Reasons Why Experimenting With Content is Important

It’s only through experimenting with content that you can stand out in the cacophonous online space today.

The digital landscape is always changing, and with it the best way to succeed with content marketing. That’s why experimentation is so important – you need to constantly be trying new things to see what works best.

The internet is saturated with content. It’s becoming more and more difficult to get your content seen, let alone stand out from the crowd. So how can you overcome the challenge of content saturation?

In a world where content is king, experimentation is the key to success. Try new things, test different strategies, and see what works best for you and your audience. With a little bit of effort, you can overcome the challenge of content saturation and achieve great results with your content marketing.

Experimenting with content – is it really important?

Content experimentation is the process of trying new things with your content in order to find what works best. It’s important because it allows you to determine what resonates with your audience and this, ultimately, leads to further growth.

What works with your audience, works for business. To be specific, here are the immediate benefits of experimenting with content and choosing the best possible solution:

1. Improvements in your bottom line

As you experiment with content – from headlines, formats, to strategies, you continually sniff out the best performing versions of those.

These cream-of-the-crop versions will attract more audiences to your website; increasing traffic, and improving the way your content performs on search. People often make the mistake of thinking that traffic doesn’t really amount to anything, when it actually is important to boost conversions.

No traffic = no conversions – who do you plan on converting if no one’s even visiting?

The best pieces of content uncovered through experimentation will help boost traffic and conversions for you.

2. Increased engagement

Similar to the previous point, high-performing content uncovered and improved upon through experimentation will also increase engagements.

They say it’s hard to measure the performance of creative executions such as written word or visual design. And if their key metric that defines performance is engagement, then how can you know that one piece will engage more people versus the other?

The answer lies in experimentation. By testing out different executions against another, you determine which ones work best to capture valuable engagements.

READ ALSO: In-depth Guide to A/B Split Testing Like a Pro

The ones that perform better can be replicated so you can, in turn, replicate the results and it becomes a never ending loop.

3. Improved customer insights

Ultimately the best benefit of experimentation is that it leads you to understand your customer better. After all, there is only so much you can learn about how they think and react towards your efforts through simple observation.

Experimentation achieves this by comparing the nuances in your executions.

Say you write two types of headlines; both varying in the tone. Comparing one treatment from the other tells you what manner of writing or speaking actually resonates with them.

That, in itself, is information you couldn’t have learned if you were just looking at how much traffic the first execution pulled in.

Furthermore, you can use the data from your current experiments to inform your future executions. This extends the value of the data of current experiments and the effect snowballs as you continue to iterate and test.

Areas in content you can do experiments on

If experimenting with content is something you’d like to explore in the near future, here are a few areas where you can start:

• Headlines. Try different headlines with varying placements for the keywords to see which ones perform better. You can also experiment with the length of the headline to see if writing shorter or longer is better, or not.
• Formats. Are also a great experiment for content. Try to compare different formats say, for example, long-form content like guides. Are guides really better as a blog, or is it better as a podcast, or even an instructional video?
• Tone. Experiment with variations in your tone for content, with respect to your branding guidelines. Does a stern, fun, or amiable tone work better with your audience? Would they like you to use the language they use, or do they engage more with formal or serious communication?

By experimenting with these different areas, you’ll be able to find what works best for you and your customers.

Tips for tracking the results of your content experiments

When you’re experimenting with your content, it’s important to measure the results of your experiments. This information will help you determine which strategies are working and which ones need improvement. There are a few ways to measure the results of your experiments:

1. Google Analytics. Can help you track how your audience is interacting with your content. You can see which pages are getting the most traffic, how long people are spending on your pages, and more. This information can help you figure out what content is resonating with your audience and what needs improvement.
2. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. Can help you score your headline based on factors like word count, common words, and emotional words. It can also show you how well your headline will perform on social media. This information can help you come up with headlines that will grab your audience’s attention and get them to click through to your article.
3. Social media platform analytics. Like those from Twitter and Facebook offer data tools that can help you measure the engagement of your posts. You can see how many likes, shares, and comments your posts receive, as well as which posts are getting the most engagement. This information can help you determine which topics and formats are resonating with your audience and produce better results.

How do you act on the data

So you’ve been experimenting with your content – what now? Well, the next step is to act on the data you’ve gathered. Figure out what works and what doesn’t, and make changes accordingly.

You can do this by:

• Updating content of blogs.
• Trying different page titles and meta descriptions.
• Improving specific paragraphs or sections of content.
• Repurposing blogs into other formats.
• Try different promotional approaches.

Key takeaways

Content experimentation will be valuable tool in the future. As it is now, content is getting published in the thousands in a single day; that’s a whole lot of noise to compete with.

Hence, the game is shifting from one that was driven by quantity to more focus on quality. Seek to improve upon content through experimentation and remember to:

• Push the boundaries. Test as much as you can even if you get a positive result. A positive doesn’t mean best and if you can challenge your champion with an even better execution, do so.
• Trust the data. Don’t push for an execution when the data’s already telling you that it won’t work. If you do that, you’ll end up wasting resources.
• Bank your data. Keep the learnings from your experiments stored and ready to be revisited as reference for future executions. This is the best way you can up the value of content experimentation for the now, and for the future.

Curious about how else you can test content? Send your questions to us over on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to discuss them with you.

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