Everyone understands content is crucial to marketing, definitely in B2B but equally so in B2C marketing. Marketers know the only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant innovation and following the top trends. Let’s look at four reasons why the content marketing world is transforming into something even more effective – content experience.
Content has been at the heart of marketing for quite some time now — marketers understand its importance and have incorporated it into their business websites and marketing strategies. What we know of the consumption side of things is that customers want more than just raw content – they want a complete content experience to lead them from start to end and beyond in their buyer’s journey. It’s all about experiences for the 21st-century customer, and as a marketer, you must keep them engaged while leading them through this journey.
Here’s an interesting insight: “Instead of looking at your content as a bridge between your customer and your product, your content should be an encompassing experience that engages the customer throughout their entire buyer journey.” Content has had a paradigm shift into being more about an experience than a means to an end. It is a crucial part of the buyer’s journey, right from introductory information, to driving decisions, serving as brand recall and more.
What is Content Experience and How Does It Relate to Content Marketing?
Content Experience is about personalizing and contextualizing content as per a user’s likes, dislikes, wants and needs. Marketers need to make sure that content is woven seamlessly into the overall brand experience and customer experience across all verticals. This includes instructions on the packaging, the website or blog content, articles, white papers, newsletters, etc. Every way a consumer engages with and experiences a brand while consuming content — including banners, chatbots, pop-ups, an AR or VR interaction, a video and a social media narrative — is considered part of a user’s content experience.
“Your content experience is the place where all the user action takes place. It’s where a visitor converts to a lead, and where you can measure your content’s effectiveness across the entire buyer journey.”
~Yoav Schwartz, Co-founder and CEO, Uberflip
Content experience is not a whole new ball game; it is an upgrade to content marketing — adapting to changing landscapes. The distinction is: “As marketers, we generate a lot of content—videos, blogs, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, social posts—and deliver it across multiple channels. Because of this, our content is scattered all over the web. To effectively build out a content experience you need all of your marketing content in one central location.”
Also Read: 4 Key Components of Content Experience
4 Reasons Content Experience is the New Content Marketing
1. Better SEO Reach
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes sure your content is right on top of search engine results when a user looks for anything relevant to your brand, industry, product or service. Rilind Elezaj Digital Marketing Specialist, SEO for X, says, “The results that search engine optimization produces are not only targeted but are also cost-effective, long-lasting and quantifiable. Unlike other strategies of generating website traffic, SEO has absolutely no shelf life.”
Improved SEO results lead to better visibility, which in turn increases your brand awareness and recognition. Focusing on content experiences rather than content marketing gives your brand a voice that is relatable to your customer. This ensures conversational customer queries — not just technical keywords — are answered, including queries from voice search assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant, which is the inevitable future of search.
2. Greater Brand Authority
Both B2B and B2C consumers have evolved and are more inclined to purchase a product or service that has a wealth of valuable information available around it on the web. The traditional product demo is no longer enough. Brands are going the extra mile to generate quality content of various types for their brand so customers can find them across multiple channels. Paying attention to providing an experience through that content rather than simply marketing tired content will no doubt improve your credibility and secure your brand a genuine reputation as an authority in the space.
Some ideas to achieve this include User Generated Content (UGC) in the form of reviews, recommendations, blog posts, ratings, and comments add a ton of value and help improve credibility. Brands can also use influencers and opinion leaders to cover live events, product launches, etc. as brand ambassadors.
Also Read: Transforming ‘Content Marketing’ to ‘Content Experiences’: 3 insights for Marketers
3. Increased Traffic and Lead Generation
Successful marketers know that innovation is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. Unlike the passive consumption approach of content marketing, providing content experiences cuts through the noise, taking your brand’s market standing to a whole new level.
The perks of being in a whole new league include better quality traffic and opportunities to leverage gated content that generate quality leads. Prioritizing video in your content experience strategy will ensure this. According to Forbes, video will only continue to rise in importance, with video predicted to account for 82% of global internet traffic by 2021.
4. Improved ROI with Integrated Metrics
Content Experience lets you capitalize on the fact that it is a combination of content marketing and customer experience. While marketing has a set of fixed metrics to track Return on Investment (ROI), Customer Experience has a rather subjective cast of metrics. These include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Quality of Customer Interaction (QCI), Customer Behavior and Intent, and Churn Rate. You can integrate these with your regular marketing metrics to unlock possible avenues. Track your content experience strategy by measuring performance at every stage, identifying what works and expanding on that.
Pro Tip: Content distribution networks such as Outbrain and Taboola can provide good ROI if you’re really trying to expand your content reach.
Also Read: In 2019, Customer Experience Will Matter More Than Ever
Where Do We Go from Here?
How do you woo the modern customer? She needs to be engaged, entertained, given valuable information — an experience she will enjoy. Marketers need to be storytellers who use the technology at their disposal creatively. Integrating interactive marketing with AR, VR, voice, etc. can add so much value to even a simple campaign idea.
Content Experience is in most ways, version 2.0 of content marketing but it is also so much more. It is the future of marketing in a world that is deluged with tech and content — a concept with the potential to become a key differentiator for your brand. It’s time to take all that fantastic content and turn it into an experience your customers will enjoy.
Are you as excited about the idea of content experience as we are? Tell us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!