2. Meaning

Meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 206%, see a 48% increase in share of wallet and 137% greater returns on KPIs, according to a Havas Meaningful Brands survey

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.

Meaningful branded content is created to inspire, educate, solve a problem and, in some cases, entertain, by writing articles, scripts and product pages that resonate with the audience on a deeper level, offering value, relevance, and emotional connection.

You need to have something new to say differently so the reader can see themselves in it by:

• Leading with the benefit
• Showing, not telling
• Finding the emotional hook and use real lifestyle examples to bring it to life

In 2024, 90% of marketers put content in their marketing strategy. That's a lot of content on a website that potentially goes nowhere and does nothing.

All this web content needs to dovetail into the solution these articles propose, which means factoring them into the buying, fulfilling and administrative journeys.

Currently, these articles tend to be reams of copy on a page with no next best action and positioned very much at the lowest possible denominator, packed with irrelevant information, topped off with a lot of corporate masturbation.

And with the branded content industry worth an estimated $600 million, can an organisation afford to treat them separately by taking them out of the user experience team and putting them into marketing?

Now is the time to tip the scales so branded content becomes experience content:

• Content mapping that includes educational, inspirational and action-based content
• Clear entry, exit and further info points
• Find 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 because 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.

How a Content Experience Architect could help

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

Building a great widget that makes form filling easier 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 that 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 accept the terms and switch on notifications.

The content journey plan would be:

HEAD: Educational articles, videos and infographics about how prolonged use of the phone is bad. This appeals to people's existing sense that what they're doing is bad but they don't know how to stop. This should be distributed where they are so social media, CRM and search.

HEART: Inspirational content to appeal to people's sense of self-actualisation and adventure. Illustrate what they could be doing instead like sport, socialising, reading or pottery. Quantify it with stats. This will also be distributed via social media and CRM.

HAND: Action content that talks about the functionality within the app. The alerts you get when you spend too much time on an app without having to search for it. And how the functionality works in terms of data security and privacy. Give step-by-step instructions on how to activate it. This would help encourage prospects to buy your phone plans, knowing they can easily manage how much time they're on their phones. This means the heart content is handing off to the tool/functionality and therefore the logged-in journey.

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 eyeball to checkout.