Categories
Content Experience

Content experience: how to address emotional needs and motivations

In the digital world, experiences are largely derived from content.  Audiences are not able size up the credibility of conversational partners in-the-flesh, or touch physical things to test their worthiness.  Instead they react to stuff made of pixels.  That reaction of people to pixels is the essence of what is often described as the content experience.  What follows are some insights into how content experience arises, and a suggested framework for how to plan to make experiences as good as possible for your audiences using four building blocks.

Content creators often have a naive view of content.  They believe there are two types of content, good content and bad content, and that good content results in good experiences.  The creator then concludes: my content is good, so people will like it.

When considered from the user perspective, content appropriateness seems like a moving target.  Content may be good for some people, but not others.  Content may be good at certain points in time, but not others.  When content isn’t quite right, it can seem mediocre, or even bad.

Understand your audience’s (sometimes complex) motivations

Experience is about emotions that arise from one’s thoughts and feelings.  In our heads we think and talk to ourselves (thoughts) while in our bodies we process various emotional, visceral or unconscious reactions (feelings).  We can have thoughts and feelings about ourselves (our self concept), and about other people or things, such as brands.  Thoughts involve interpretation and evaluation – a process of judging that can be curious or critical.  Feelings range in intensity and how they manifest.  Feelings and thought play off each other – thoughts drive feelings at times, and other times feelings drive thoughts.  Their interplay is most intense when feelings and thoughts are aligned or “fused”: the times when people are most convinced of what they encounter is real.

Psychotherapists warn of the danger when people can’t separate thoughts from feelings that are negative: when unconscious feelings spur critical thoughts about oneself or another, or when habitual negative “self talk” causes one to feel bad.  Storytellers like to encourage the fusing of thoughts and feelings in a positive way by getting people so absorbed in an enjoyable story so that they stop evaluating the story (and the storyteller) critically.  People tend to have positive experiences when they feel comfortable with the storyline: it is aligned with familiar, positive prior experiences of a person, so that receptivity goes up, and judgement and negative reactions are absent.

The interplay of thoughts and feelings influence perceptions your audience has of themselves, and of your brand.   Content can prompt people to evaluate themselves negatively (“I must be dumb for not understanding this”) or positively (“I’m so in the know.”)  Content also induces people to evaluate brands negatively or positively.    Consider the public reactions, both positive and negative, to a recent Dove soap campaign focused on beauty.  That campaign may not represent the kind of content you create, but it does illustrate the range of possible reactions that content can elicit, with people talking both about themselves, and the corporation that is behind the message.

Whether the content provokes thoughts and feelings about the person using the content, or the brand behind it, depends on the person’s self concept (expectations about oneself), and  their view of the brand or product (expectations of the brand.)

The following table illustrates some different aspects of content experience.   People may focus on how an experience makes them feel or think of themselves.  Or they may attribute the experience, good or bad, to what the brand did for them.

Relating to Self  (personalization) Relating to Brand (attribution)
Good Experience Affirms who am I, or want to be Has qualities or values I desire, is “on my side,” gets me where I want to be
Bad Experience Makes me feel inadequate, or under-appreciated Slows me down, wastes my time, insults me, bores me

Brands generally have limited influence over a person’s self concept, unless they have had – or will have – a sustained relationship that will influence a person’s expectations of themselves over time.  A community college may be able to reframe how a person thinks about themselves. A candy company generally can’t.  For the most part, brands can appeal to aspects of existing self concepts.  A high end chocolate maker might use content to cultivate chocolate appreciation and connoisseurship, and affirm a chocolate aficionado’s belief in their erudition.

It is helpful to know the mindset of your audiences, especially whether they have a superior (arrogant) or inferior (intimidated) attitude toward  aspects of your product, so you can adjust your content to work with their expectations.  For example, does your audience see themselves as geeks?  Does your content appeal to geeks, or does it seem too simple, or too me-too?  Unless people are looking for aspirational content (involving a transformation of self identity) people generally want content that reaffirms who they think they are.  When content is discordant with how people think of themselves, they often will blame the brand for being wrong.

It is also helpful to know any hot button issues different audience segments may have.  When faced with an emotional situation, people often personalize the bad ones more than the good ones.  Take the assertion that brands care about their customers.  Some brands like Zappos in the United States have been successful in getting people to view their organization as caring about the customer as an individual.  But generally customers have a healthy skepticism when it comes to believing brands “care” about them.  The idea that brands might genuinely care – really value the customer’s time and psychic needs – must be earned through repeated concrete action.  When something goes wrong, the same people who doubt that “care” (in the emotional sense) is a reasonable expectation to have of a brand will be quick to decry that the brand doesn’t “care” about them, as if they secretly believed the brand would prove them wrong.  While content is only one aspect of the brand experience, it can play an important role in offering palpable evidence to customers that can create a feeling they are cared for.

Given these variables, content will often need to adapt to different segments of the audience, to account for different priorities, both informational and emotional.  To understand the differences in audience segments, it is helpful to create content personas that address the informational needs of different audiences at different stages of time, their psychographic characteristics, media preferences, topical interests, their attitudes toward the brand, social media behavior, time scarcity, and attention habits.  To offer full value, content personas should go beyond the functional scenarios and device-centric usage profiles found in user experience personas.

Get ready for the “moments of truth”

Good content experiences are achieved when audiences sense their thoughts and feelings are aligned while using the content.  People hear messages when they aren’t distracted by how the message is being delivered to them.  They identify with content that seems as if it is part of their life stories.  The building blocks for good content experience need to come together during various “moments of truth” a customer will encounter: points in time when the customer will form a strong and lasting impression that will shape their expectations of the brand in the future.

During moments of truth, there is a big potential for content to make people feel bad about themselves, or bad about the brand.

  1. If the brand doesn’t offer content that’s on-topic, then the customer will feel the brand is not a credible source of information.
  2. If the brand doesn’t present content in an audience-appropriate way, it can destroy trust, or make some customer segments feel excluded.
  3. If the brand doesn’t offer a compelling articulation of how its various content relate to your bigger needs, then the brand has forgone the opportunity to establish a basis for an ongoing relationship.  Instead, the brand may even foster confusion about the brand, or even skepticism and cynicism if the audience is more focused on poor storytelling than the story itself.  When viewing individual items of content, the customer thinks: “yeah right” – it doesn’t add up.
  4. If the brand lets down a customer at a critical moment, because it failed to plan for how a customer might need content at a certain time, then the brand has lost the chance to build loyalty.

Implement the building blocks of superior content experience

It may seem self-evident that one should create content that makes people like themselves and the brand.  But the reality is that only some content does this well.  Even if we disregard all the badly produced content that people are often forced to use to get things done in their lives, we are still left with a massive amount of content that is unexciting for most people and offers poor competition for other outlets vying for their attention.  Correcting the most clumsy elements that spark bad experiences is not enough to attract audiences to want to use your content.

Delivering superior content experiences depends on a mix of components and methods:

  • what you say or show
  • how you say or show things
  • how you do your communication

What you say, and how you say and do that, can be broken down into four building blocks that address how you develop relationships with audiences, and meet their needs during their moments of truth when the are likely to form a strong impression that will shape their expectations of your brand.   These building blocks are illustrated below.

content experience building blocks address key audience needs
content experience building blocks address key audience needs

Content elements are the choices about what to talk about.  This includes the topics your content addresses, the level of detail offered, the selection of information to based on audience needs and priorities, and making connections to other topics that are related.   The content elements you offer are the DNA of your identity to audiences.  It reveals whether your focus is the same as the audience’s.  Content elements are the major factor determining how curious an audience segment will be in what you say.

Content presentation is about how content is styled, translated into media and distributed.  Yes, style matters, a lot.  Assuming the audience has interest in what you talk about, you need to determine how to present the content in a way the audience will find engaging and willing to offer their attention.  Presentation choices help create the rapport you establish with your audience, influencing how receptive they will be to what you have to say.  Content presentation includes editorial style, such as voice and tone.  Editorial style influences the mood your content conveys, such as being helpful, happy, respectful or funny.  The decisions relating to content presentation also include whether to show content about your topic, rather than simply talk about it, and selecting the appropriate media to convey your content, such as video, info graphics, or social media dialog.  The more a brand can communicate on the audience’s terms, the more the audience can identify with the content and see it as part of their life stories.

Content articulation is about how content elements come together to create meaning for audiences.  This can be the stories you tell about your brand, or the arguments you make to advocate a certain position or course of action.  Your content elements and presentation should support how your content is articulated and reinforce your messaging.  Audiences should be able to easily understand the big themes of what you offer, without feeling shouted at.  It is easiest to see the articulation with brands that have cartoon mascots (Ronald McDonald or Smokey the Bear) because both brand and audience think in terms of what the mascot persona says as part of its larger story.  Other brands use more subtle ways to tie together content into a larger message, such as when content consistently reflects brand values such as environmental stewardship.

Content awareness is about how your content responds to audience needs at different points in time.  Content awareness embodies the relationship your brand has with the audience by showing how responsive your content is to changing audience needs, and how well you can anticipate these needs.  Your content demonstrates awareness of audience needs by planning for customer journeys, and for detailed scenarios of use for your content.  Aware content makes the right content available where it is needed, when it is needed.  It does so by considering content needs across different device platforms, and anticipating how content may be needed in the context of secondary activities that are not immediately related to acquiring or consuming the content.  To deliver aware content, content resources need to be embedded within the overall design of your organization’s services so it is available exactly when the audience will want to use your content.

Great content experiences require more than an entertaining copywriter, or a clever editorial calendar.  It requires empathy for different kinds of people, who have an assortment of needs and motivations.  Empathy is not an intention; it is a measurable quality.  It is demonstrated by how successful your content is with different audience segments.   Truly empathic content is possible only from a deep understanding of the many aspects of audience needs, which should be validated through user research with audiences and content performance assessments. The ability to deliver that content, the capacity to create and position content addressing those needs, requires holistic coordination and planning.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Effectiveness

Making your content relevant

Talk to people who use content, and you will hear complaints about it being too hard to find what they want, about having to deal with extraneous content, and about corporate content sounding like “marketing speak.”  Such complaints reflect a sense that the content people encounter is not relevant to them.  Too much of the wrong content, too little of the right content.

Making your content relevant involves matching what you offer audiences with what audiences want from you.  That sounds simple, but there are several dimensions involved.  Let’s consider how content can match, or mismatch, audience needs.

We will start with a few assumptions to keep the discussion manageable.  We will assume that your brand serves one or more audience segments, but for now we will focus on your relationship with a single segment.  We will assume that the audience segment, while comprised of individuals having multiple interests, can be treated as homogeneous in having a similar set of needs and expectations relating to the content they seek from you.

There are many ways audiences and brands can overlap, both imperfectly and productively.  This can be illustrated in the following diagram.

 

overlap of audience interests with content offered
overlap of audience interests with content offered

Looking at overlap

The worst outcome is when brands are largely out of touch with their audience.  Audiences feel estranged when they are interested in many things a brand might be able to talk about, but the brand chooses to talk about other things that have little interest to the audience.  The brand could be a trusted source of information on a topic, but instead talks at the audience and offers little content of actual value.  The situation is common, especially in the area of professional services: a bank, rather than provide genuinely helpful suggestions in the context of their products and services, instead promotes messages from the chairman and newsletters about their community involvement.

Another common situation is when audiences use a core of the content you offer them, but ignore the rest.  Audiences are serviced but not engrossed when they value a brand for narrow utilitarian content only.  People will say: “I just want to get an answer to my question; I don’t want to see all this other stuff.”  They engage with the product support content, but not with the content about the brand, because the brand content hasn’t been created in a way that matches the underlying needs of the audience.  People go to their local government website for a schedule of recycling, but ignore articles about public hearings related to the recycling program.  If the audience is not thinking about other things they might potentially want from your brand, you need to rethink your approach to building audience engagement to make your brand feel more inclusive.

People sometimes want more content from a brand than the brand is prepared to offer.  Audiences feel underserved when they need content from a trusted source, but the brand only wants to provide minimal factual content to support sales.  Ordinary people are not experts on tires, water heaters, or many other aspects of life, and want to understand how their situation or behavior will influence product performance in the long term.  But brands may offer only limited specific information, rather than relationship-building content.

Audiences feel supported when there is lots of content available that is relevant to them.  The brand has done a good job translating what it knows into content that speaks the language of the audience and addresses their needs.  From the audience perspective, most of the content seems relevant; from the brand’s perspective, little of the content created is wasted.  Achieving this happy state involves creating compelling audience centric content, where the brand qualities play a supporting role to the content itself.  By having content responsive to audience needs, the brand can build its audience, and have permission to talk about itself where appropriate.

A final possibility is when audiences become obsessive about your brand, and want your brand to take the lead in the relationship.  For brands it is a wonderful position to be in, to have adoring fans who want you to talk about yourself, rather than talk about the humble needs of the people who are interacting with your content.   For these brands the chief challenge is regularly creating highly original content that will impress your fans.  While this fandom brand situation clearly does exist, it is comparatively rare.  Fan-based brands require long term development, and tend to arise in exceptional situations, where extraordinary brand differentiation and identity has been achieved.  While brands should be cautious about directly pursuing this route, it may be possible to incorporate elements of this approach with certain lead customers provided the primarily audience already feels fully supported.

Reshaping your content

To broaden the overlap between audience interests and brand content, shuffle things around.  Enlarge the range of the relevant content:

  1. identify and understand the full range of audience interests through audience research and analytics
  2. build audience curiosity for content that addresses other topics of potential mutual interest by holding content exploration sessions followed up by content testing
  3. create quality content that address these audience interests

Generally this process involves moving toward the audience, away from self-referential content.  Ideally, relevant content is about “us,” but to get there, one needs to address the “me” in the audience before one can talk about “you” the brand.

 

Categories
Content Effectiveness Content Efficiency

Thinking about your return on content

Imagine a company that devotes 50 people to create an item of content that is used by only 10 people.  That scenario sounds absurd in the digital world, but companies often do such things when they create content for their executives.  Count the number of people on the email list – for example, the internal team and associated department reviewers who are charged with drafting a decision memo for the company board.   Do all these people really need to be involved?  Is the matter that important?  Even in the digital realm, companies are capable of unconsciously mimicking such behavior when they allow procedures for internal communications to shape their process for creating content for their customers.   You see this happen when the legal department needs to clear each revision, or the executive sponsor wants to approve the final copy.

The opposite situation is also common: a small ragged team of low level employees is responsible for mission critical content that has obvious financial implications, but it is overwhelmed by the task.

Balancing resources and content scope

So what is the right balance between resources for content needed, and the scope of content to deliver?  Determining the  balance reveals both how much content to create, as well as how much money to invest in content quality factors such as

  • creative resources
  • production hardware
  • software tools and platforms
  • review procedures
  • risk control

Apart from such big resource decisions, knowing the right balance can be helpful when deciding what specific content to deliver in a given quarter: for example, does it make sense to produce more videos and delay the project to tag community forum comments?

What is needed is a comprehensive and systematic framework for assessing the impact that all content achieves, measured against all the resources devoted to create that content. True, organizations commonly measure content resources and outcomes on a project basis for specific content initiatives (a campaign, a re-design, a mobile app, etc.) But rarely do they develop an overall picture of what value they are achieving from all their content activities.  Traditional media publishers, being in the more straightforward position of being pure publishers, probably have the clearest sense of the value of their digital content in terms of costs and revenues. Yet even they are struggling with getting scope and resource levels right (e.g., should they develop a new tablet app?)  For traditional product and services firms that are comparatively new to digital publishing, it can be challenging to track the true payoff.  There may be many different content initiatives, each having different goals and using different kinds of resources, including staff who are devoted to content activities only part time.

With organizations undertaking growing numbers projects and investments related to content, content strategists should help their stakeholders put together an integrated “portfolio view” showing how all activities are complementing each other.

Content value: effectiveness and efficiency

For content to have value it must satisfy the needs of both audiences and organizations.  Useful but expensive content can be poor value, as is cheap but inadequate content.  For audiences, content must meet a need to be effective.  For organizations, content must show return on investment.

In these heady days of content consciousness (embodied by the slogan “content is king”), many organizations seem willing to invest now in content, and worry about the precise payoff later, as long as baseline indicators seem to be improving.  But sooner or later, organizations, especially product and service companies new to digital publishing, will ask: Is all our content worth the effort?  Is our content costing us money, or making us money? If content is now a core business asset, can you show me what it returns?

At the heart of content value are two core concepts: content effectiveness, and content production efficiency.

Content effectiveness measures how audiences relate to the content.  Audience impact can – and should – be measured many ways, since audiences are looking for different things from content, and how they use content will vary as well.  The impact of content is related to it’s purpose:

  • content that has a direct purpose such as how many conversions did an email result in (tight coupling of content to outcomes)
  • content that fosters indirect impacts across the customer lifecycle such as building brand awareness  (loose coupling of content to outcomes)
  • content that has multiple purposes such as when a product tutorial video needs to reduce product returns and needs to enhance brand perception (diffuse coupling of content to outcomes)

There are many metrics relating to content effectiveness: number of visitors, dwell time, social media shares, loyalty metrics, reputation metrics, activations, to name but a few.  These metrics measure different kinds of outcomes and reflect different qualities of a brand.

Content production efficiency measures the resource intensity when creating particular kinds of content.  High effort content consumes many resources, both human resources and non-labor costs such as asset licensing, hosting, or paid promotion.  Efficient content production reduces total resources needed to create a type of content of a desired quality.  It is important to recognize that content that requires effort is not necessarily inefficient: efficiency depends on the type of content being created, and the qualities (impact) expected.  Video will often be more resource intensive than copy, for example, but it does not follow that all video is inefficient.  Efficiency is not solely a matter of cost, as quality (and potential audience impact) needs to be accounted for.  Generally, content that costs less to make, or takes less time to make, is more efficient than more expensive content or content slower to produce, provided the content is of comparable quality – it creates equivalent audience impact.

The costs associated with content are subject to two opposite influences.  On the one hand, the unit cost to create content is decreasing, as better content production and management tools make content creation easier.  However, these tools have not necessarily enhanced the quality of content (value to audiences), so that more content is being created of a substandard quality.  This situation has lead to recommendations for more human attention and more structured review processes in content creation, which can drive up costs.

Strategies for improving return on content

When organizations become concerned that they are not getting a desired return on their content, they will typically try one of two strategies.

The first strategy is to enhance the quality of the content, making it more engaging or useful, and potentially broaden the scope of content activities: adding videos, adding more social media, etc.  These tactics aim to improve the impact of an organization’s content, but do not typically lead to production efficiency.  Instead, expanded activities tend to involve more processes that need coordination, increasing the overhead.   A common downside is organizational fatigue, as proliferating content initiatives require more attention from staff who do not have content as a core responsibility.

The second strategy organizations use to get more value from their content is to focus on tweaking a narrow range of content to make it more productive.  Organizations may fine tune their SEO or their copywriting to drive more activation; organizations try to get a repeatable formula that yields predictable results.  Consider a finely evolved targeted marketing email: there are fewer wasted emails sent, and less editorial review, since a template has been optimized.  Predictability helps to reduce risk and contain costs, but such a focus may do little to increase long term brand engagement and improve the audience impact of content.  The focus on optimizing specific content products can result in sub-optimization for the organization overall, where separate activities are done in departmental silos without a broader vision for what customers really want and how to address those desires.

pathways

Few organizations seem to move along a direct path  from “bungling” to “enlightened.” Instead they tend to emphasize either content enrichment, or content streamlining, even though there is no intrinsic reason why organizations can not both fine tune delivery of established content at the same time they expand the scope of content activities into newer areas.

Why firms emphasize either content enrichment or content streamlining probably comes down to who in the organization is driving the effort, and the narrative they use to describe the problem and its resolution.  The content enrichers believe that the core value proposition of the existing content is inadequate, and that something better needs to be offered.  This approach appeals to creative marketers, agencies, and brand-conscious executives.  The content streamliners believe the core value proposition of the content is fine, it just needs refinement to yield better results more quickly and cheaply.  Such an approach appeals to analytic marketers, and IT departments interested in upgrading systems.

To avoid a lopsided strategy, organizations need to assess the total value of all their content operations: to compare the resources they devote to content with the outcomes achieved by looking at both content effectiveness and content production efficiency together.  Helping stakeholders understand this value will be a key responsibility for content strategists in the future.