Bog Series: Content Experience – Part 1
Content + User Experience = Content Experience
How do I reach my customers? That’s a question every business should ask. In the digital age, it’s theoretically easier than ever to reach your customers with content. But in reality, it has also become more difficult in recent years. On the one hand, you can quickly create blogs and videos. On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of content out there. Attention is a scarce commodity.
Therefore, the question is: how do I create interesting and purposeful content? We also know that creating just a few pieces of content is not enough. So the next question is: how can I continuously generate new content ideas and topics?
As always, your success depends on your planning. To create a successful Content Experience, you need the right strategy. In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, we will discuss how to develop a guiding thread for the strategy.
Who are my customers and what’s my aim?
Step 1: Aims and Personas
The customers are at the centre of the Content Experience. We are fighting for their attention after all. The content should be of interest to your target audience. But what’s actually the aim of all of this?
Part of the strategy should be to clearly define the aims of the Content Experience. This involves developing concrete targets that can be implemented and evaluated. Now, we can figure out who our target audience is and based on that, create personas.
Personas are fictional representatives of the target audience and for the Content Experience Strategy, it is usually sufficient to create two to three personas. The Personas help you understand your customers, including their journey, interests and behaviour.
As an example: Content is a big topic for Marketing departments. Let’s assume, that our Persona (let’s call her Sarah) works in the marketing department of a mid-sized company and was tasked to do research on Content Strategy. We can analyse Sarah in more detail and work out what she is searching for and why.
What’s of interest to my customers and what can I offer them?
Once the Personas have been defined, the question is how to reach them and showcase what the company has to offer. You should also ask yourself, which of your company’s skills or competencies you’d like to communicate to your customers in the process.
Step 2: The Core Story and Key Themes
The idea is to merge or connect the aims of the company with the needs and interests of the Personas. When their needs and interests are addressed, then they will take the bait and find the content useful. Good content is based on reciprocity.
To achieve this, in the next step, we need to work on the Core Story. The Cory Story is what connects your business with the customer’s reality of life. Or, in other words, it’s how you make sure your content is useful and interesting to your Persona. The Core Story defines every piece of content and it is our guiding thread.
We can create a specific Core Story for each Persona if necessary. A possible Core Story for Sarah would be: “Reach and convince your customers with the right Content Experience”. Based on the Core Story, we can derive Key Themes that are of interest to the Persona.
Relevant Key Themes for Sarah would be: “Cost & ROI”, “Personalisation & Marketing Automation” and “Content Creation & Publishing”.
Now we have worked out what the Core Story and the Key Themes are. So how do we get to the content? And how do we generate ever new content ideas?
In Part 2 of this blog series, we will address those questions.
See also our services to develop a Content Experience Strategy.
