A blueprint for delivering stellar content experience

Content marketers discuss various tools and trends brands must follow, and how they should align marketing teams and agencies internally to make it easier to provide a seamless content experience

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Akansha Srivastava
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Every content marketer understands the importance of properly packaging content. To climb up the search engine ladder and be meaningful to consumers, creating a seamless content consumption experience is important. Short films, interactive content, UGC are not just forms of content marketing, but examples of content experience. It isn’t a one-time phenomenon, but a full journey of different content touchpoints of a consumer — from thinking of buying a product to actually purchasing it. 

Last week, BuzzInContent discussed where marketers go wrong in devising a good content experience and how they can improve it. The story titled “Is your brand's content experience appealing to consumers?” also pointed out the difference between content experience and content marketing.

The second part of the series is about various tools and trends brands must follow for a better content experience, and how they should align marketing teams and agencies internally to make it easier to provide a seamless content experience.

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Manas Gulati

According to Manas Gulati, Co-founder and CEO, #Arm Worldwide, while there are several tools to help brands navigate their way through the jungle of content web, the core formula is to understand the customer problems and answering them in a seamless manner by building connected experiences across mobile web, app and TV.

“Enhancing content experience of consumers is not an easy feat because you actually have to listen to what they want or don’t want. You need to be familiar with their challenges. You cannot simply balance content marketing by buying advertising spaces. You need to build new customers and make the existing ones feel special. All by focusing on their pain points and assuring them you can treat them well with your information,” he said.

Useful tools to help deliver a better content experience

Understanding the importance of content marketing and willing to create a fool-proof content strategy is a good start but to really excel at offering a seamless content experience, a marketer needs the right tools.

The actual quantity of content created on a daily basis is a mammoth figure. Infographics, images, slideshows, e-books, emails, videos, tweets and Instagram Stories take the amount of content produced to astronomical heights. Therefore, one must equip herself with the latest tools to be on top of a consumer’s preference.

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Raghav Bagai

Raghav Bagai, Co-Founder, Sociowash, emphasised the importance of being equipped with the latest tools to device a good content experience. “Since content strategy is the combination of art and science, brands must use advanced technologies and tools powered by artificial intelligence and conversational commerce for a seamless and non-pushy sales and communication experience. The eco-system needs to be loaded with content that adds value to the consumer, which can be accomplished through data-led content creation to support relatable marketing,” he said.

Bagai suggested that content marketers should keep themselves abreast with tools that enable them to study behavioural insights and help create valued content and enhance a consumer’s content experience.

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Shreyansh Bhandari

An important part of the content experience is to create the right content for consumption. It requires active collaboration between the teams and understanding of the analysis from these tools, said Shreyansh Bhandari (Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Lyxel&Flamingo).

He said one of the most advanced tools available for content marketers is the Adobe Experience Manager. “There are others that you can explore such as Uberflip and Paperflite, which may be able to fulfil your organisational needs and still not be very heavy on the pocket and can be a good initiation into setting up content experiences for your needs.”

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Ratnapriya Mitra

Ratnapriya Mitra, Vice-President of Client Services at Blink Digital, said Google and Quora and Hubspot are useful platforms that can help brands deliver stellar content. She said, “Google provides quite a few tools that can help you deliver a good content experience — Google trends, Keyword planner, Google search console. Quora is a useful platform to find challenges faced by your target audience. Hubspot is commonly used by content strategists and creators.”

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Rishabh Mahendru

Other than the basic stuff, BuzzSumo, Quora, Reddit, Answer the Public, SEMRush and Google Trends are great tools that can be used to gauge trends and create content, Rishabh Mahendru, Assistant Vice-President, Client Servicing, AdLift, said.

SEO and a good content experience go hand-in-hand

Nowadays, many people debate that content can work just fine without SEO if it is compelling enough. But Gulati of Arm Worldwide refuted this notion and said SEO is that branch of content that nurtures your content, helps it grow and reach unexpected heights. “A good content experience comes from doing in-depth keyword research; one should never stuff keywords and over-optimise. One should enhance metadata and use tags appropriately, look for trending topics, boost traffic or do content indexing,” he added.

Deploying SEO in content marketing is like leaving a breadcrumb trail in the form of linkbacks, meta tags, etc. It helps consumers find their way to the brand's content. A well laid out SEO strategy would definitely manifest a better user experience and help maximise relevant traffic to the brand’s content.

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Abhishek Chaturvedi

Digitas SVP and Head of Planning, Abhishek Chaturvedi, believes that SEO is not just a science that requires technical expertise but an art that marketers need in order to deeply understand their customers and how people are interacting with the web.

Sociowash’s Bagai said, “To accomplish a good content experience through SEO, the imperative is to focus on keyword research that helps in identifying keyword phrases that customers search for. In addition, the touchpoints that get activated once the person lands on the desired page set the tone of the upcoming content experience. The user, then, becomes a part of the content experience eco-system.”

Although he added, “Search is an intent and action-driven channel. So any SEO keyword research/strategy should be shared with the marketing and content teams to help them create video content that speaks to the consumer's real pain points.”

SEO is evolving to meet the new challenges of image, video and speech recognition, and audio matching, Chaturvedi said.

For an all-round content experience, Mitra of Blink Digital said, one should never stuff a page with keywords and over-optimise. Content and SEO should always work in balance.

How should content marketing teams and agencies internally organise and align to deliver a compelling content experience?

Bagai thinks that there's no one specific or pre-defined format to create a good content experience. With the ever-evolving digital landscape, it is essential to keep oneself updated. Bagai added, “The key is to work towards making brands as human as possible and identifying the right interaction points that users will relate to and interact with. Thus, brands and agencies need to keep learning.”

Since it’s not a one-off activity, the alignment needs to be long term with checkpoints and milestones defined. Bhandari said the teams need to be committed for a long term and ensure they are ready to invest in content generation, technology, tools and people to make the content experiences a success. “The connect generation needs to be regular. It requires coordination across all copy, production, SEO, art, media and analytics teams with the brand to ensure that the right content is created, distributed and measured,” he said.

According to Chaturvedi, the problematic area in the world of content marketing is that content campaigns are still being evaluated using traditional ad measurements. “It appears that marketers across the board are not yet focused on evaluating content campaigns against engagement metrics and are still favouring more traditional brand measures as KPIs.”

Giving an example of his own agency, Gulati told BuzzInContent that from the agency’s HR to business heads to the company executives, everyone has a say when it comes to content. “We believe in involving everyone because every individual works differently and their idea of content is also different. The more, the merrier. We have a ritual of connecting every Friday to discuss new marketing and content strategies where all the teams brainstorm new ideas. This is our solution to produce effective content experiences.

“If every brand and agency starts investing time effectively and efficiently towards their content and marketing strategies, trust me, the time would be much lesser than chasing an estranged client,” he said.

content marketers A blueprint for delivering stellar content experience