Moving from Content Creation to Content Experience

Content. Content. Content.

Content is king. Content is everything. Content is what matters. Right?

Today’s companies are hyper focused on content. Content creation. Content production. Content marketing. But what if that focus was misplaced? What if most, not all, but most companies are going about it the wrong way?

Once upon a time, content marketing was very much defined as simply, “Let’s go create content!”

The problem with that approach is that once you have all of the content, you’re left with a very real problem. What do you do with it all? You’ve got piles and piles of content, and no idea how to get it in front of the people that YOU need to see it.

How do you justify all the money you spent on making that content? In order to get an ROI, you’ve got to actually USE the content you produce.

On a recent episode of the B2B Revenue Executive Experience podcast, we sat down with Randy Frisch, CMO at Uberflip, and author of the book F#ck Content Marketing for a discussion on what content marketing is, what it isn’t, and where you start if you’re looking to get a handle on things.

Here’s what we learned.

What Is Content Marketing NOT?

First of all, let’s clear one thing up.

Content marketing is NOT content creation. So many companies today are hiring people with titles like “content marketing manager” or “content creation specialist” and expecting them all to do the same thing.

Create content.

But most of all, or at least a lot of these folks are coming from the media world. Their day in and day out roles were creating content and getting it to a team that would be in charge of getting the content where it needed to go.

They wrote the articles of the newspapers, but they had nothing to do with getting the newspapers on the front porch, or into the inbox of subscribers.

All of a sudden, we’re asking folks with little to no experience actually marketing the content to be proactive in trying to get the content where it needs to go. And we wonder why we’re failing so miserably.

What Content Marketing IS

At its core, it’s very simple.

“If you created content then you have a content experience. Because content experience is simply what it’s like when someone encounters your content. The real question is, is it helping your business or hurting it?”

RANDY FRISCH, CMO at Uberflip

Imagine walking into a Target, or a Gap. What does it look like? How is the store laid out? How are the aisles organized? Does the flow of the store make sense? Are thing where you naturally expect them to be?

That’s what content marketing is. It’s simply HOW people encounter your content. The feeling they have. The reaction they get.

Now take that same metric you used for Target and apply it to your site. What does it look like? How it laid out? Do you have to do 3 proverbial laps around the store before you can find what it is that you’re looking for?

Look at Spotify or Netflix.

“Nobody complains about the fact that Netflix or Spotify personalize those recommendations for them. We want those same experiences when we go to people’s websites.”

RANDY FRISCH, CMO at Uberflip

Where Do You Start?

Again, if you create content, you’ve already got a content experience. But in order to map and create this journey for organization, you need more individuals to take a focus on content EXPERIENCE, not merely content CREATION.

Think about it in terms of the ENVIRONMENT, the STRUCTURE, and the ENGAGEMENT. None of those things has much if anything to do with content creation. They’re all about the experience.

Content is great. But the problem comes when all the focus is placed on content creation, and no attention is paid the actual content experience. Nail the experience and watch your customers come rolling in.

This post is based on a podcast interview with Randy Frisch from Uberflip. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to the B2B Revenue Executive Experience.

If you don’t use iTunes, you can listen to every episode here.