Content experience tips to help you get the most out of your marketing
Useful for: Understanding why an investment in content experience is critical to creating a personalized and engaging buyer journey, how to scale it, and who on your team is responsible for making it a reality.
Tech you’ll need:
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1. How we define content experience
Every piece of content that’s created and put out into the world has an experience around it. Whether any care has been given to optimizing the experience is another story. That experience can make your prospects’ lives easier and send them on a path to make a buying decision, or it can fall flat and cause potential buyers to look elsewhere. Strategic marketers will create the right conditions for a potential buyer to engage further.
At Uberflip, we define content experience this way:
A content experience is (a) the environment in which your content lives, (b) how it’s structured, and (c) how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company.
A content experience occurs wherever and whenever anyone encounters your content. All of these encounters build the trust that is needed to establish meaningful relationships between your audience and your company.
Let’s break this definition down a little more:
| ENVIRONMENT | STRUCTURE | ENGAGEMENT |
|---|---|---|
| This is the user interface that surrounds your content and the way it makes your audience feel. | This is the way your content is organized. | Engagement depends on the way your content experience keeps your audience’s attention and compels them to keep consuming content. |
| - Placement - Design - Display - Visual aesthetics |
- Segmentation - Navigation - Tagging - Curation of streams |
- Personalization - Relevance - Consistency - Contextual CTAs |
For an even more detailed breakdown of this definition, you can read our article on the Uberflip Resource Hub.
It’s important to note that a content experience isn’t something you lack, as we all have one. It exists beyond your blog, resources page, or campaigns. Anywhere your content can be encountered, it can be experienced. And wherever and whenever that occurs, so does a content experience.
2. How to personalize content experiences at scale
As with 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!
This download is one you’ll want saved on your desktop!
Step 1: centralize content
As marketers, we generate a lot of content—videos, blogs, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, social posts, and more—and deliver it across multiple channels. Because of this, our content can be scattered all over the web. To effectively build out a content experience, you need all of your marketing content in one central location. Thankfully, you now have Uberflip to accomplish this!
Step 2: organize content
At the core of the content experience is the way your content is organized. Categorizing your content will ensure greater discoverability and ultimately lead to a better experience for the visitor—and also for internal stakeholders who intend to use and share your content. Tag and organize by a particular topic, persona, or account, so you can build, at any time, personalized experiences that mirror a customer’s journey. Define recommendations to strategically engage people with the right content at the right time.
Step 3: personalize experiences
Personalizing the experience will impact how customers move through the buyer journey and, most importantly, view your brand. After you organize content contextually, it’s time for the fun part—creating collections and designing an experience around them, like an email nurture, ABM campaign, event destination, or resource center. The devil is in the details here—personalized messaging, custom images, company branding. When you create a better experience around your content, your prospects and customers are more likely to engage and convert.
Step 4: distribute content
Now that you’ve created content experiences, it’s time to put them into action by marketing them across your distribution channels. Your experiences should be mapped to each stage of the buyer journey and distributed across the channels that best complement these. If the buyer is at the awareness stage and you’re taking an ABM 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
Just like you’d expect from any other form of marketing, content experience makes a direct impact on the business. By leveraging marketing automation and analytics you can capture leads, score leads based on engagement, and get actionable insights. As you begin to focus on your content’s environment, structure, and how your audience is compelled to engage, you’ll begin to see content reaching its full potential, performing the way it was intended, and proving the ROI of your content marketing. That’s the power of focusing on the content experience.
3. Content experience ownership [cheat sheet]
Whether you have a dedicated director who owns content experience or you’re spreading out the responsibility across several members of your team, it’s important to understand who plays a role in creating an engaging content experience.
This cheat sheet illustrates who on the marketing team and in your organization is in the best position to own what.
Content experience ownership
| ENVIRONMENT | STRUCTURE | ENGAGEMENT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CONTENT MARKETER Content creation and management |
X
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| DEMAND GENERATION MARKETER Lead generation |
X
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| DIGITAL MARKETER Campaign and website performance / User experience |
X
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X
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| UX DESIGNER User experience |
X
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| GRAPHIC DESIGNER Campaign and website performance / User experience |
X
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| WEB DEVELOPER IT infrastructure / Visual aesthetics |
X
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X
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| PRODUCT MARKETER Product demand generation |
X
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| SALES / ACCOUNT MANAGER Sales and revenue |
X
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As you can see, we all have a part to play in content experience. In most organizations, the responsibility can fall to the content marketer, demand generation marketer, and digital marketer.
With this content experience insight you’re now well on your way to ensuring your organization is providing a consistent, compelling, and binge-worthy experience.
Visit Uberflip Help to access more how-to guides and troubleshooting articles, or to contact Uberflip Support.