If you’re looking to revamp your content strategy, there’s no doubt that the web is saturated with content. Many companies are keen to put all their focus on quantity over quality—but this can give you an edge if you’re a savvy content creator.
But how can businesses make sure that their content and sales strategies are working as well as they possibly can?
The trick is to start making the shift from regular content marketing, to crafting elaborate and well-planned-out content experiences.
Contents
The difference between the two
On the surface, content marketing and content experiences seem like they would be very similar in terms of their definitions. In practice, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Let’s look at content marketing first. As per the CMI (content marketing institute), this discipline is all about creating and publishing ‘useful content’. The aim is to use this content to draw in an audience, and then to keep producing content that will maintain their engagement. With a content marketing-focused strategy, you’ll end up producing content pretty consistently, since it’s the key to making sure your customers continue to engage with your company and decrease customer churn.
The content experiences approach looks at the idea of engaging with the intended audience through a different lens.
The content experiences tactic places quality solidly over quantity. The idea is to stand out by putting out content that lingers in customers’ minds. This experience is based on the consumption of strong pieces of content that guide the customer on their journey from potential lead to dedicated consumer.
How content experiences push the boundaries
Branded content should be at the heart of your company’s strategy. By turning your content into an experience, you can push its power and overall reach to new heights. The pieces you publish should all serve a specific purpose, such as answering common questions or helping to boost sales.
Your content creation team will therefore have to collaborate with other departments, such as sales, to create the most highly optimized content. This will help to create a unified brand image that will bring in more customers.
Setting the groundwork
Now you’re sure that creating a content experience-focused strategy is the best choice for your business, but there are a few important things to set up before you do. You’ve got to make sure that when you do switch over to the content experiences model, your company will be making the most of it.
Thankfully, this groundwork boils down to one simple concept: communication.
Internal communication
It’s absolutely crucial to make sure that your employees can all share digital documents with ease. If there are any obstructions to this kind of communication, especially between departments, it will become very difficult to create a content experience that seamlessly integrates content from, for example, sales and marketing.
In a remote working environment, it’s also especially important to make sure that the communication solutions you’re using are the best ones available.
High quality screen sharing needs to be available to all your employees. That way, every employee working on a project can see exactly what’s happening overall. Screen sharing can also make presentations much simpler, which also helps to improve communications as a whole.
External communication
A company’s website is a really great way to gauge how you’re appearing to your customers. It’s worth your while to spend time with good website builders, making sure that your web content aligns with your overall message. The other facet to improve on before moving over to a new content experiences strategy is external communication.
Digital branded content is a great way to reach out to your customers, both current and prospective. In fact, having a branded blog can draw in up to 67% more leads. As such, crafting a deliberately high-quality experience for customers online ensures that they’ll be more likely to keep engaging with your brand.
The best way to deliver that excellent experience is by creating top-quality content – or in other words, perfecting your content experiences strategy!
How to deliver content experiences
Now that we’ve covered the prerequisites, it’s time to look at how to make the content experience model work for you and your company.
The first step is to consider how your specific business can benefit from different kinds of marketing, and how it can achieve the most success across different platforms. Once you’ve got that figured out, the next thing to do is plan out exactly how you’re going to make sure the content your brand puts out is of the best possible quality.
Let’s take a look at those two parts of the content experience plan in some more detail.
A strong strategy
When you’re creating a brand new strategy, there will always be a lot of questions you’ve got to answer first. This is true even if you already know what sort of approach you’ll be taking (in this case, the content experience approach).
For example, what SaaS marketing strategy can bring you the most leads, and what sort of content will help make that happen? Should you be automating any part of the content creation process – and if so, which one(s)?
The important thing is to take a step back and answer your questions one at a time. That way, you’ll be able to create a truly powerful strategy.
Automation – yes or no?
As for the question of automation, the answer to whether it should be used in the first place seems to be a resounding yes, based on the figures. Organizations that choose not to automate any processes ensure that their methods stay less efficient than they could be – and this can cost them up to 30% of their annual revenue.
The numbers say it loud and clear: Automating your writing workflow can both save money and increase earnings. While it’s always good to ensure that the final product passes through human hands a few times first, anything that can be automated will help with making the overall process smoother.
The polishing process, and beyond
The content marketing journey shouldn’t stop once you’ve hit the Publish button. You should have appropriate teams constantly be prepared to update the pieces that have already been put out. It can be difficult to keep track of each piece of content and when it was produced, so use a digital asset management system.
Cutting out this old or duplicate content is also a great tactic. It can help your company move forward and craft a brand image that changes with the times and remains up-to-date no matter what. With this method, it’s important to keep one question in mind at all times: does this content align with my content strategy? If the answer is anything other than an immediate, firm yes, change needs to happen.
Making it happen
A truly great content experience engages leads over prolonged periods of time. It does this by implementing well-focused, carefully crafted strategies that lead directly to the creation of fantastic content. Each new piece of content will add to the overall experience, creating the impression of a powerful, unified brand image.
Bio:
Koa Frederick – accelerate agency
Koa Frederick is the Senior Vice President of SaaS strategy at accelerate agency, an enterprise SEO agency who exclusively partners with enterprise tech companies to scale their SEO and content marketing. Koa has extensive experience in growing SaaS brands via organic leads and loves to write in her spare time. Here is her LinkedIn.
