Why Great Customer Experience Is Rooted in Strong Content Architecture

Positive customer experience (CX) is inextricably linked with content strategy, as content is how people first encounter your brand. They learn about your business through customer-facing content like social media long before they speak directly with a representative. Content also forms the foundation of their ongoing experience throughout the customer journey. Your blog posts, product or service pages, and knowledge base create the self-led journey that modern B2B buyers demand.

Content architecture is how you design an outstanding customer experience. It is the scaffolding connecting strategy to execution, so you can utilise content effectively across your enterprise. It solves how best to manage and distribute content to create experiences that satisfy the needs of your target audiences.

If you are new to content architecture, we suggest reading the first part of this series.

Why Should You Focus on Content Experience?

Experience is critical in an age when how you deliver content is just as important as what you deliver. 

Which of the following experiences do you think will encourage brand loyalty? An app interface where users have to wade through a half dozen sub-menus to learn how the product works. Or an interface that includes a personalised discoverability feature to help users learn about features or functions. They each provide the same information but vastly different experiences.

Companies can’t just think about their experience in the context of the buyer's journey, either. 

It is just as important to consider their employee experience, for example. Professionals enjoy amazing, tailored content experiences in their personal lives. Why should they have to leave that expectation at the door when they come to work? 

The better their content experience at work, the more they will engage with the company. They will have the information they need to complete tasks effectively, expand their skill sets, and collaborate with other teams.

How Strong Content Architecture Supports CX Strategy

Organisations produce content and experience throughout the business. Your architecture facilitates cross-functional collaboration by providing a shared understanding of how you structure, distribute, and experience content. This ensures a streamlined process for content creation, approval, and publication, aligning output with CX strategy. 

Once in place, content architecture acts on several layers to ensure you deliver a consistent and high-quality customer experience.

Scope

Thinking about your content from this perspective allows you to examine if your content strategy covers everything you need it to.

Content architecture establishes the breadth and depth of your content experience. Using data-based methods, such as keyword research and search intent, you determine the interests and needs of the intended audience. By analysing tracking data, you understand how users interact with your content ecosystem throughout their journey. 

You also learn what you don’t need. The topics, content types, channels, and audiences that don't contribute meaningfully to your experience. You can easily compare your content offerings to your customer journey to identify and remedy gaps in your experience. To ensure that you cover every take and give people the confidence, either to become a customer or beyond. 

Architectural thinking helps you develop effective content models to go in depth and address every need state. It ensures that you have relevant, timely content campaigns to answer the questions people have, their anxieties, and the jobs they need to do. 

For example, when comparing your content model to your lead pipeline, you might notice that you have plenty of marketing and sales content. However, your post-purchase experience lacks customer success content to encourage ongoing engagement. Or you might audit your recruitment strategy and notice that you need more content speaking to the needs of Gen Z professionals. 

Content architecture also plays a pivotal role in establishing standards and best practice for creating accessible content. It facilitates the use of diverse content formats by systematising the effective management of various formats. It includes processes for incorporating accessibility features (e.g. alternative text and transcripts), that make your content more inclusive and user-friendly for all audiences. 

Doing so ensures that your content strategy is flexible and adaptable. You can juggle a mix of formats to cater to different audience needs and preferences without compromising on quality or overwhelming the content team.

Organisation and Structure

How you organise content has a dramatic impact on how your content experience works (or doesn't work) for users. Ultimately, content exists to answer questions. The way you group content plays a vital role in providing those answers.

There are different frameworks you can use to organise how your content works to answer the questions of your audience(s). They define how different content assets relate to one another, and inform your SEO, UX, and inbound marketing strategies. An experience or journey framework might suit some content better, while other assets require a topic-based approach.

You also need to bear user preference in mind when designing your approach. What works for one audience or person might not work for another. Using the same content, you might need to build different ways of understanding and navigating to provide answers to users’ questions. 

Say you’re a specialist medical practice focusing on three distinct treatment areas. Here, you could use a flat structure to organise your site. The main menu could display each treatment category directly. This approach makes it easy for people to find what they’re looking for without clicking through multiple levels. 

However, this wouldn't work well for a large hospital. There are simply too many individual treatment categories and you risk overwhelming users with too many choices at once. 

Instead, you might use a hierarchal structure with intermediate navigation to establish context and help users better understand departments. For instance, a drop-down service menu might list broad treatment areas such as ‘Dentistry’, ‘Cardiology’, and ‘Paediatrics’.

Caution is required. If a hierarchical structure is too complex, you can confuse users. If they decide your site takes too much work to understand, they will go elsewhere. Use analytics and usability testing critical to identify when and where to employ different frameworks to enhance user experience.

Contextual navigation (i.e. internal links) can also help people to connect ideas and themes within separate pieces of content organically. Doing so not only enhances CX; it improves SEO as search engines can index your site more easily.

A clear content framework doesn’t just help with discoverability. It supports personalised experiences by organising and categorising content based on user preferences, interests, and behaviours.

Doing so allows you to tailor and target content to specific audience segments. This is crucial for automated campaigns. Without labeling systems that establish relationships between content, automation platforms wouldn’t know which asset to send next in a dynamic sequence.

Navigation, Framing, and Sense-Making

Framing creates the context to help people make sense of and understand the value of your organisation, brand, products, and services. When you frame a piece of content with skill, you can open people up to alternative possibilities and inspire a ‘eureka’ moment.

Content architecture helps to ensure consistency of experience. When well-designed, it enforces harmony across all content assets and platforms by establishing guidelines for voice, tone, and messaging.

Using tools like content models and templates, you establish the relationship between content types, devices, users, and publishing platforms. By defining the environments your content operates in, you ensure the quality and consistency of content assets. And through attention to microcopy, typography, colour, and imagery, you help users navigate your experience across multiple channels and platforms. 

All of this makes it easier for customers to recognise and connect with your brand across different touchpoints. People can recognise your content regardless of where they encounter it, which is critical when communicating in today’s omnichannel world.

Another tool you can use is modular content. Each ‘module’ is a self-contained block of pre-approved content—copy, images, graphics, video files, etc. Like a digital version of Lego bricks, these modules are easy to stack together in different configurations. 

You can quickly reuse assets to create more comprehensive, innovative, and satisfying content experiences across multiple channels. The same module can appear in email marketing, social media, sales materials, digital advertising, eDetailing, webinars, and self-service options. 

This modular approach towards content creation helps with framing because you can easily edit for context. It provides flexible scaffolding to support an agile content marketing strategy that can adapt to changing technology and market conditions. 

Content architecture also supports the integration of content with customer support systems to provide efficient on-demand customer assistance. It organises and structures content in a way that allows for seamless access and delivery of content, whether through chatbots, help centre support staff, sales reps, or other channels. By creating reliable, satisfying content experiences, you gain trust, build better relationships, and increase brand authority. By demonstrating your investment in meeting their needs, you win loyal customers and drive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Investment

Excellent customer experiences depend on identifying and investing in the moments that matter.

Like any other design activity, doing so requires making trade-offs. You must understand your users: who they are, the questions they’re asking, their emotional needs, etc. You also need to understand how their needs intersect with your business needs.

This allows you to identify the decisive moments in your relationship. And the most impactful conversion points you need to invest in.

You don’t necessarily need a ton of high-volume, high-quality content for every type of user or brand interaction. Instead, start with your users and work backwards to identify the most critical interactions they have with your brand. These are the milestones where you should invest in creating high-impact formats. This is where you should use video or animation, and original research or gated, in-depth white papers.

Real-time reporting is another element to weave into the very structure of your content experience. You want the ability to measure performance on every level—from individual content modules to your entire strategy.

Keep in mind, your focus isn’t on determining the quality of a particular asset. That is done at a content management level. Instead, you are examining how well the different structures and relationships that make up your content experience are functioning.

Clearly defined performance parameters and robust reporting mechanisms enable you to measure customer experience and maximise the ROI of your content investment. You have the measurement processes and systems in place for regular content review, updates, and maintenance. You can look for ways to improve your experience and ensure it is relevant, accurate, up-to-date, and aligning with industry standards, best practices, and customer expectations. This comprehensive view of content/customer interactions allows you to prioritise resources and ensure an optimal experience for users. 

Build Great B2B Experiences with 1827 Marketing

When building out your content architecture, it is helpful to think through experience as a separate element. Doing so ensures you have the content systems and processes in place to support your customer experience and customer service strategies.

However, your architecture will also be influenced by other areas—topic, organisation, and your overall brand ecosystem. Your job as a content strategist is to blend these different perspectives to create a coherent structure.

We hope you’ll join us as we continue to explore the world of content architecture. This is the third of a five-part series. If you haven’t already done so, we highly suggest reading the previous article exploring how content architecture shapes effective content pillars. Next, we’ll look at how content architecture touches every aspect of your organisation.

Get in touch if you would like to learn more about how we can help with your B2B content marketing needs.