Most brands know – or think they do – what it takes to deliver a satisfying content experience.
But what your brand believes will drive engagement may not align with what works for your audience.
When assessing value, audience perception is reality. If your content experience doesn’t resonate with a person’s first entry point, you may not get a second chance.
In order to meet the expectations of the target group, company-wide alignment is required. This way you can help everyone understand the task.
Disconnections lead to dissatisfaction among consumers
An effective content experience should capture the audience’s casual interest – and gradually convert them into trusted and lasting customer relationships.
However, this progression can be disrupted when isolated functions independently manage certain components of the experience.
If these content partners don’t understand your audience’s intentions and motivations, they may confuse their messaging priorities and marketing goals with the audience’s needs and concerns.
That’s why Cupid PR is a co-founder Mark McShane says, “All good communication begins not with the message you want to send, but with a deep-rooted understanding of what your audience already thinks, feels, needs and wants.”
Audiences can recognize when experiences – or their content components – are designed to advance the company’s goals rather than address its challenges.
Aim your audience’s lens
It’s important to look at every decision through the lens of audience understanding, he says Steve PritchardManaging Director at It Works Media. An enterprise-wide process that combines multimodal research with performance data analysis can sharpen this understanding. “Telling a story about your brand will only come naturally when all content functions have direct, well-aligned knowledge of what makes your audience tick,” says Steve.
Use direct feedback to humanize your audience
Ricci MaseroMarketing Manager at Intellek, points out some data-driven signs that you’re not on the same page as your audience: “Engagement drops, people drop out shortly after landing on your offers, and conversions become less frequent.” ”
But you can’t get a complete picture based on key figures alone. Diana ZhengDirector of Marketing at Stallion Express says platform metrics can give brands a false or incomplete picture of engagement.
While these metrics pinpoint behaviors and patterns at a superficial level, they do little to illuminate the underlying causes or context of the interactions. And these insights are crucial for decision-making.
Diana and Ricci both recommend combining quantitative analysis with direct feedback mechanisms to improve your understanding of your audience.
“Surveys, focus groups and user testing reveal their motivations, pain points and decision-making frameworks,” says Ricci. “When you overlay that with quantitative data patterns, you get a 3D view of your customers that you can then share with your functional content partners.”
“Seamless” begins with bridging isolated strategies
Understanding your audience is invaluable. But turning every moment of engagement into an opportunity for deeper connection requires strategic orchestration of all your content touchpoints.
For many corporate brands, this requires a rethink in how they design the experience. Instead of isolated steps along a journey, content experiences should be networks of valuable, contextual insights – regardless of where, when and how a customer connects.
Seamlessly connecting all brand assets and interaction points is a major challenge.
When I spoke to Robert Rose from CMI, he recommended starting by examining your existing experience. The data can provide insights into your audience’s key interests, which can help you set focus priorities across your organization. Robert assures that this will help you set direction and set manageable timelines so you don’t have to redesign everything at once.
Integrate your employees
You need to engage and prepare your cross-functional partners (e.g. sales, communications, and other teams that collaborate on content) to work together to create a cohesive experience. As Ricci notes, each player needs to understand their responsibilities and how their roles fit together in the audience journey.
Travel map
Mark McShane of Cupid PR suggests creating integrated customer journey maps to illuminate audience needs that your reps may not be aware of. Maps should include all touchpoints and the intended experience at each stage of the journey.
“This could uncover opportunity gaps – places where the experience could frustrate or overwhelm customers, or where there are obstacles and delays,” he says.
Set up workflows and communication channels
Next, establish efficient workflows and clear communication channels. Ensure all teams involved have input into strategic direction and understand the execution process. These steps can help neutralize the friction and resistance that often occurs during profound organizational change.
While your teams may be reluctant to step across the aisle and work outside of their comfort zone, doing so is essential to delivering a cohesive and compelling content experience.
Maxwell Pollockformer content marketing specialist at Memora Health, says: “(You) have to do it and (you) have to integrate all the necessary effort into your workflows.”
The collaborative process will help in developing and implementing the audience experience.
Maxwell notes that his team has built a content library that optimizes his brand’s cross-functional collaboration. “It has made it much easier for sales to access our content to further their goals. It also sparks valuable conversations between our teams in a direct, task-oriented way,” he says.
Establish consistent quality and user experience standards
Establish company-wide content quality and value standards. If you don’t align your brand’s tone, style, and voice, you risk confusing people as they move from one touchpoint to the next.
Maxwell suggests working with key stakeholders to develop a company-wide editorial style guide.
“It ensures that our customers receive a consistent, high-quality content experience of our brand across all of our different platforms and content types,” he says.
In addition to content quality, consider setting usability guidelines. Make it easy for consumers to find what they’re looking for and move on to the next step, no matter where they enter your brand’s experience.
Diana Zheng of Stallion Express suggests focusing on these user experience considerations to ensure positive interactions and improve customer satisfaction:
Your tip: Make navigation more useful by organizing content based on your visitors’ most common challenges, rather than content formats (e.g. videos, white papers, blog posts), use cases, or target industries. These structural approaches better address your brand’s priorities and assumptions rather than the practical needs and preferences of your customers.
Monitor, test, learn and experiment
As you rebuild your experience around a more customer-centric vision, you can’t ignore the value of testing and experimentation. The digital space is constantly changing and the popularity of platforms, technologies and trends can increase or decrease without warning.
You may need to test new strategies and pivot as new insights and opportunities arise. These opportunities become more consistent when monitoring your customer feedback channels is an integrated part of your content experience workflow.
Taking advantage of all the opportunities you discover also requires the willingness – and operational agility – to try out new ideas.
According to Mark McShane, experimentation has become a central tenet of Cupid’s PR approach. “It’s about finding what works and doubling down on it,” he says, “but also constantly asking, ‘I wonder if…?'”
Target group-centered strategies promote valuable experiences for both sides
Brands win when their content experiences provide value that their audience values. To achieve this goal, your entire organization must work with a unified strategy aligned to its vision of success at every step of the journey.
A version of this article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of Chief Content Officer.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute