Blogger: Katarina Dos Santos, Orlando Area Chapter
AT&T’s digital content aims to provide customers with effortless task completion on their site, combined with improved customer satisfaction and reduced call center volume. They use a traditional content creation model where information architects create wireframes of their webpages based on business goals. This helps conceptualize that needs and goals in the webpage. These wireframes are then handed off to writers to populate the content and final copy based on what makes sense to the audience.
Downsides include:
- Content created in piecemeal fashion – not holistic
- Content may not fit into the design
Content audits of your webpages provide easy opportunities to define redundancies, and the goals and opportunities in existing content. It’s a tedious process but it wields a great amount of power.
Pro Tip: Create a spreadsheet that outlines CTA’s, links to other pages, headlines, etc.
At AT&T they use tree studies (a tool to test consumer decision making) to test taxonomies and content structure and prototypes to test usability.
Testing and data – qualitative and quantitative
- Usability testing
- Feedback forum
- A/B testing
- Heat maps – where are people looking on the page, software that shows where consumers are honing in on the page
- Comments that people leave
- Click data – raw numbers of how many clicks the page receives
- Columbus data/Call-tracking integration – if someone calls the call center, they can detect what page the customer was last on 72 hours ago – used to detect overall web issues if there are multiple calling re: the same issue
- Completion rates
- Profile data – based on customers account information
Content approach documents is a resource used to distill the research into a content plan for project teams.
Pro Tip: Create your content approach document before project launch and outline hurdles and content issues in order to strategize your priorities.
Content is key to improving conversion rates. Remember to keep the customers mindset of when they arrive to your site in mind.
Overall, it is important to have patience and persistence. Understand that new ideas have to be sold to your leadership more than once – no matter how brilliant. Stay focused on the big picture such as your overall strategy, without forgetting about the little picture or the steps you took to get there. Don’t get discouraged and pick your battles within your organization. In the end, always aim high.
Predictions:
- Broader acceptance of content strategy
- Better integration of personalization and humanization – It’s a fine line, but you want to be as friendly and usable as possible for your clients (AT&T example: bundling services)
- Improved methods of measuring content performance
- Increased collaboration
- More efficient process – narrowed the number of people who approve content
