Blog Series: Content Experience – Part 2
Content + User Experience = Content Experience
The Content Experience addresses the central question of how to reach your customers with content. First, you need to know who your customers are, what’s of interest to them and what you hope to achieve with your content. In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, we talked about these topics with the help of an example and created a guiding thread for our Content Experience Strategy, our Core Story.
Our Persona from Part 1, Sarah, works in marketing and her Core Story is: “Reach and convince your customers with the right Content Experience”. Based on that, we deduced relevant Key Themes, i.e.: “Cost & ROI”, “Personalisation & Marketing Automation” and “Content Creation & Publishing”.
Now the question is how, based on this information, can we actually create purposeful content?
How do I generate content ideas and topics?
Step 3: The Strategic Foundation Document
The development of the so-called Strategic Foundation Document will help you implement the Content Experience.
The Foundation Document is a living document. Its sole purpose is to help you generate and accumulate content. In other words, the Foundation Document is the framework based on which we can continuously create new and relevant content.
The persona, her Core Story and the Key Themes are at the heart of each Foundation Document and they form the basis for the development of the Document’s chapters and sub-chapters.
Those, in turn, are the starting point for the content creation. Based on the chapters and sub-chapters, we build the individual pieces of content (blog articles, videos, webinars, presentations, etc.).
Using the example of Sarah, we can see that there is a lot to write about Key Themes such as “Content Creation & Publishing”. The Core Story helps to focus our attention and narrow down our list of possible topics. First, we develop the chapters and sub-chapters of the Foundation Document and based on those, we derive the actual pieces of content. For each piece, we also decide which content format fits.
The Core Story defines each content piece. For Sarah, my focus is on what she has to consider when creating and publishing content for her company and what all of that has to do with Content Experience.
“The end”…?
Of course the Content Experience doesn’t end here. A content schedule and the right tools are as much a part of it as the distribution on the relevant content channels and the continuous evaluation and optimisation of the content.
You are never “done” with content.
That can be scary. But it doesn’t have to be. With the right Content Experience Strategy, you can reach and convince your customers.
