What is a content experience framework?

There’s no shortage of buzzwords in the content marketing space. It can be a chore just to keep the latest terminology and acronyms straight and understand the sometimes subtle nuances that differentiate them from each other. Content experience framework is that type of reference. If you’re not familiar with it, you may have questions, such as: .

• What is a content experience framework? 

• How is it related to the content experience? 

• Is it the same thing as a content experience platform (CXP)?

In this guide, we’ll answer these questions and also tell you why having a content experience framework could be the vital missing link that pulls all your marketing strategies together for better results. But before we discuss the "framework," let’s look at the content experience.

What is a content experience?

Think of a content experience as the overall experience a consumer has interacting with various types of your company’s content on all the different devices they use throughout the buyer journey.

How consumers access the content, consume it, engage with it or respond to it all affect the content experience. Making this experience positive for the consumer so they’ll consider converting to a customer requires three key considerations:

Strategic planning: To ensure the content is relevant, messaging is consistent and it’s delivered to each consumer on their preferred device in their desired format

Good timing: It’s vital to deliver content to consumers at times when they’re most likely to make a decision during their buyer journey.

The right level of personalization: Let customers know you understand their needs without using a one-size-fits-all approach or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, appearing to know too much about them or invading their privacy.

Why is the content experience important?

Why should you care about providing consumers with a great content experience? It all comes down to whether you want to convert more customers. If so, it makes sense to do as much as possible to ensure customers are happy with your brand, products and customer service. This is the best way to get them to tell their friends, family, co-workers and social media followers about your brand.

Does giving consumers great content experiences require some investment? Yes. But you should see much better results, so the investment should pay for itself quickly. Forrester research found that even small improvements in customer experience can have big financial payoffs. For instance, a one-point increase in the CX index score can amount to as much as $244 million in incremental revenue for a big-box store.

Delivering a great content experience doesn’t mean you have to toss out everything you’ve been doing and create all new content from scratch. Chances are you can repurpose much of the great content your team already has on hand. But first things first. Let’s look at what the content experience framework is and why you need it. 

What is a content experience framework?

A content experience framework is the process and the components of the process that enable a content marketing team to create quality content experiences. For teams that still do traditional content marketing that involves a linear process of creating and publishing content, analyzing results and repeating, this requires a shift to a more agile approach where content creation is an ever-changing process that evolves quickly.

Though there can be some variation as to how different content marketers refer to the components of the content experience framework, there are typically four to six parts.

Here we've broken down the process into six components. These include a content audit, creating content to fill in gaps, storing and organizing content, personalizing content, distributing content at the right time and analyzing results. 

Here is a deeper dive into what to do at each step:

Audit content 

Review your existing content to determine how much of your content can be used as is or repurposed. Think about what is most relevant to your consumers, but also consider things like your marketing strategy, recent buyer trends and current events. 

Create content to fill gaps

Where you’ve identified gaps in your existing content, create new content that’s purposeful and strategic. Encourage content writers to format copy in a way that allows it to easily be spun for different buyer personas. This way one content piece can be quickly repurposed for more than one audience.

Store and organize content: 

Managing content for all your different audiences and platforms is easier when it’s all located in one central location such as a content experience platform (CXP) driven by a headless content management system. Content experience platforms enable brands to better engage their audiences on multiple channels. In this type of system, content can be organized using tags, filters and technology like AI, making it simpler to reuse it at different stages of the buyer journey and for different channels such as SMS messages, social media posts, blogs, articles and more.

Personalize content 

This is much more than just inserting someone’s name into the content they receive. Instead, it involves understanding each of your buyer personas and their pain points, then addressing them with meaningful content. By meaningful, we mean that the content should impact them or make their lives easier. Accomplish this, for example, by answering questions they have on a topic, or by educating them on how your products or services can help them.

Schedule/distribute content

Distribute the relevant, personalized content that’s been created to the appropriate audiences at the optimal times on multiple platforms. This might involve sending a text message to a consumer who is physically near one of your retail locations, but it also includes all the content that your internal teams, such as inbound marketing and account-based marketing staff, rely on delivering at specific times for success.

Analyze results

Take a close look at what does and doesn’t work to continuously improve content. Consider as many types of data as possible to understand the success of your content. These include time on the website, customer conversions, lead generation stats, sales numbers and more.

Delivering great content experiences doesn’t have to be difficult

Whether you follow the content experience framework exactly as we’ve outlined it or use some variation, the goal of this type of process is to better engage your audiences with meaningful content in various formats throughout the buyer journey. 

Learn more

Learn more about improving content experiences in our guide, “The Ultimate Guide to Content Experience.”

Schedule a free demo to see how Contentstack’s content experience platform can help your organization provide great content experiences.