Most brands understand what it takes to deliver a satisfying content experience — or think they do.
But what your brand believes will compel engagement may not align with what works for your audience.
When gauging value, the audience’s perception is reality. If your content experience doesn’t deliver at someone’s first point of entry, you may not get a second chance.
It takes organization-wide alignment to meet audience expectations. Here’s how to help everyone understand the assignment.
Disconnects breed consumer discontent
An effective content experience should draw casual audience interest — and gradually transform it into trusted and enduring customer relationships.
However, that trajectory can get disrupted when siloed functions independently manage specific components of the experience.
If these content partners don’t understand your audience’s intentions and motivations, they can conflate their messaging priorities and marketing goals with the audience’s needs and concerns.
That’s why Cupid PR co-founder Mark McShane says, “Every good communication starts not with the message you want to send, but with a deep-rooted understanding of what your audience already thinks, feels, needs, and wants.”
Audiences can tell when experiences — or their content components — are built to drive the business’s goals rather than address their challenges.
Align your audience lens
Viewing every decision through the lens of audience understanding is essential, says Steve Pritchard, managing director at It Works Media. An enterprise-wide process that combines multimodal research with performance data analysis can sharpen that understanding. “Telling a story through your brand will only come naturally when all content functions have direct, well-aligned knowledge of what makes your audience tick,” Steve says.
Use direct feedback to humanize your audience
Ricci Masero, marketing manager at Intellek, points to a few data-driven signs that indicate when you’re not on the same page as your audience: “Engagement plummets, people bail shortly after landing on your offerings, and conversions become few and far between.”
But you can’t get a complete picture from metrics alone. Diana Zheng, head of marketing at Stallion Express, says platform metrics can give brands a false or incomplete view of engagement.
While these metrics pinpoint surface-level behaviors and patterns, they do little to illuminate the interactions’ underlying causes or contexts. And those insights are critical to decision-making.
Diana and Ricci both recommend combining quantitative analyses with direct feedback mechanisms to enhance your understanding of your audience.
“Surveys, focus groups, and user testing pull back the curtain on their motivations, pain points, and decision frameworks,” Ricci says. “Layering that with quantitative data patterns will give you a 3D view of your customers, which you can then share with your functional content partners.”
‘Seamless’ starts with bridging siloed strategies
Understanding your audience is invaluable. But transforming every moment of engagement into an opportunity for deeper connection takes strategic orchestration of all your content touchpoints.
For many enterprise brands, this requires rethinking how to architect the experience. Rather than siloed steps along a path, content experiences should be networks of valuable, contextually resonant insights — no matter where, when, or how a customer initiates contact.
Seamlessly connecting every brand asset and interaction point is a big nut to crack.
When I spoke with CMI’s Robert Rose, he recommended auditing your existing experiences first. The data may reveal insights into your audience’s primary interests, which can help you set focal priorities across your organization. Robert asserts that this will help you align on the direction and set manageable schedules so you’re not reengineering everything at once.
Onboard your collaborators
You’ll need to involve and prepare your cross-functional partners (such as sales, comms, and other teams who collaborate on content) to co-create a cohesive experience. As Ricci notes, every player needs to understand their responsibilities and how their roles in the audience journey fit together.
Journey map it
Cupid PR’s Mark McShane suggests creating integrated customer journey maps to illuminate audience needs that your collaborators may not be aware of. The maps should include all touchpoints and the intended experience at each stage of the journey.
“This might identify opportunity gaps — places where the experience might frustrate or overwhelm customers, or where obstacles and delays occur,” he says.
Establish workflows and communications channels
Next, establish efficient workflows and clear lines of communication. Make sure all involved teams have input into the strategic direction and understand the execution process. These steps can help neutralize the friction and resistance that commonly occur in sweeping organizational changes.
While your teams may be reluctant to reach across the aisle and work outside their comfort zones, doing so is essential to delivering a cohesive and compelling content experience.
Maxwell Pollock, former content marketing specialist at Memora Health, says, “(You) have to do it, and (you) have to incorporate all the required efforts into your workflows.”
The collaborative process will be helpful for developing and deploying the audience experience.
Maxwell notes that his team built a content library that streamlined their brand’s cross-functional collaborations. “It’s made it much easier for sales to access our content to fuel their purposes. It’s also sparking valuable conversations among our teams in a direct, mission-focused way,” he says.
Establish consistent quality and user experience standards
Set enterprise-wide content quality and value standards. Without alignment on your brand’s tone, style, and voice, you risk confusing people as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint.
Maxwell suggests collaborating with key stakeholders to develop a company-wide editorial style guide.
“It ensures that our clients receive a consistent, high-quality content experience from our brand across all our different platforms and content types,” he says.
In addition to content quality, consider setting usability guidelines. Make it easy for consumers to find what they’re looking for and move on to the next step, no matter where they enter your brand’s experience.
Stallion Express’ Diana Zheng suggests focusing on these user-experience considerations to ensure positive interactions and improve customer satisfaction:
Her tip: Make navigation more useful by organizing content based on your visitors’ most common challenges, not by content formats (e.g., videos, white papers, blog posts), use cases, or target verticals. Those structural approaches better address your brand’s priorities and assumptions than your customers’ practical needs and preferences.
Monitor, test, learn, and experiment
As you rebuild your experience under a more customer-centric vision, don’t overlook the value of testing and experimentation. The digital space constantly changes, and the popularity of platforms, technologies, and trends can wax and wane with little warning.
You may have to test new strategies and pivot as new insights and opportunities emerge. Those opportunities will flow more consistently if monitoring your customer feedback channels is an integrated component of your content experience workflow.
Capitalizing on any opportunities you discover also requires the will — and operational agility — to try new ideas.
Embracing experimentation has become a core tenet of Cupid PR’s approach, according to Mark McShane. “It’s about finding what works and doubling down,” he says, “but also constantly asking, ‘I wonder if …?’”
Audience-centric strategies fuel mutually valuable experiences
Brands win when their content experiences offer value their audiences appreciate. To deliver on that goal, your entire organization must work from a unified strategy aligned to their vision of success at every step of the journey.
A version of this article originally appeared in the March 2024 edition of Chief Content Officer.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute