More marketers know about marketing tactics like content marketing and content moderation than they have ever done before.

In 2012, marketing had become synonymous with social media – a perfect platform for engaging with a customer, selling a product, and measuring how well you market your product. But with social media comes associated risks, like the sharing of defamatory material and offensive content. With more campaigns competing for attention across all platforms, how do you ensure that your content marketing message is being seen and shared?

The rise of customer experience mapping

The proliferation of marketing communication at a high volume has shifted into the importance of customer experience. Content marketing has actually evolved into more of a customer experience journey as opposed to a content campaign. Marketing companies are trying to prove to customers that they are good. By knowing what are some of the things their customers should expect from the customer experience, marketers will be in a better position to gauge their goals and performance.

A customer experience map helps you show the top five drivers of customer experience in real-time. By collecting the necessary data, you can then use the data you have gathered to develop marketing strategies that contribute to the development of the perfect experience for your customers.

As you can see in the image below, trying to get to know your customers and personalizing your communications are just a few of the things that will be worth looking into when developing a customer experience mapping.

Exposure or Exit strategies

The same data that provides insight into your customers will also help you identify the right exposure strategies for your content marketing campaigns. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 10 percent of marketers use exposure strategies. Exposure strategies will involve putting your content out to the public at large and still maintaining control over it. Exposure strategies will also allow you to ensure that the copy you put out does not contain any defamatory content. With exposure strategies, your content will have a high chance of not being read by your target audience and of lower conversion rates.

What does this mean for your content marketing strategy?

You should design your content marketing strategies around an exposure strategy, and then develop the content that will be written around the strategy. A marketer should optimize their strategy around available exposure strategies. This way, you get a marketing strategy with low exposure and high retention rates.

What about readership or engagement?

The next element is engagement. Your journey with your audience must be built around engagement. Engagement starts with a good user experience. A good user experience is all about the customer experience, right? So how do you find out what it is that your customers would be interested in? By collecting data from them, you will know what is their preferred consumption method, like a website or mobile app.

The need for engagement starts with creating high quality content that has engaging content for your target audience. Content marketing is all about creating content with eye-catching images, memorable headlines, and writing that is memorable and entertaining. If the content that you make isn’t engaging, the audience won’t end up reading it.

The audience may love a piece of content in the beginning, but if it’s not something that a social media reader would be able to relate to, then it’s just going to end up becoming quickly outdated. Content marketing means creating content that people will remember, which requires quality content.

For companies and individuals that want to get to know their audience, start with understanding what they like and don’t like, how they move through various content types, what content they like to read versus how they consume their content, and what it is about the content that they do choose to consume. Once you have done all of this, then you can start engaging with your target audience and watching what they do when they interact with your content.