Podcast: The Content Journey and an Interview with Agility

Scroll down for a full video of our conversation.​

The Journey Builds Engagement

There are many pros to the creation of a content journey versus what could best be described as fishing with content. You want to lead customers along a path that inherently qualifies them so, in a way, as fish they end up in a barrel as far as your sales team is concerned. Without a journey, you’re more so dropping 10 different pieces of content into a lake, one hardly connected to the other and the bites are more happenstance and of far less value.

The reason journeys work is because, at the heart of it, content marketing satisfies the information-hungry society we have become, being far more research-based in our purchasing decisions. The concept of a journey also allows brands to use different content mediums because each is going to impact consumers differently. It can be as simple as understanding the various ways people best absorb information, it’s not all from reading, some internalize information better from listening or seeing something visually impactful.

It also gives brands different ways to represent themselves especially when it comes to the first stage of the journey when the tone is set. If your brand tone is loud and you want to grab consumer's attention, start with a sponsored video on social. Tease an article coming soon and then pack the educational information in there. Or, if you want to gain traction through third-party thought leadership, start with sponsored content. The most important thing is to remember a content journey allows you to fine-tune the best content cocktail that will appeal to your audience, engage them initially and then more deeply as they advance with each step.

When we were chatting with Jon, he shared his thoughts around where you really should put your focus when developing your journey: “The most important to me is the very beginning content. It sets the tone for how you're going to communicate, it starts to show whether you're bringing value, it shows your brand approach, whether it's aggressive, whether it's subtle and if you lose your customers or anyone in that buying journey early on, you can never get them back.”

Later, he let us in on where some teams miss the mark. “I think, whether it's a component or just the overall idea of how you make a journey successful, you have to spend more time in optimization. I actually think creating it should be a shorter amount of time, get it out quick, get it going, start collecting data and if you have AI you can start absorbing things as well and then spend way more time in optimizing."

The Interplay of Data and Technology

The content journey can also hold a significant amount of treasure for the brand by way of consumer data, as Jon mentions: “The longer they're within the journey, the more data you can collect, the more A/B testing and different things that you can do and you can hone and adjust your conversion rates and things like that.”

For this reason, it’s crucial when you’re laying out the wireframe of your content journey, for each step you should determine the content topic, the content type, the devices you imagine it will mostly be consumed on and the specific KPI that will show you’re reaching your goals within that stage of the journey.

As for technology supporting the content journey, its role will be increasingly dynamic. It’s key for measurement but technology is also poised to gain and leverage intelligence while easing the strain on in-house content and marketing teams when the demands of the journey outweigh their abilities. Jon views technology within the content journey as “starting to affect how we deliver it and it’s starting to affect how we analyze it. So first off, our ability to track the status of the results of how people are going through our journey is tenfold what it used to be. We have these marketing automation platforms and even just the email platforms we’re using can tell you, this person took this step and then they stopped here and then they went here, and they did this, where did they come from originally? One journey works for a certain type of person and another journey works for a different type of person so technology has given us the ability on the alignment between our content and our journey and the consumer of that journey.”

When it comes to intelligence, Jon thinks "AI is becoming huge in marketing automation and even ad generation and all these marketing tools. Mainly because us as humans can only do so much processing without spending tons and tons of time and, things change so fast you have to be on top of how you need to adjust your content, how you need to adjust the journey, the different steps, more steps, fewer steps, however you need to get them through that journey and AI can adjust things on the fly. A lot of tools are starting to adjust the content on the fly dynamically and then it'll pick which route is working the best."

Ending Notes

At the end of the day, content marketing does offer brands the opportunity to achieve higher engagement and conversion but it does demand a more in-depth thought process and high-level execution to make sure there is an accurate ROI and achievement of goals. The increasing power of technology and devices will help in engagement accuracy but the devices especially will also increase complexity.

But, you can solace in the fact that the pros of technology in the content journey game far outweigh the cons, as echoed in Jon's final point. "I think one of the biggest trends is AI, and I think AI is going to be writing our content. Maybe not our copywriting and initial things but the big bulk parts of the content, it can pull that together and adjust it and even change a paragraph or a section of our content and not the whole thing so, really tailor it to that customer. Then there's this whole concept of devices and how we're interacting with people with the content, not only are the technologies emerging that are new types of ways to interact like VR and AR, all these things are changing the way we interact with our content and with the end consumer. But also, the journey across all the channels so you might be playing with something on your phone, doing some Christmas shopping and then you may go on your desktop and do something. That journey needs to be seamless and it needs to feel like you're having the same experience and it's not just the brand experience.”