Have you seen the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime yet? If not, you are missing out. If you have, then you may recall how funny she is, but the strategic mind of her manager is spot-on. The comedian finds out it’s not just about being funny — it’s about delivery, the audience mood, unsaid industry rules and much more. “Spontaneity works until it doesn’t work. Then you’re stuck,” quips the manager to a shocked and depleted Mrs. Maisel after her first failure on stage.
Your content strategy is much more than brainstorming content and getting it out on the site. A content engineer is the backstage manager that considers the strategy, audience, structure and guidelines. The customer experience is everything in today’s market, and content engineering is the process of presenting your audience with something they want to engage with.
Appealing to Your Audience
It’s more than likely you’ve been doing some online Christmas shopping. Have you noticed the retargeting ads yet? Since you are in marketing, you probably have.
Sometimes it takes me several minutes of admiring a shoe I really like before I realize, “Hey! This is the same one I was looking at the other day!” No wonder I like it. If I click on the ad, I will not only be sent to the page of the product I like, but I’ve even had my size pre-selected — all ready for purchase!
That retargeting strategy is personalized to the audience to increase the temptation of a purchase decision. All of your content can be similarly personalized to appeal to the visitor. Content engineers are defining those customer personas, tagging the content and designing the customer journey maps to structure supportive content that appeals to your audience and moves them toward the purchase decision.
Integrating Personalized Content Strategy
Back in the day, companies would try to stuff keywords into their articles in the hopes of ranking high in the search results. No longer. It’s been years since this blacklisted tactic has worked. And the newest generations that grew up with search engines are continuing to expect better and better results. People want to find answers to their questions that are relevant and well crafted, and businesses are turning to content engineers. What is content engineering? Content producers create blocks of information that content engineers break up into agile content tagged for a specific buyer persona. When a developer gets involved, this content can be applied and combined in any number of ways to personalize the content for the individual viewer.
Creating a Seamless Show
Comedians may tell a lot of jokes, but the great ones know how to combine the various parts into a show that feels cohesive and engaging. A content engineer is going to create that strategy for a seamless experience in a way that appeals to the visitor and keeps your company message in place. When a visitor stumbles onto any point of the site, the content engineer will use smart content to inform and convert in a personalized way. The visitor can simply move forward no matter where they are in the journey when they drop into your content show.
Where Does the Content Engineer Fit in Your Team?
Content engineers and strategists work together to figure out what content should be produced and then put it into a dynamic format that can be used on any platform or system. Your content producers will work under the content engineers to create the dynamic copy, videos or images needed in the strategy. Then developers will work with the engineers to come up with the tags needed to help define the content for use, including metadata and taxonomy. The content engineer will help turn the marketing strategy into content that can be used by developers for content presentation systems, like Drupal, Sitecore, Adobe, Kentico and more. Content managers are then in charge of getting the content out to the audience through various channels to ensure a wide reach.
With everyone working together, you’ll have dynamic content that shows people the things they already want to see. Remember the shoes? I like my own tastes so much, I almost didn’t notice that they were being very selectively shown back to me. Instead, I remember how much I like them and I have to convince myself all over again why I’m not ready to purchase — yet. Personalized content is alluring. Companies that do it well are very successful in online sales.
Check out more top marketing trends to really boost your game for 2019.
Alethea M graduated from the University of Saint Francis in 2009 with a B.A., double-majoring in Communication Arts and Graphic Design and double-focusing in Illustration and Computer Arts. She photographed the Saint Francis football team for a paid work study all four years she spent at the school. Immediately after graduating, she got a job at a non-profit company teaching art to young children and running their art program. She moved on to work as a copywriter and graphic designer for another non-profit company in Indiana as a Marketing Assistant for two years. She now spends her time as a wife, mother, freelance writer, and photographer.
