With content design, you create the basis for inspiring product content and a convincing customer journey.
The availability of rich, creative content has become essential to the content marketing strategies of many brands. In the future, content marketing should be an integral part of the strategy of e-commerce companies in particular. This is because the buyers from the media production or content creation sector are usually numerous: marketing, social media, email marketing and traditional advertising are just a few. Often, the need for content marketing only becomes apparent during operational content planning. Time and budget are then often too tight for creation. As a result, design, branding and conversion suffer. Thus, opportunities are missed to create impulses in the business, to win new customers and to achieve long-term goals.
With Content Design from forbeyond, content managers can meet the requirements of your company even better and create good content more efficiently. On the one hand, Content Design is oriented towards the requirements of the target group. It is very much about visual elements and textual content. People like to talk about storytelling, which is primarily intended to inspire the user. The customer is therefore the focus. In addition, metadata and technical parameters must be taken into account when creating content. In this way, web design, user experience, various tools and, last but not least, the content marketers, who are responsible for the activities at Google for better ranking, also benefit.
Conception of content design and later media production, content creation, are based on our content maturity model.
Initial content is already created during product development or is provided by the supplier. As a rule, this is material and master data that is required to make the product digitally available. Systems and processes in the company are enabled. Thus, production can take place or content about design and material can be transmitted to product management or sourcing. The information is hardly suitable for marketing and is not part of a content marketing strategy.
The first building block of content relevant to content marketing is essential content. It is created with a focus on the product. The product is presented with a rather neutral visual design, added values are highlighted and described in such detail and close to reality that the customer can make a safe purchase decision. Here, the company has to balance between conversion optimization and avoidance of returns. Initial content can be used for a wide range of target groups.
With creative content, the product is staged in a context. This can be a target group or buyer persona, but it can also be concrete use cases or creative stagings for content marketing. Video and visually sophisticated images for social media play a larger role. The need often arises in marketing. Content creation faces different challenges than initial content.
Social media, but also reviews and 2nd-hand platforms such as e-Bay live from the fact that users create the necessary content themselves. However, retailers, marketplaces, test reports, editorial departments, etc. also constantly create content, the quality and context of which is sometimes not oriented to the target group, the design or the strategy of the company. This digital content should also ideally be used for the company's own content marketing.
Content marketing helps to inspire your target group. Content design creates a reliable basis for this.
As a rule, purchasing decisions are no longer made on the basis of a simple impulse. Along the customer journey, buyers receive several impulses via a wide variety of touchpoints such as online stores, online marketing, TV, video, or social media. Content design bundles the most diverse requirements, transfers them into processes, and thus supports the content marketing strategy.
The requirements of target groups, customer segments or personas for the presentation of products sometimes differ greatly. The different requirements can be mapped in text and image concepts. With the customer content clusters, we structure the most diverse sources and simplify the content creation processes. At the same time, we ensure that the content is available for specific target groups.
During the conception phase, the required images, texts, videos, etc. are defined and visually represented in content guidelines at category level. On this basis, coordination can take place with the teams for marketing, brand, social media channels and others in the company. The final version is then also used for briefing suppliers and specialist departments. The guidelines are developed step by step and adapted as required.
Content creation is often still based on traditional advertising media such as high-circulation flyers and catalogs. Even if their relevance continues to decline in favor of digital advertising and web stores, the implementation of the digital strategy in media production is still pending. With content design from forbeyond, you also transform media production in your company. The evaluation of content automation is also part of the conceptual service.
Originally, forbeyond focused on product information management. In the meantime, we offer significantly more services that also establish a connection to content marketing. With Product Experience Management, Content Design and Classification Design, we now work with our customers to develop the right strategy for holistic content marketing and efficient content creation.
Content design is a very relevant building block in this context. In order to cover this segment even better, we have strengthened our team with specialists who were responsible for large parts of content creation at Zalando and Otto, for example. With our model of customer content clusters, we match the requirements of target groups, personas, style groups and products in a uniform logic. On this basis, individualized content can be created and distributed to the touchpoints via a PIM system.
Retailers, manufacturers and organizations from a wide range of industries already rely on our support for their content marketing strategy. We look forward to hearing from you!