You feel cheated.
You‘ve tried to create amazing content to win the content marketing game.
And yet your revenue hasn’t shot through the roof. Why?
The problem isn’t your content, it is how you’re putting it all together.
You need to put your content into a content experience framework, according to my podcast guest Randy Frisch, who is Co-Founder, CMO, and President at Uberflip, a speaker, and the author of F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue, and Relationships.
Content Experiences, Not Content Marketing
The Customer Experience Podcast is available in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher. It’s also embedded here on an episode-by-episode basis.
Hear the entire conversation with Randy right here …
Listen to “3. Why Content Experiences Beat Content Marketing w/ Randy Frisch” on Spreaker.
Why Content Marketing is a Mistake
As you might have guessed from the title of his book, Frisch doesn’t like the term “content marketing.”
“We associate content marketing as simply creating content,” says Frisch. “That’s only the first step. It would be like saying, ‘I’m going to build a fort for my kids. I’ve bought a pile of wood. Now, I’m done.’”
Instead of content marketing, Frisch has developed a content experience framework.
For Frisch, content experience is as simple as considering when your audience encounters content:
- What does that feel like for them?
- What does it look like from an environment perspective?
- How do we structure those steps that people go through?
- How do we ultimately engage them?
“Think about it in those three ways: environment, structure, engagement,” says Frisch.
“We’re so wrapped up around the idea of creating content that we don’t think about mapping that content to a buyer journey,” says Frisch. “How do we deliver experiences in the same way that brands like Spotify and Netflix have, by putting us in this immersive experience where we click from one piece to the next?”
Without this comprehensive approach to content, even blockbuster single pieces of content are isolated.
“When we look at experiences, creating one is great and it may get us a marketing award, but it’s not necessarily going to help us scale the business.”
Content Marketing vs Content Experience vs Customer Experience
In this video clip, Randy walks through content marketing versus content experience, then pulls up to connect to customer experience …
The Content Experience Framework
Frisch has designed the content experience to help businesses scale their content to deliver compelling experiences at every stage of the buyer journey.
STEP 1: CENTRALIZE YOUR CONTENT
Depending on the size of your organization you probably have content for prospects, new users, and long-standing customers in different areas. You might have one silo for sales materials, another for email series in your marketing automation program, another for blogs, another for podcasts, and another for a knowledge base.
This can be a problem, especially when you don’t own the platform, like when you have YouTube videos. On YouTube, your competitors’ videos are right next to yours.
Bottom line: You need to be able to centralize, control, and host your experiences.
STEP 2: ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT
You have to audit all of your content and start tagging it. Internal linking is a pain, but it pays huge dividends in terms of SEO and user experience.
STEP 3: PERSONALIZE YOUR CONTENT
Personalize your content experiences based on buyer persona or stage in the buyer’s journey. That content gets used in ABM, inbound, demand generation, and sales enablement. Don’t think content first, but try to execute any of those strategies without content.
STEP 4: DISTRIBUTE YOUR CONTENT
How are you going to get the content into the right hands? That’s the easy part. But before you send out a chain of seven emails for a specific persona, rethink their experience.
“How do I send you to one email where you’ll consume seven pieces at the same time,” asks Frisch. “That’s a big jump in productivity and outcome, and a better experience. That’s the experience that you and I expect on Spotify that gets us to listen to, these days, 112 artists a month versus 68 artist a month, three years ago. Spotify did that just by introducing the idea of recommendations.”
STEP 5: GENERATE RESULTS
Generating results happens all along the sales funnel as the content supports various marketing stages.
How Serving as Cofounder and COO Informs Customer Experience
As the cofounder of a fast-growing, SaaS-model company, Randy’s learned a lot of valuable, hard-won lessons over the past several years.
Enjoy his insightful take on perspective, core values, teamwork, and alignment in this video clip …
Why You Should Attend Conex in August 2019
If you want to raise your content experience game, consider attending the 4th annual Conex: The Content Experience in Toronto this August.
Marketers from digital marketing, demand generation, content marketing, and more will gather at The Royal Conservatory of Music for tactical workshops and two full days of actionable learning and conversation on how they’re creating, and owning, the content experience.
“We really made it about thought leadership and pulling together a movement of people who believe that creating content is not enough, that we have to use that content well,” says Frisch.
Get a Free Chapter of Randy Frisch’s Book
If you go to Randy Frisch’s website, you can read an excerpt from his book, F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue, and Relationships, which is available from Amazon.
What Randy’s Book Isn’t About
This post is based on an interview with Randy Frisch, who is CMO at Uberflip. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to, rate, and review The Customer Experience Podcast.
If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here:
Guests Next Up on The Customer Experience Podcast
- Marketing leaders like Joseph Jaffe, Ann Handley (Marketing Profs)
- Customer experience expert Joey Coleman (Never Lose a Customer Again)
- Branding experts like Kurt Bartolich and David Brier
- Sales leaders like Jeremy Donovan (SalesLoft) and Charles Green (Trusted Advisor)
- Customer Success professionals like Nick Hart (Outreach.io) and Rachel Ostrander (Brooks Running)
Send your guest recommendations to: Ethan at BombBomb dot com
Please Subscribe, Rate, and Review – It Matters!
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