Improving Your Content Design Strategy using UX Ideas

Content design strategies are usually, though not always, based around enabling websites to convert visitors into customers. There are a million ways to develop kicking content and there’s no tried and tested formula that you can use to get yours right. However, there are some UX principles that may help when you develop your content strategy:

1. Create User Personas of Your Buyers

There’s no finer tool in a UX toolkit than the user persona when it comes to creating content. You want to look at your buyers as you work on your content and ask the questions to see if your content really lives up to their needs.

You want to examine if you’re still targeting the right buyers, the way that they like their content to be served and the lifecycle from prospect to client to be certain that you’re delivering the right content for their requirements.

2. Design for Speed

That old cliché about people spending seconds as to whether to stay on your site or go elsewhere is sadly a cliché because it’s true. You want to use the content and the space that content fits in – to catch and hold someone’s attention.

Write great headlines (and sub-headings) to give people a strong indication of what’s going to be useful and what’s not. Make content valuable rather than marketing junk too – people want real information, not your “Why we are so awesome” speech. In short make content easy to access and make it valuable.

3. Cut Back on Clutter

You want your content to enable decision making. That means making certain that each piece of content:

• Answers your users’ questions about the topic – or guides them to the answers

• Leaves your user happy that they have the information they need and doesn’t make them need to contact customer care or a competitor to get what they do need

• Has a clear reason for being. Ask the question; “What’s the point of this content?” and then “Does it achieve that objective?”

Make sure that the language you use keeps things simple and clear for your users. Don’t overwhelm people with big words and fancy technical terms. Nice clean pieces of content are much more valuable than those that need to be read 2 or 3 times to be properly understood.

4. Examine Your Sales Funnel

One of the easiest ways to improve the content on your site is to plug in Google Analytics and see when people are leaving in your sales cycle. Then it’s time to carry out a little user research and find out why they’re leaving. Where’s the information gap? Did the content fail to create trust and a sense of security? Are your bringing something up too late in the process (hiding delivery fees is a great way to watch people walk away from your sales funnel)? And so on…