What Content Experience Means and Why It Matters

A B2B buyer that wants to solve a problem their company is facing begins a months-long sales cycle by researching keywords on Google.

If they come across your page, you’ve successfully captured their attention and now have the opportunity to pitch your solution.

If your content is high quality, the prospect will get a lot out of it and probably appreciate the free help you gave them. But then what? Do you keep their attention and provide more value, eventually leading to a closed sale? Or do you lose their attention to the search engines, and maybe another company?

The answer depends on the quality of your content experience.

Today’s guide will give you the principles behind this practice as well as some easy steps you can take to curate your own content experience.

What is Content Experience in Marketing?

Your content experience is closely related to your content matrix.

In a few words, your content matrix is the strategy behind the way you create content. It details the kinds of content you’re creating and who it’s for.

The content experience is how you deliver this content. It considers not just individual pieces of content and broader content strategies, but the entire user experience of your brand.

Curating a great content experience is about ensuring that needed content is delivered to the right people at the right time. Doing this builds brand trust and authority and ultimately increases conversions.

Why Content Experience Matters

Customers don’t always know what they’re looking for when researching solutions. You may capture the attention of someone from a Google search and then fail to convert them. It could be because your content was underwhelming. But it could also be that the user enjoyed your content, and appreciated it, but couldn’t easily find more.

A poor content experience means the user isn’t being recommended anything else that’s relevant to them, even if your site is filled to the brim with great information. The user simply doesn’t see it and instead clicks back to Google to find another link.

On the other hand, if your content experience is well designed, the user might come across another link to a relevant article on your website and click through to it.

Perhaps they spend some time on your website learning about your brand and product in a user-friendly way that doesn’t force them to engage in any way they don’t want to: you have videos if they prefer videos, blogs if they like to read, and most importantly, you gently suggest the right content based on a personalized profile you created in advance.

This is what a great content experience looks like, and it’s what you should strive for.

Prove You Know More Than Just One Thing

B2B buyers need content that doesn’t just address singular issues, but a broad stream of content that shows awareness of all their pain points and demonstrates that you know how to make their lives easier.

Your content experience is the management and philosophy behind the delivery of this content.

How to Create a Great Content Experience

Your content experience must be unique to your industry and company. It should even be personalized to individual buyers where possible. However, there are some universal principles that any great content experience should share.

Here are a few of those principles to help inspire your own content experience.

Start with a Content Audit

You should begin by taking a look at the content your marketing has already produced.

How well does each piece connect with the rest? Is there an overarching theme or message that pervades all pieces of content? If not, why not? Is it due to a lack of quality content, or perhaps a total lack of this kind of cohesiveness on the part of your whole marketing effort?

Knowing where you stand on these key issues will inform how you continue with the following steps.

Focus on Seamlessness

When we refer to a seamless experience, we’re talking about the way customers move through multiple pieces of content in a given session.

A customer may begin with a blog of yours they found on a SERP. Within that blog, there could be a link to a video on a related subject that actually is more closely related to what the user needs.

Alternatively, they could meet some microgated content that fills a similar need.

There is more art than science to the idea of seamlessness, but in general, it’s about minimizing the possibility of losing the customer’s attention once you’ve gained it.

Make Multi-Channel Content

Your content should be available in many formats.

Customers appreciate having multiple ways to engage with your brand. It also increases the odds of keeping their attention for longer because it reduces the odds they’ll become fatigued or bored with your content.

Personalize Content Whenever Possible

There’s a well-known public speaking dictum that states you should try and make eye contact with individuals even as you’re speaking to a large audience. It engages individuals and will make them feel like you’re speaking to them only.

The simple reality is that generic content is less engaging and less effective at converting target audiences. Your content should be personalized wherever possible to take advantage of the fact that people are eager to be heard.

Centralize Your Content

We recommend you set up a content hub.

Imagine going to Netflix and having to manually search for each movie or show you wanted to watch. It would be doable but cumbersome, and you’d miss the recommendations you’re currently given when you open up the app.

Your content hub should follow this example.

What is a Content Experience Platform?

A content experience platform like Hushly can make curating a great content experience easy.

Hushly believes ungated content captures higher quality and human-verified leads. We follow this data-driven philosophy with a simple platform focused on removing friction, personalizing content, and delivering this content on time to the right buyers.

You should never be done optimizing your content experience. There is always new content to show off and new customers to convert. Each new factor will require a fresh take on your overall content experience. This is something we understand instinctively, and we make it our mission to measure the performance of your content experience and optimize it with detailed analytics.

Great Content Needs Great Distribution

The challenge of creating high-quality and high-performing content regularly is immense.

It takes the dedication of many individuals and teams to produce relevant content that identifies customer needs and proposes solutions to them quickly and efficiently.

All of this effort could be for nothing if the content experience is lacking.

Users simply don’t have the attention spans necessary to wade through large catalogs of unorganized content. More importantly, they don’t have to. If your content experience isn’t cutting it, they’ll find a company that can manage theirs better to solve their problems.

Use the ideas in today’s blog to avoid this fate by curating a memorable content experience that will keep customers happy and coming back for more.

Take a look at Hushly’s eBook, Efficient Growth at Scale, for more information on how to manage your content experience.

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