From the course: Introduction to Content Marketing

Delivering content experiences

From the course: Introduction to Content Marketing

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Delivering content experiences

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- Think about some amazing content you read, watched, or listened to recently. What made it great? Was it only the content? Or was it also the great experience you had with the content? My hunch is the experience played a part, and that's why delivering content experiences is a key element of content marketing. So I'm going to introduce you to the concept of content experience along with several excellent examples, not only in marketing but also from innovative media. I find it useful to think about content experience in three phases. The first phase is finding the content. If people can't find your content it might as well not exist, so this phase is all about making your content easy for your customers to find, especially for the first time. Now you might think this means optimizing your website content for search engines like Google. Not necessarily. The type or format of content you plan to offer should drive how to make the content findable. A podcast, for example, will need distribution on audio platforms. Shopify makes its podcasts available on iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud, that way people who like podcasts don't even have to know what Shopify is or visit the Shopify website to find the Shopify podcasts. So consider carefully how to make the experience of finding your content as easy as possible. The second phase of content experience is quite logically consuming the content. This phase focuses on making the content easy to read, watch, or listen to. If you frequently interrupt the experience with promos and ads, or your website pages load slowly, or your content doesn't look right on mobile devices, you risk offering a poor experience that customers will abandon. This phase is also a great opportunity to create moments of delight as customers interact with your content. For example, if a customer successfully reaches the end of a video or article you can congratulate them or ask them for quick feedback. That last phase of experience for content marketing is what I called discovering more. This phase is all about helping customers engage with more of your content, or take an appropriate next step such as subscribe to your email list. The last thing you want to do is leave customers who consume and love your content at a dead end. Take a cue from the media innovator Netflix. Netflix makes it so easy to find more relevant content that binge-watching is now a phenomenon. Now I'm not saying you have to create a phenomenon. All I'm saying is if you make it easier for your customers to discover more content you will give your customers a great experience, and be more likely to achieve your content marketing goals. So the experience your customers have with your content is as important as the content itself. Make it easy for your customers to find and consume your content, as well as discover more.

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