3. 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 eyeball to checkout.