Content Experience

Content experience is the intersection of content marketing and customer experience. It regulates how we use content to offer users the best possible experience along their customer journey.

Content marketing has long since developed from a niche to an important marketing tool. It is now crucial to stand out from the mass of content that is produced every day with high-quality content.

That's why content experience is more than just a buzzword, more than just the next short-lived marketing trend that everyone is chasing after. Especially in times when artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT is increasingly generating off-the-shelf content, companies can and must distinguish themselves through high-quality, user-centered experiences.

Relevance, information content, design, contextual user guidance, usability, and interactivity must be considered and implemented as a whole in order to create positive user experiences.

The content experience is therefore expressed in the context or environment in which the content is embedded. It refers to the way in which content is presented, structured and consumed, in other words: how it is experienced.

Would you like to find out more about specific topics in the context of content experience? In our magazine, you will find articles with exciting insights.

The brand experience refers to the basic perception of a brand by (potential) customers. It is primarily about the emotional expectations that a person associates with a brand.

The customer experience describes the entire interaction that customers have with a brand during their customer journey. This includes, for example, the purchasing process, but also contact with support, product quality, the provision of accessories and more.

The content experience in turn serves to promote user engagement through the design and preparation of content, and ultimately to generate conversions in this way.

All three concepts should not be considered separately. Rather, they are interlinked and ideally create a holistic experience that binds the customer to your brand or product and leads them into a so-called loyalty loop.

To put it in other words: The brand experience shapes the emotions that customers have in contact with a brand and determines their expectations accordingly. The customer experience focuses on identifying very specific user needs and fulfilling them at all points of contact with the brand. The content experience designs relevant content to harmonize company goals with customer needs. It therefore regulates how content is used to optimize the customer experience.

Forbes magazine therefore describes content as the centerpiece of a customer experience, while Andrew Wheeler, CEO of Skyword, goes even further and says somewhat exaggeratedly: The customer experience is a content experience.

A successful content experience is characterized by several features and elements that work together to create a positive and effective user experience.

Relevance: Your content should of course be relevant to your users in the first place. You can achieve this by analyzing your target group and topics. Evaluate what your target group is looking for, what problems they want to solve and what challenges they are facing. Meet these needs with your content.

Target group orientation: Your content should not only address the needs of your potential customers thematically, but also be designed and prepared with them in mind.

Localization in the content ecosystem: In order to be found, the content must be placed in the right context. If it is a guide article, for example, it should first be embedded in a suitable topic cluster that is linked in a user-friendly menu. In addition, a link can also be integrated on a product page in the online shop or inserted in the video description on YouTube if it fits contextually. Give your users the opportunity to find helpful content at the various touchpoints with your brand.

Contextual user guidance: If users simply consume your content and then leave, you have hardly achieved anything. Make sure that you lead the user on seamlessly—for example, with a meaningful product placement, a download form or links to other interesting content. Think of the initial content as a "hook" with which you first attract attention and then create incentives for further interaction.

Motivation: Content should therefore always be designed to encourage user engagement and motivate them to carry out a desired action, i.e. generate conversions.

Storytelling: Storytelling is a key marketing tool because we humans are evolutionarily designed to be inspired by stories. Stories arouse emotions and, if used correctly, can deepen the connection between customers and the brand. For example, use your customers as the protagonists of the story who, with your help, solve a problem, fulfill a need or overcome a challenge.

Interactivity: Interactive elements, as the name suggests, also encourage active participation and thus promote user engagement. For example, offer the option to comment or integrate surveys into your content. Interactive consulting tools such as Guided Selling also contribute to a positive content experience.

Structure: An important factor for a good content experience is the basic structure of the content. Does the content have a logical structure that helps users to grasp the content? Especially with text content, a clear hierarchical structure is necessary so that readers can scan through the post to discover the sections that interest them. Highlight boldings are also helpful here.

Design: The visual design of content makes a decisive contribution to the content experience. Design has a multidimensional task and thus particularly emphasizes the connection between content experience and brand experience as well as between content experience and customer experience. Design should be appealing and characterize the brand perception of users based on the design of the content, but it goes beyond aesthetic design. The arrangement of visual elements, color scheme and typography have a decisive influence on how users interact with content. Design therefore serves to fulfill user needs as quickly and smoothly as possible by skilfully directing the user's perception and attention and reinforcing the message of the content.

Accessibility: Make sure that your design is accessible and can be "experienced" by all users. The content experience should be easily accessible for everyone.

Consistency: A consistent design ensures that users can concentrate on the content without being distracted. Consistency is therefore not only crucial for the recognition value of a brand, but also an essential element for a positive content experience. Once again, the link to the brand experience is recognizable here. Create comprehensive content and design style guides to ensure consistency in brand voice and corporate design.

If you take the above elements into account and combine them carefully, you will already have a major advantage over competitors who do not yet rely on the content experience concept. With the following tips, you can further sharpen and optimize the user experience.

Content-first approach to design

You are probably familiar with the famous "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text, which is still used far too often in design development—usually when the design is first conceived in order to later squeeze content into the already finished layout corset.

For a better content experience, on the other hand, we recommend the content-first approach, i.e. you put the content at the center of your planning and then develop the design around this content. This ensures that the content offers users the greatest added value and provides an optimal user experience. This is because the focus is then on the content that is really relevant to the user.

Incidentally, this does not mean that you have to create a final text before you start developing the design. That's not realistic, of course. However, instead of producing meaningless "Lorem ipsum" placeholders, produce texts that already set the direction for the final version in terms of content. Another advantage: you can directly identify edge cases that need to be taken into account in the design. This allows you to avoid wasting resources on necessary changes that would only become apparent later.

At Moccu, we work with so-called low fidelity wireframes for some projects, i.e. we first create rough content blocks to test the user flow before going into the elaboration phase.

Compare experiences

Take the time to analyze the content experiences of other brands. Analyze what they are doing right and how they present their content.

Important: Don't just look at examples from your industry. For one thing, your competitors may not yet be consistently implementing the concept of content experience. Secondly, brands are not judged in a digital context solely on the basis of their competitors.

Instead, users orientate themselves to the high standards that other companies have set with an outstanding content experience. Customers often compare their current experience with positive experiences from the past, and not necessarily with the competition's offerings.

A content experience is always experienced in three dimensions, as the research project Customer and Digital Experience Excellence (C/DXE) emphasizes. Past experiences shape expectations of the current experience, which in turn influences expectations of future experiences.

Semantic organization

Structure your content carefully and create contextual topic clusters to enable simple and logical navigation. If you are planning a comprehensive SEO content strategy, we therefore recommend a semantic information architecture. Otherwise it will quickly become confusing.

Install search function and configure well

Especially with a very large amount of content, a search function is essential to give users the opportunity to quickly and effectively find relevant information on your website.

However, make sure that your search function is optimized and delivers relevant results. Provide users with filter options to refine their search. After all, an inadequate search function can be even more frustrating than its absence—and inevitably leads to a negative content experience.

Promoting and utilizing team synergies

An optimal content experience requires collaboration between different departments in your company. You should therefore promote communication and exchange between your content team (including SEO, design, social media, etc.) and other areas such as PR, marketing, or brand management.

The team synergy brings another advantage: the exchange between SEO, social media, PR, or brand management is crucial for good digital authority management (DAM), as it helps to create a consistent and trustworthy digital brand presence. This digital authority will become even more important for top search engine rankings in the future, especially for Google's upcoming AI-generated Search Engine Experience (SGE).

By having different teams working together, you can generate synergies from different expertise and perspectives and thus enable a holistic content strategy. By pooling this expertise, you ensure that the content experience is not viewed in isolation. This allows you to create a seamless user experience in contact with your brand.

Durch die Zusammenarbeit unterschiedlicher Teams generieren Sie Synergien aus unterschiedlichen Fachkenntnissen und Perspektiven und ermöglichen so eine ganzheitlich gedachte Content-Strategie. Indem Sie diese Fachkenntnisse bündeln, stellen Sie sicher, dass die Content Experience nicht isoliert betrachtet wird. So gestalten Sie eine nahtlose Nutzer:innen-Erfahrung im Kontakt mit Ihrer Marke.