple channels. It also helps you lock down version control and ensure everyone is using only marketing-approved content.
Step 2: Organize Content
Now that you have all of your content in one place, the next step is to organize it. What are your topics? Who are your personas? Will you organize content by stage of the funnel? And what kind of content do you have?
Auditing your content is a must-do at this stage. Find out what you have, and then tag or label your content by topic, persona, account, or stage of the funnel so it can be easily found, used, and shared in a personalized manner. Auditing your content will also show you any gaps you need to fill.
Once labeled, your content can be categorized for easy discoverability on the front-end (through the top navigation) and on the back-end (either through a spreadsheet or using technology). This will allow you to quickly and easily build personalized experiences at any time.
Finally, before you move to step three, be sure to define what content should be recommended. This can be done using the categories and tags you just created (a content experience platform can help with this), or by adding another column in your audit spreadsheet. For the more advanced, decision trees, artificial intelligence, and intent data can be leveraged to determine what to recommend to whom and when.
Step 3: Personalize Experiences
At this point, most people jump right to distributing their content, but personalizing the experience is an important next step. Creating a personalized content experience will impact how customers move through the buyer journey and, most importantly, how they view your brand.
You laid the groundwork for this in the first two steps—now let the fun begin! You can create collections of content and design an experience around them. That way your target audience can engage with content in all sorts of formats in one intentional experience. Some examples include a resource center, a destination for your email nurture campaigns, an ABM campaign, or a knowledge base for customers.
To make it truly personalized, you’ll want to include tailored messaging, custom images and branding, and contextual CTAs to make the experience that much richer and engaging for your prospects, customers, and target accounts.
Step 4: Distribute Content
Now that you’ve created your content experiences, it’s time to put them into action by marketing them across your distribution channels. How do you do this? Well, the experience you created will have a unique URL and your distribution tactics (email, organic, social, paid advertising, direct mail, etc.) will lead them back to that experience.
Your experiences should be mapped to each stage of the buyer journey and distributed across the channels that best complement them.
If the buyer is at the awareness stage and you’re taking an account-based marketing approach you might try a mix of paid ads and direct mail, or if inbound marketing is your focus then organic and social media might be your best way in.
Step 5: Generate Results
Alright, time for the grand finale. Step five is where we get back what we’ve put into building out experiences. Because after all, this isn’t just about having a great brand, it’s about driving business results.
Putting the right finishing touches on your personalized experiences will allow you to generate the results you want. Things like:
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The right calls-to-action
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The proper integrations
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The right tech to adapt on the fly
By leveraging marketing automation and analytics, you can capture leads, score leads based on engagement, and get actionable insights. You’ll also find you have the ability to maximize the results you see because engagement is contained within this one experience.
As you begin to focus on your content’s environment, structure, and how your audience is compelled to engage, you’ll see content reach its full potential, perform the way it was intended, and prove the ROI of your content marketing. That’s the power of focusing on the content experience.
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