4Cs of Interaction Thinking: Choice

The same survey found 60% of consumers say the content brands currently create is “poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver”.

This is a shocking statistic given the potential returns from simply adding meaning to your content.

Say something that slaps

Meaningful branded content is created to solve a problem through education, information, or to complete a task.

This could be articles, scripts for videos and product pages that resonate with the audience on a deeper level - offering value, relevance, and emotional connection by empathising with a person's mental state during the interaction.

For content to be meaningful, it needs to:

• Be discoverable
• Speak from a position of authority, expertise and experience
• Address what the reader wants to know in a suitable format
• Have a next-best-action, whether it's click to buy or learn more

And for those of you in digital who think this only applies to marketing content, think again. How do you think people will find your onboarding pages, get into the buying journey or solve a problem with their account or order? They need meaningful and accessible language to get them there and lead them to a positive outcome.

You cannot separate the functional (therefore, profitable) part of the user experience from the passive exposure and active research to which people are subject.

This isn't marketing, this is user experience

The Choice section is normally led by the SEO team or marketing team, aiming to be at the top of the search page to increase traffic to the website or to have sponsored or paid content on other sites to meet the same objective.

The problem with this approach is the article can be far removed from what people will find when they click through.

It may even talk about a subject your company doesn't cater for, but because of some woolly analysis on what people are searching, it's served as a fail-safe approach to get noticed.

If this content lacks integrity because it has no meaning for them or your company, so you've lost those engaged prospects.

It is the time to tip the scales so branded content becomes experience content because this Choice needs to be:

• Educational, inspirational and action-based
• Clear entry, exit and further info points
• About topics you have the authority and credibility to talk about in a way that centres the reader

The reason this content is part of the experience is that without it, there won't be any traffic coming to the website, prospects will pass you by, meaning you're not expanding your market share, you limit cross and upselling potential, and you could churn existing customers.

The middle isn't about being mid

In traditional marketing funnel thinking this is seen as mid-funnel. But the funnel no longer exists as the way we use the internet and interact with brands has changed. It's no longer linear.

The purpose of this content is to get customers into the funnel that leads them to buy, called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

But someone may have stumbled on this content out of curiosity or because a headline piqued their interest while reading something else on another website. So these people are right at the beginning of the decision-making loop; therefore, passive top-funnel.

However, they could be actively researching to solve a known problem. Classic mid-funnel, but they could have previously seen your cringe social media posts, spam emails or heard about your terrible service, so they would turn off if what they're seeing now is woolly and meaningless.

They also might have an unknown problem. That niggling thing that annoys the hell out of them but do nothing about. That's when they spot the solution in passive Capture content, they may skip the Choice content and head straight for a Conversation but some will want to research before they commit, so end up in Choice before heading back to Conversation or clicking off completely.

If this happens, you want to make sure that even though your product/service wasn't right for their particular needs, you've made them feel good because you've helped lead them to a positive outcome with joyous Connected interactions.

The story could be sitting in your user experience

Building functionality that measures how much time is spent on your phone is useless if no one knows it's there, so the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments. Here's an example:

You're a telco and you've discovered people want to limit the amount of time they spend on their phone, so you've integrated functionality into your app that sends push notifications when you've spent too much time on a single app or it's been a long time since the lock screen activated. You just need people to accept the terms and switch on notifications.

Meaningful content plays in the headspace, so it's designed to make people think something. There will be overlap between the heart, which makes you feel, and the hand, which makes you do. It's the nature of content to guide the audience through a journey, at every touchpoint, for every trigger.

As 81% of consumers say they need to trust a brand before buying, keeping all interactions in the same flow, with the consistent tone and messaging, and knitted together to make your journeys sticky, builds that trust through lower cognitive load and seamless experiences from eyeballs to checkout.