Take a minute to imagine the following two scenarios.
Scenario 1: You’re sipping a piña colada in your backyard. You can smell your neighbor’s trash, hear cars zooming down the street and see a lawn that’s probably in serious need of mowing.
Scenario 2: You’re sipping the same piña colada, but you’re on a beach. You smell the salty sea breeze and hear nothing but the sound of waves and your own peaceful thoughts… ahhh.
You probably see what I’m getting at here — you might be drinking the same piña colada, but it tastes a whole lot better on the beach than it does in your own backyard.
What’s the lesson here? Context is everything.
This is especially true in content marketing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve created the best content in the world — if it’s living in a poorly optimized content experience, it’s not going to perform to its full potential.
Here are a few elements of your content experience that you should consider optimizing.
Valuable Content
Content is, of course, the foundation of your content experience. As much as the content experience can impact your content’s performance, it won’t magically fix bad content. It’s up to the marketer to ensure their content is providing valuable information for their audience.
You can do this by:
- Fact-checking your content to improve its credibility.
- Enforcing consistency both in quality and publishing cadence.
- Optimizing your written content for today’s reader (yes, that means making it easy to scan).
- Including high-quality and helpful visuals.
Responsive Design
40% of people searching on a mobile device will choose another result if it is not mobile-friendly, and 70% of mobile searches lead to action on websites within one hour.
Stats like these prove that responsive design is absolutely necessary for your content experience.
Think of it this way: Your prospective buyers should be able to consume your content regardless of the date, time, or device — not compensating for all possible entryways into your content creates a leak that your potential leads can easily slip through.
Patch the leaks that might be caused by a static content experience and build a responsive experience that is fast, intuitive and effortless for your end user.
Organization & Discoverability
Letting your blog posts pile up by date is not an effective way to use your content to generate leads. Your content should be strategically organized and easily discoverable as your end user makes their way through the buying journey.
Keep in mind that people rarely go looking for content by format — rather, they search for solutions. Organize your content by subject (as opposed to format) to help your audience find what they need.
Keep your audience from looking for answers elsewhere by:
- Building a well-structured menu
- Enabling a content-wide search bar
- Using a content recommendation engine like BrightInfo
Targeted & Contextual Calls-to-Action
The best way to generate leads from your content is to include CTAs, but not just any CTAs will yield the response you’re looking for.
Your CTAs will be far more effective if they’re providing a relevant next step. For instance, if someone is reading a blog post entitled “10 Advanced Email Marketing Tips,” it makes no sense to present a CTA to download an eBook called “Email Marketing for Beginners.”
Or, if we’re working with the piña colada example from before, a more targeted CTA would probably ask something like, “Click here to get caught in the rain.”
In all seriousness, if your CTAs aren’t a contextual part of the experience, they’ll be ignored. At Uberflip, we tested a CTA for an eBook on Content Marketing metrics in two different content streams – one containing a random assortment of eBooks, and one containing other content marketing resources. The CTA converted at 14.9% in the eBook stream, and at 34.5% in the content marketing stream.
Lesson: don’t underestimate the value of context.
Deliver an Engaging Content Experience
Great content is necessary for successful content marketing, but it’s only the first step.
If you’re not considering the vessel in which your end user will travel on as they embark upon their buyer journey, how do you expect them to get to the end?
Focus on your content experience and watch your content start to perform.
Ready to take your content experience to the next level? Watch our webinar with Uberflip’s VP of Marketing, Hana Abaza: How to Optimize the Content Experience for Crazy-High Conversions.
Author
Victoria Hoffman is the Content & Community Manager at Uberflip, a platform that helps marketers create, manage and optimize content experiences at every stage of the funnel to boost engagement and generate leads. When not talking social strategy, she can be found watching Netflix and eating pizza.
