When creating content, you are not only providing your consumers with value, you are providing them with an experience. This experience, good or bad, can leave a lasting impact on current and future consumers.
What exactly is a content experience?
Every piece of content you publish creates an experience for the consumer. The experience your content creates can either hurt or help your brand. A good content experience can lead to more engagement with your content and brand, but a bad one can lead to a loss of prospective customers.
The content experience is all about where and how your content is structured to leave an impression on your prospects and customers.
What should you consider when creating a content experience?
1. Relevance and Speed
In today’s world, content marketing is nothing without relevance and speed. Relevance is the most important thing to consumers. According to buyers who responded in a 2021 market report, creating content around “the problem I’m looking to solve” is most important to their content experience.
People want content that will solve their specific problems. They also want content on topics they care about, and they want it quick.
This is why it’s so important to create evergreen content. If you’re constantly creating timely content that is overly specific to that time and place, it will eventually lose its relevance and you will be spending all of your time in a constant content creation loop.
2. Think About What Your Consumer Truly Wants
Buyers don’t want to be sold to. What they want is to be educated.
According to the same report, 64% of buyers find product reviews most useful – this was followed by product tours at 43% and videos at 33%. However, it was reported that the marketing materials that were being prioritized were sales sheets, whitepapers and e-books.
Buyers want content! Real content they can learn from and will entertain them.
61% of people responding to the report said in order to take some form of action, they want content relevant to their needs. If you’re looking to increase sales and engagement, give your consumers what they want.
3. Your Distribution Matters
We all know the digital space is becoming crowded, so how will you make yourself stand out? The answer is through engaging content.
You want to be putting your content in a space where people can continue to engage with it as they consume more and more. Whether that be a blog or social media, you need to stake your claim somewhere you know people will return and stay awhile.
You can also utilize your content to send people to different places they can find different content you’ve produced: send people to your blog from social media,hyperlink to different blog posts within one blog post, place a YouTube video you’ve created into a blog post with a call to action to subscribe to your channel for more.
The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to your distribution. However, you need to have some sort of strategy to get people to engage.
Creating relevant content quickly, keeping your consumer in mind and distributing to the right places can create a great content experience for your consumer. You want your content to lead to a positive experience for your audience. You want the person reading it to have a great experience with your brand. Next time you publish any type of content, think about what experience that content will create for your readers.
