Understanding content experiences

So, just what are these digital content experiences that contain a de-siloed combination of personalized text, images, multimedia elements, and interactivity? Aren’t these just websites? Blogs? Resource centers?

Well, yes and no. The key difference lies in the architecture and purpose. In B2B marketing, websites are classically architected in a hierarchical fashion and contain categories and sub-categories of content. You traverse “deeper” into the site to get to more detailed levels of content. Blogs are traditionally simply article-based publications presented in reverse chronological order. And content marketing resource centers (or learning centers) are usually libraries of digital assets organized (or not) by some kind of content format. There have been many attempts to provide definitions of the idea of a “content experience” – but we have begun to describe these “content experiences” as: “purpose-driven, interactive experiences which are architected to deliver specific values, or stories, to a targeted audience, and are delivered through both linear and non-linear narratives. “They act as bespoke, specialized digital hubs that can be rapidly created and deployed. They feature content that is presented dynamically, and they feature more granular audience measurement capabilities.” Thus, each content experience has a definitive purpose. They are not built to simply be a logically organized repository of files/resources or a most recent news outlet. They are, put simply, designed to create a valuable and specific experience for the audience. Now, for B2B marketers, building the capability to continuously create a network of these dynamic, multimedia-enriched, interactive content experiences may seem overwhelming without new technology, new skills, and new measurability to facilitate that evolution. Ironically, however, it is just this kind of thinking that can enable a much more scalable, rapid, and modular content marketing approach. As new experiences are created, the idea of “design once, use many” can be realized. A video can be utilized in multiple experiences. Pieces of a thought leadership article can be leveraged into other experiences. Content reuse and repackaging will remove bottlenecks from production design and amplify content creation capabilities. This approach requires more than just the choice of a new set of software tools. It requires new ideas and thinking in terms of how to structure these content experiences in a more modular and non-linear fashion. It requires a deeper and more holistic look at the way content marketing is presented and activated to educate buyers.

But as these more creative and business-strategy questions are answered, there will also be a need to understand how B2B marketers should best embed an organizational capability to deliver upon these ideas.