Start with business needs

Marketing teams today need to stay competitive by creating content that engages current customers and attracts new audiences. Their content has to stand out, reach the right people, and appear at the right time to guide customers through their journey.

Marketers must also stay flexible, constantly adapting to new trends and shifting audience preferences. They need to make their content easy to find while managing budgets more effectively.

Kentico Customer Success team has talked to many clients who, when they first heard about content modeling, wondered whether the time spent on content modeling sessions would pay off. During consulting sessions, we helped them understand that they should not consider the impact of building a good content model only from the perspective of what if you get your content model done wrong. It is essential to consider the possibilities that open for your team when you get the content model done right:

• Your marketers can focus on crafting engaging and relevant content rather than worrying about technical aspects or keeping the format of their content consistent.
• Your businesses will maintain consistent branding, messaging, and information architecture throughout their digital presence.
• Your marketers can connect related pieces of content, create personalized experiences, and enable effective content discovery for your business’s target audience.

The content model is one of the most crucial building blocks that help companies realize their content strategy. A well-defined content model supports marketing teams across the whole content life cycle process – from content ideation to creation and approvals to content curation and reviewing or archiving outdated content. That’s why content modeling sessions need to include stakeholders from the marketing teams in the organization. They will be working with the model and need to see (and influence) what the actual flow of content creation looks like.

Consider your content from the business perspective

Before we discuss details about storing and designing data in Xperience, let’s start with thinking about the content and its role in your business and in shaping up your customers’ experience.

How your team stores and uses content must be tied to your business outcomes. By actively participating in content modeling, your team members describe, define, and distill the flow of content creation, and they can shape how they’ll build their content. Combining marketing expertise and experience during the content modeling process ensures that the model resonates with your marketing strategies.

Looking at how your customers will consume different types of content, makes you consider where to display this content on the website. It forces you to define the journey a customer will take from the first interaction with your business through the series of touch points in different channels or marketing materials up to final conversion, be it a purchase, signing up to receive a regular newsletter, or booking a meeting with your representative.

Your content model needs to create the foundation to support marketing strategies and yet be flexible enough to adapt to changing requirements and marketing tactics, introduce a new marketing channel, or provide guidance and help when the content editor team changes.

Look at your customer journeys

Any content modeling project needs to start with analyzing business requirements. Optimally, you’re running content modeling sessions as a part of a larger initiative, which consisted also of running a full-fledged content audit. During the audit, you have likely defined your company’s content hierarchy and understand the different content types and roles your content plays in your marketing strategies.

Apart from running the content audit, it helps to consider (and define) what specific marketing tactics your marketing teams employ and what role your digital content in Xperience will play in your overall marketing efforts.

Think of different tactics and scenarios that you’d want to implement, including publishing company updates, thought-leadership content, re-sharing customer reviews from your industry portals, promoting your content on social media platforms, or displaying posts from different social media platforms in your digital marketing channels. Among others, answer questions such as:

• Do you plan to publish the content stored in Xperience via different channels?
• Will you use the same content in emails? Or does your team want to create channel-specific content variants?
• What content do you want to personalize or adjust based on specific conditions? For which types of your audience?
• What content needs to support different presentations requiring changes in page designs or layouts?
• What types of campaigns do you plan to run? Which content will support your digital campaigns?
• What is your typical (or expected) customer conversion journey across the channels that you are targeting?
• What are the typical customer journeys on your website channels?

During the analysis, teams usually identify their content’s core pieces. Think of core content not just in terms of specific information, such as contact information, product specifications, event pages, or a home page. Instead, focus on the content you use (or plan to use) to create customer conversion journeys.

• Which touch-points on your customer journey lead to the quickest (or most earning) conversions?
• What content drives engagement on your website?
• What content best resonates within your mobile app?
• What content brings the best click-through rate in email?
• Is it the same content copy-pasted from one channel to another?
• What core categories (and taxonomies) does your content fall into?
• What are the core audiences for which you can create personalized content?
• How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your digital campaigns? Which data do you collect?
• What tools do you use to track the performance? Do you need to enable any special provisions to use them for tracking your content performance?
• What data about your content do you currently miss?

Document your discoveries and make sure to build your versatile model around them. For example, your team should be able to dynamically swap core content pieces across different channels depending on who’s consuming them. At the same time, respect your team’s needs and don’t overdo the complexity. Remember, you can start small and then iterate over your model to ensure your marketing and editor teams have what they need.

In the last part of the content modeling process, you’ll define content types your team will use to build content experience across channels your business uses. We will discuss how to use content types to structure your content model to help your customers and marketing teams in Xperience projects later in the guide.

Every content model is unique

Building a content model is not a universal, one-for-all exercise

Xperience is a digital experience platform which makes it a highly versatile tool that serves different markets and verticals. Every customer project is unique.

Though every marketing team’s activities aim to achieve similar goals using similar tactics, each team’s situation differs. Teams that use Xperience have different sizes; they consist of marketers with various experience running their campaigns under more or less different conditions. Their projects have different business requirements, and that’s why it’s possible to introduce one step-by-step guide to the content modeling process that will fit all. Defining what the implementation should look like is a critical piece that makes your project succeed.

In the following part, we’ll highlight some moments from the content modeling process that our customers often need to remember.

Think beyond the basics

When you define a content model, it’s important to define the content types in a way that supports marketing plans and fits the team’s needs.

During the content modeling sessions, you need to go beyond “We need to show this info on a Product page.” Usually, product pages display product data and information about related products or complementary services. We recommend thinking beyond the typical product page and considering how the product information differs for different customers and where this information appears on their buyer’s journey. You may realize you need a way to alter some of the data depending on who’s consuming it.

When you consider your content from the perspective of the See-Think-Do-Care framework, you will show different product images to different audiences and provide different information for customers in the See phase, and different information in the Care phase. Defining different properties on a content type or introducing a content type will allow you to tailor data in the default semantic content type to specific situations and help your team win.

See any of the “Product” content types on the Kbank demo site and how editors can override the root data values with data tailored to display channels or other situations.

As a result, you might end up with several semantically defined content types with content types that will hold content fragments for content-tailoring opportunities. You can see several of the following examples in Kbank demo site.

• Core content: The foundational pieces of content that will always be needed (e.g., articles, financial product, places, blog posts, events, or videos).
  • Content tailoring opportunities - Banner content type that allows to personalize product image, subtitle and title.
• Pillar content: Major content pieces that support your marketing objectives (e.g., long-form guides or case studies).
  • Content-tailoring opportunities - Featured content content type to “showcase” content across different channels.
• Supporting content: Content that enhances or drives traffic to pillar content (e.g., social media posts or infographics).
  • Content-tailoring opportunities - Reference content type to store customer testimonials (See the Dancing Goat sample project for an example).

To find out more about different types of content (or to help unify your internal vocabulary), see how to define 11 levels of content.

Your content model will evolve with experience

Your content model will grow similarly. Consider your first content model as a hypothesis, build prototypes, validate with stakeholders, implement improvements based on what you learned, and iterate. We’ll overview the content modeling process in a dedicated guide. Just keep momentum and avoid spending weeks perfecting your questions to find seemingly important, often unnecessary answers.

Involve technical users in content modeling sessions

Technical-minded users, especially, might feel this content modeling phase is a waste of time. However, considering the role of content in the company’s digital marketing strategy, recognizing the needs of the marketing team and verbalizing how customers will consume the digital content is a vital part of defining any well-shaped content model. Kentico Customer success team met with many customers who “just wanted a website” and who sadly later realized their content model didn’t support applying effective digital marketing tactics, such as content personalization.

What’s next?

You’ve learned that it is important to specify content requirements based on your project needs. The next page will explain the basics of content modeling process.