Everything You Need To Know About Content Experience Platforms

Imagine that the fictional sister of Sherlock Holmes, Enola Holmes, is back. Now that we are on a hypothetical ride, let's imagine she just got assigned a new case; a beauty brand that wants to find the best way to attract the target audience. This brand wants to find out the secret to successful marketing strategies. In fact, in the past, this brand has hired the best marketing agency for this task but still, no progress was seen. So now the CEO thought, who better than Enola Holmes to solve the mystery of successful marketing? Since Enola is part of this digital world, she uses search engines, websites and e-magazines for her research. After some time, she figured out that there's (literally!) one king that's ruling online spaces right now - content.

She realizes that experiences driven by content on most successful sites are not just about a combination of visual design and user-centred thinking but also about the user seeing the right digital content on the right channel at the right time. It goes beyond the four walls of impressing the customer and creates an emotional connection with the users. Now, she's curious to discover how brands make such a fantastic experience through content. After some more research and she finds herself scrolling through techdogs.com. (We said this was a hypothetical scenario!). On our site, she discovers that Content Experience Platforms are helping businesses develop a flawless impression on customers. Not just that but these platforms are also allowing businesses to create and manage interactive experiences across multiple platforms and channels.

Enola is a bit confused about where to begin learning about this tool. So, she begins by understanding these platforms in detail.

 

What Are Content Experience Platforms?

We want to make one thing clear to Enola (and you!), in today's digital world customers expect to be able to interact with brands whenever and wherever they want. It’s not enough just to have content on your site; it needs to be organized and accessible in a way that makes sense to your visitors. For example, a well-written article, a funny blog post or an intriguing video are great ways to engage your audience and increase brand awareness across all touchpoints.

Content Experience Platforms take things one step further by integrating and sharing the content across your social media networks. This makes it easier for users to find the content they're looking for, wherever they may access your brand. These platforms bring together the different elements of your content marketing strategy to create content that is useful, shareable and effective. Content Experience Platforms put your customers at the center of your content marketing strategy by making it easier for you to create experiences that are useful, engaging and memorable across every customer touchpoint – from website to mobile app to email communications to social media. Isn’t that super supportive of CXPs?

Now Enola is curious to find out more about these platforms, so she scrolls through a bit and starts browsing the history of Customer Experience Platforms.
 

History Of Content Experience Platforms

Are you too excited to know the history of these platforms? Well, the history of content marketing is quite soap rising as it all started in 1933 with soap advertisements, aka soap operas on the radio by Procter & Gamble (P&G). It was the first ever non-print content marketing, which helped P&G grab a lot of attention from its female listeners. Slowly, other content marketing took inspiration and developed sophisticated forms such as storytelling, more ingenious distribution techniques and so on.

Fast forward to 1993, when O'Reilly Media launched the world's first company website. This era marked the emergence of digital content creation and introduced blogs, websites and email marketing. By the 2000s, social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube took the world by storm and there was a demand for more informative and engaging content.

With the arrival of 2010, content marketing became commonplace for brands and organizations. With more and more brands learning the value of sharing content online, the digital world started to change. With that, there was the need for a comprehensive platform to develop, organize and share engaging content. Content Experience Platforms emerged as a ray of hope for organizations and to date, these platforms are playing a crucial role in streamlining the process of creating and distributing content.

The mention of process reminds us that the next section details all about the process of Content Experience Platforms.
 

What Is The Process Followed By Content Experience Platforms?

 

As Sherlock Holmes puts it, look for what's there, not what you want. Let's look at the working process of Content Experience Platforms. 

 

• Content Audit

  A content audit is one of the most critical steps of site optimization; without it, you won't know what content you have, whether it's relevant to your users or even grammatically correct. A content inventory also helps in finding duplicate content and locating broken links. Content Experience Platforms perform a thorough content audit and also keep a check on your content inventory.

• User Testing

  Content Experience Platforms are tools that help in user testing by creating interactive prototypes and testing them with real users. These platforms manage a centralized repository for all content accessible across all digital channels, helping you test the interactions across touchpoints to ensure a top-notch user experience.

• Audience Segmentation

  Content Experience Platforms use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to create dynamic content experiences for customers. These platforms identify user segments based on the user's interests, intent, behavior, demographics, or other identifying factors. Each segment of users receives customized content in all stages of the customer journey – from social media messages to emails or to recommendations for videos to watch.

Lovely, right? Well, that's not all; the coolest part (at least for us) are the benefits of these tools!
 

What Are The Benefits Of Content Experience Platforms?

Enola's mother had a piece of valuable advice for her, "There are two paths you can take, Enola: Yours or the path others choose for you." By the way, #TechDogsTribe chose the best path for Enola, i.e., to lead her toward the benefits of these platforms.
 

• Content Experience Platforms help companies create and organize content to personalize the user experience. They manage a brand’s content—copy, images, videos, blog posts, etc.—and use algorithms to determine which content will be most relevant to each visitor.

• AI is changing content experiences, making it easier for users to find what they need. Content Experience Platforms store a variety of content (such as videos, images, podcasts and articles) that are organized in a way that makes them easy to discover. With the help of AI, these platforms can improve user experience by better personalization of recommendations and giving users what they want.

• Content experiences involve integrating content from various sources into a single experience. This helps create an experience that is more than just a static webpage that users can only read. Content Experience Platforms allow you to integrate your content more efficiently to focus on building great experiences instead of worrying about technical integrations.

The future is up to us!

Yeah, that's a quote by Enola Holmes which describes the importance of self-worth and prompts us to the next section – the future of CXPs.
 

What Is In The Future Of Content Experience Platforms?

 
We welcome you to the future of Content Experience Platforms, Enola!

Content personalization is the main trend in the area of content experiences. CXPs will soon help unify content and allow you to distribute it wherever you choose. Besides, it will take content optimization of the customer journey to another level and make it far more manageable across all the touchpoints. The merger of content personalization strategies with Content Experience Platforms will help your customers receive product recommendations, ads, etc. that are much more suited to their preferences including tonality and language. #BetterPersonalization

The combination of analytics across mobile, email, social media, etc. will reshape the concept of content collaboration. Apart from that, headless content management systems will be crucial for the customization of content, robust security and overall better performance when deploying content to end users who use diverse channels and devices. In association with Content Experience Platforms, headless content management systems will help you focus on structured content and distribute your content from between sources and channels easily. In short, designing excellent content experiences will get easier, quicker and so much better, Enola!
 

Let's Call It A Wrap!

Content is the core of the digital universe and content experience is one of the most effective ways to impress your target audiences today. The present and future of content experience require creating interactive, engaging and fun content that’s tailored to segmented audiences. This type of content strategy makes flawless interactions and creates a bond with your target audience, just like the bond between you and #TechDogsTribe

We mean, the magic of interactive content made you stick to this article till the end, right? Apart from interactive content, the Content Experience Platform helps brands create, manage and measure their content experiences more effectively. With that, it's time to call it a wrap!