Buyer experience drives everything, and with the proliferation of services like Netflix, Google, and Amazon setting new standards (and expectations) in personalization, B2B organizations must either keep pace or risk losing potential buyers at the gate. And how do marketers do that? With content experience, of course!

While building a modern content experience may seem like a daunting task, it really isn’t. There are tactics that can help bridge the gaps that riddle the content experience development process.

Here are some of the most common content experience pitfalls, as well as some solutions to help overcome them.

1. We don’t have enough content to support our initiatives

Too often content is thought of as white papers, guides, and other long-form or otherwise media-rich assets. But content can be anything.

Content is a blog post; it’s a video; it’s an email; it’s a display ad. Content fuels all of our marketing strategies. 

Oftentimes, content is overthought, making the idea of “good” content feel all the more out of reach for a typical marketer. But, in reality, “good” content provides value in whatever form that may be. So, don’t let a lack of assets prevent you from developing new content-rich initiatives. Be creative about your content, and use that creativity to change the way your organization thinks about content.

2. We don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to personalize our content

Content personalization doesn’t need to be a massive endeavor—a little personalization can go a long way, so long as your efforts are relevant to the reader.

Start with the basics: personalize your content around personas and buying stages, focusing on your prospects’ needs, challenges, roles, and responsibilities. Then, as your process becomes more refined, expand into other areas of personalization: company names and verticals for an account-based marketing (ABM) program; situational and behavioral intent for a 1:1 approach.

The key to effective personalization, more than anything, is relevance—make that a priority above all else.

3. We don’t know how best to organize our content library

While it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of discussing how you want your content to be organized, start by considering an organizational hierarchy.

How do you want your top-most level to be organized? Typically, content libraries are organized by format or topic first. Then, once that’s established, you can start thinking about the inner layers of the hierarchy like personas and buying stages. (And if you want to go deeper, you can even consider creating specific landing pages for specific accounts! But that’s another endeavor altogether.)

How you organize your content will depend on the experience you want your readers to have. Do you want them to know what your areas of expertise are? Then organize by topic. Do your buyers consume a variety of different types of content? Then organize by format.

The key here is to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer—how would they want to browse your content library?

4. We don’t know how to encourage content consumption

Encouraging content consumption when a prospect lands on your site is as easy as giving them options to engage with.

This could involve embedding links throughout your page text, suggesting the next piece of content they should engage with, designing specific CTA banners and sidebar images, or providing a CTA pop-up promoting a new asset or your newsletter.

Today’s buyer wants to be enabled to self-educate, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them a roadmap to success. Buyers are on a constant lookout for the next piece of content to engage with, so ensure that you’re not only capturing their attention when they land on your site, but that you’re also giving them a reason to stay.

5. We don’t know what metrics to track

We know that content plays a role in nearly every aspect of the business, and that makes tracking performance and measuring ROI that much harder. When you’re unsure of what metrics to track and how those metrics impact your pipeline, it puts your ability to do more in jeopardy.

To make it easier, align your content performance metrics to the different stages of the sales process: attract, convert, and close. This way, you can better identify how and where your content is impacting the sales funnel with a clearer understanding of where you can improve.

Consider these content performance metrics as they’re mapped to the different sales stages:

There you have it. Building a modern content experience isn’t so difficult. All you need is content and a desire to create consumption paths and see results to make significant improvements to your content experience. And if you’re curious about where you stack up, get in touch with us for a free content experience audit. But for now, go forth and create great experiences!