01
Choose the topic and place in the customer journey
The subject
Those looking to get started with content experiences are best looking at those experiences as part of a campaign. There are many possibilities:
Experience around a product or service. Experiences are interesting if you want to market a new product or support awareness of an existing product. They are also suitable if you want to increase social support for a project. Or the support of other stakeholders, such as employees or shareholders.
Experience around a theme. Perhaps you want to publicize your company's sustainability initiatives, communicate your industrial company's safety for the neighborhood, your initiatives for your customers' health in retail, the benefits of working with you for recruiting, the importance of your initiatives for innovation, your company's 20th anniversary, company history, challenges for your company's future for employees.
The place in the customer journey
At what stage of the customer journey is the focus of the campaign? Is it about raising awareness, or are you more interested in strengthening engagement, conversion or use/advocacy? The phase determines what type of story you need. There are three types:
1. stories with an emotional top layer,
2. stories with an informational top layer,
3. stories with an interactive top layer.
What type of content experience for which stage?
02
Create an outline of the content journey
For planning a one-time campaign
For a one-time campaign, draw out the content journey. Where does your target audience first interact with your content? How do you lead people on to what next step? How do you bring them to the content experience?
An example of a content journey at a content experience for a software package for designers.
For planning series of content experiences
If you are communicating periodically to the same target audience, we work on an always-on strategy with a variation of the well-known hub-hygiene-hero-content pyramid.
The central idea of this model is that you create a broad pyramid base of weekday, inexpensive basic content, above that a pyramid middle of more fun and slightly more expensive creative content, and on top of that a pyramid top of super fun or super interesting waw-content experiences. Through that mix, you create in your target audience a periodic base of familiarity (with the base of the pyramid) and combine it with periodic surprises (with the middle and top of the pyramid).
Content rarely scores by itself; you have to lead people to it. So consider from the beginning: how will you maximize the value of your content experience? How do you lead people to the story, how do you keep them in the story, how do you make sure they continue in their content journey after the visit?
03
Refine your goals and define your budget fork
Defining content experiences is an iterative exercise: you have to retrace the steps above several times and align all the elements.
As a result, you get a plan in the following form:
For a one-time campaign, draw out the content journey. Where does your target audience first interact with your content? How do you lead people on to what next step? How do you bring them to the content experience?
We want a content experience about [this topic] for [this target audience] at [this place] in the funnel and thus with this overall objective] with the top layer in the experience being [information (or emotion or interaction] in a content journey in which the visitor sequentially goes through these steps: [fill in].
We want to achieve [these qualitative and quantitative goals at this time] and propose a budget range ex VAT between [x and y] euros, all costs included. The experience will result in the visitor remembering [this feeling: xxx; this information: xxx; this interaction: xxx].
Full briefing by us to the agency can be given on [date], launch of the experience we foresee on [date]. On client side, we have one central contact person for this project with significant decision mandate.
Which budget fork?
The investment required in dynamic content experiences is similar to that in video. To keep your budget under control, pay attention to the following things:
Make clear strategic choices at the outset. Without clear strategic focus, it is impossible to excel creatively. Involve your own stakeholders sufficiently for this as well: faulty group dynamics on the customer side sometimes result in suboptimal choices. To satisfy everyone, the group wants a little of this and a little of that, a little white and a little black, which ultimately results in nothing but gray.
Show willingness to set aside your own brief if the agency comes up with a compelling alternative that achieves the same goal. Be sure to get your own stakeholders behind the alternative in essence. In any case, encourage the agency to offer its own opinion on your brief.
Limit the number of media to be integrated into the experience. Do you have to have both motion design and video and 3D? Each additional medium creates an additional creation process with its own specialists. Often it is better to integrate less media and use the chosen media with more refinement.
Ask the agency to live up to the agreed terms of engagement and, as a client, commit yourself to doing so. Agile work assumes that all team members together are available at specific times. If this pre-agreed planning cannot be maintained, you will quickly face considerable delays and extra costs.
Okay, ready for your quote request!
Ask the agency to provide you with a proposal based on your briefing that convinces you of:
The creativity and innovative strength of the firm, as evidenced by references and any ideas and proposals
The credibility of the terms of engagement proposed by the agency, regarding steps, schedule, team structure, collaborative structure.
Agency transparency in pricing arrangements
