Content-first approach
What is a content-first approach?
A content-first approach is a strategy that puts content at the center of the design and development process.
Unlike the traditional design-first method, where the visual design and layout take precedence, which often leads to content that feels forced or out of place, resulting in a disjointed user experience, the content-first approach prioritizes the user and their preferred content, leading to a more cohesive and user-centric final output.
Why is a content-first approach important to Organizations?
Improved Audience Engagement
When we prioritize content, it speaks directly to the audience's needs and preferences. By focusing on what the audience wants to read, see, or learn about, we can create more engaging and relevant experiences that resonate with users, keeping them interested and coming back for more.
With relatable content, we satisfy the user's intent quicker and help them find what they are looking for, which results in them taking action. The design assists the content in making these actions possible and seamless, giving us an engaged audience.
Better SEO Performance
Search engines prioritize relevant, well-structured, and valuable content for users.
When the content is relevant to the user, they stay on your website and take interactive actions as the content-first approach addresses specific user queries and communicates value better.
This sends a strong signal to search engines, and your website satisfies metrics such as user-intent satisfaction, user-interaction satisfaction, search-intent satisfaction, etc. With these in place, you will likely see improvements in metrics such as Time on page, page view, scroll depth, signup, etc., further propelling your SEO scores.
User-Centric Content Design
A content-first approach ensures that the user's needs are at the forefront of the design process. This means creating a more intuitive and satisfying user experience while balancing out design aesthetics.
The design is structured so that the content or its value is not hindered by the aesthetics of the design, ensuring the user's experience and needs are kept at the forefront.
Cross-Team alignment
When content is the starting point, it provides a clear direction for all project teams, from marketing to design to development.
This alignment ensures everyone works towards the same goals, facilitating better collaboration and smoother project execution. The availability of the content, i.e., the messaging, gives better direction to the design to visualize and product teams to develop a solid user experience.
Content as the foundation of the Brand
Content is the core of any digital presence. It conveys the brand's message, values, and information to the audience. Prioritizing content provides a strong foundation for digital presence, ensuring that all design and functionality enhance and deliver the same brand message, thereby effectively winning the user's mind share.
What Does a Content-First Approach Process Look Like?
1. Research & Understand the Target Audience
The first step in a content-first approach is thoroughly understanding your target audience. Creating detailed buyer personas can help represent different segments of your audience, and these personas act as guidelines in creating relevant content tailored to their needs. You can include demographics, psychographics, and firmographic details to curate a pointed persona that will enable better content creation.
To ensure your content resonates with your audience, you need to use their language. This starts with thorough keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your audience uses when searching for information related to your industry.
Creating an expectation map involves mapping out the customer journey and identifying what content users expect at each stage. This process starts with understanding the different stages of the customer journey, such as awareness, consideration, and decision. Identifying content paths & gaps in your current offerings helps ensure you provide the right content at the right time, meeting your audience's expectations and guiding them through their journey.
2. Define Goals & Metrics
It is important to define clear goals and metrics for measuring the success of the content-first approach. Start by setting specific objectives such as increasing website traffic, generating leads, boosting engagement, enhancing brand awareness, etc.
Once your goals are defined, establish metrics to measure success using common metrics, including page views, time on page, conversion rates, social shares, and lead generation.
3. Define a user story and its associated flow
A cohesive narrative is essential for keeping your audience engaged.
Define a user story that ties all your content together and guides the user through a logical flow of information. This involves organizing your content to support this narrative, starting with broad topics and drilling into more specific subtopics. This logical flow increases engagement and keeps the users hooked, sending strong engagement signals to the search engine.
It is important to determine what type of content best supports the user flow - this could be ebooks, blogs, videos, etc
4. Create content, review, refine
A content-first approach goes beyond just creation. Once the created content is live, implement a review process where content is checked for accuracy, readability, and alignment with your user goals. This can be done by periodic feedback from users and internal stakeholders, and the gathered feedback should be implemented based on the insights arrived at.
5. Create a design supporting the content
In the content-first approach, we prioritize the content in the design process and ensure that the design supports and enhances the content, providing a seamless user experience.
The design is more of an enabler for the content, and the aesthetics take a backseat while ensuring visual quality. All design decisions are taken with the content and the user at the forefront. Therefore, create a design that enhances the user experience and aids in conveying the value of what the content wants to communicate, even it takes multiple iterations. To simplify and control the iterations, you can use a DAM like ImageKit to track your graphic’s asset versions which lets you collaborate easily.
6. Review and Publish
Once the content and design are ready, publish and monitor their cohesiveness. This can be tracked with the common metrics mentioned above, as they clearly communicate how the design and content resonate with users.
It is important to set benchmarks and refine the content and design periodically as fresh content/design aids in more engagement, thus resulting in a positive user experience. A/B testing of both content and designs has positively impacted in bringing a good result and is worth considering while implementing a content-first approach.
How Do You Make Your Organization Adhere to a Content-First Strategy?
Making your organization adopt the content-first approach requires 3 key elements
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Communicating values of content-first approach
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Stakeholder alignment
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Making the team user-centric
Educate internal stakeholders on the benefits of a content-first approach and showcase how it will impact user experience, engagement, SEO, and the buying journey. Once these are clear, ensure alignment between the teams that will be hands-on in the process, i.e., marketing, design development, etc. This will ensure that the organization is working towards a unified goal of satisfying the user intent.
It is important to foster a culture of a user-centric mindset in the team for the success of the content-first approach. This eases the understanding of the approach and brings them on board for the plan.