Experience Optimisation In Content Marketing

The last section in our content marketing chapter shall be taking a look at experience optimisation.

Here’s a dirty little secret.

Great content, even super relevant content, isn’t always enough. You need a really great experience that is optimised for your goals.

Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, explains content experience like this:

I like to think about it in terms of piña coladas. There is a reason why I don’t want to be drinking one in a dingy dark basement, but on a beautiful sunny beach instead.

Experience matters a lot.

Here is what your content needs to be like to actually deliver a good experience.

• Readable
• Actionable
• Tailored

Readable

Here is an example from the social media website Buffer, which explains how they make their content readable.

They have a nice big headline to grab your attention, and really easy-to-read short paragraphs, which are actually better for mobile, so that you don’t get hit by these big walls of text.

You have social shares, subheadings, and images, which break up the text really well. It’s a really enjoyable reading experience.

Actionable

Is your experience actionable?

It blows my mind when people tell me that their goal is lead generation or audience growth, but they have no call to action. Or they do, but it is a terrible user experience.

Small quiz for you guys: What is Oli Gardner’s (CEO at Unbounce) rule on CTA?

HAVE A F#@?ING CALL TO ACTION!

Simple.

I will echo that sentiment when it comes to content, not just the landing page.

When you are creating a call to action for your content, I want you to remember 3 things:

1. Clarity
2. Context
3. Targeting

Clarity

Is It Clear? Is The Action And Value Obvious?

Context

Context is everything.

This is where we can add the wrong call to action to the wrong content. As you can see below, we have an advanced marketing blog post, but the call to action is for a beginner marketing ebook.

This is better:

Targeting

Last but not least: targeting.

Generic CTAs will only take you so far. You need to be specific about your call to action.

Here’s an example:

A generic one: “Hey, if you are interested in Marketing Automation, why don’t you try building a hub?”

…What?

As you can see, there is no content at all in this CTA.

Here’s a specific one:

“Hey, I know you are using Marketo, so why don’t you take a look at Marketo and Uberflip in action?”

This has to work really tightly with your distribution strategy.

Tailored

We want to make sure that our users’ experience is tailored, so from this position, you’ll want to take a look at how most other people structure their content.

When you look at the navigation of most websites, you have content arranged based on its stage, which may then be divided by topic and type.

This is how most people do it.

The reality is that we need to get a bit more sophisticated and strategic with how we actually put our content out there.

Here is an example from DNN.

I have never been to a resource page and thought “I want to read a whitepaper”. Have you ever done that?

I didn’t think so. But everybody still makes these organisational mistakes.

You need to get a little more strategic about how you organise your content for the people that are trying to find it.

Maybe you need to look into organising your content by type, together with by segment or audience as well.

Here’s how a company called Visual Web Optimizer does it. They do conversion rate optimisation.

They do it by type, industry, and element (depending on what element you want to test on your website).

 

So, you can get something like this: elements on the website that allow you to search for a case study for SaaS that tests price.

A much more tailored experience.

It doesn’t matter if you have thousands of pieces of content or just a few, you need to start putting some thought into how you organise that content.

That’s it.

Conclusions

To summarise, we’ve learned:

1. Customer development for content: Make sure that you are creating really relevant content for your audience. It will have a huge impact on you readers.
2. Strategic content creation: So that you are not writing blog posts just for the sake of it, create content that people care about, and then expand that into different types of content that you can re-use.
3. Distributions tactics are key: Make sure that you put some thought into your distribution strategy before you actually move on to it.
4. Experience optimisation: Of course, you need to make sure that the content you are writing is readable, has a call to action, and is tailored to the needs of your audience.

 

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