After all the effort you put into capturing people’s attention, they’re finally starting to show interest in your product.

GIF Source: Tenor

While that’s a great thing, it raises another important question:

How do you turn their interest into ongoing engagement, clicking your call to action (CTA)?

The answer: content design! 

It’s a marketing strategy that fuses content and design to create experiences that take users from attention to conversion.

And, lucky you, this guide is dedicated to helping you understand content design. 

It’s a deep dive into:

• What it is and where it came from.
• Why it’s worth your time. 
• What the content design process looks like.

So let’s jump right in, starting from the top.

What is content design? 

Content design is the process of planning and providing your audience with the content they need using previous research and data collected about them.

Izabella Naessa, a digital business professional and change management lead at Chalhoub Group, a luxury experience brand, says…

“It’s about ensuring that the content serves its purpose and meets the needs of the target audience.”

In other words, your target users are at the center of content design. Of course, your brand benefits from this process too, but before getting there you need to create content based on the answers you’d get to these questions: 

• What are their needs? 
• When do they want it to be solved? 
• What format do they want?

Overall, content design is not traditional content creation as you know it, where traffic is a big deal. This one is about helping users solve their challenges and then introducing your brand or product as a solution for users to tackle their pain points and challenges. 

Now, content in this context can be any resource (of any format) that helps users solve their needs. 

Let’s say you run a subscription-based service and every time users include add-ons, it never reflects on their invoice. They only know if they contact customer care. 

Messed up, right? That’s where content design comes in. 

A content designer understands and resolves the users' issues by redesigning the checkout page to include add-ons. 

So the content, in this case, isn’t just text or a graphic, it’s a combo of copy, call-to-actions (CTA), visuals, and icons to improve the user experience. 

Before we go any further, where did it all begin?

How did content design evolve?

It all started when Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London worked for the UK Government. 

She led a team in 2010 that was responsible for shutting down about 551 government sites. 

However, the challenge was not knowing which content needed to be migrated or deleted. 

Sarah said, “We needed to move the civil service from publishing what [the] government wanted to say to what citizens needed to read.”

And then in 2014, the term ‘content design’ was coined. It involved her and the team using data and evidence to prioritize users' needs; defining, testing, and iterating content formats. 

“This iterative way of working was more like a design process than the content process [the] government was used to. The way the content was set out, the way content and design worked together on call-outs and action elements etc; we were changing the whole way we worked, from top to bottom.”

But it’s important to note that content professionals were already using similar processes and methodologies before content design came on board. Take UX writing, for instance. It began in the 90s and leverages data such as user interaction and feedback to create content.  

However, even though content design and user experience (UX) writing sound quite similar, they’re different. Here’s how:

What’s the difference between content design and UX writing?

UX writing is focused on copywriting (text) for a product, website, or app so users can interact with it properly. An example is what you read on our homepage that tells you what we do.

But that’s where the UX writer’s responsibility ends. Their job is to use words aligned with the brand’s style and users’ preferences to guide them on what to do next. 

Content designers have more responsibility beyond coming up with the words. They’re concerned about the context of a user’s need and using the right approach or format to solve it. 

Content design involves a lot of strategizing and brainstorming to solve pain points and promote the brand’s product.

And why is this needed? 

Let’s show you why.

Why is content design important?

Users spend a lot of time browsing online. They know good experiences when they see one. 

If they have to work hard to find answers to their challenges, they’ll go with a competitor, someone who makes it easier for them to navigate.  

Content design helps answer the burning questions in users’ minds, providing clarity, easy navigation, and giving them the direction they seek. 

Jas Deogan, former head of content design at giffgaff, a UK mobile virtual network operator, says content design is important because it helps:

• Improve user experience. People want seamless access to information they’re looking for online. By thoughtfully organizing your content, structuring it for clarity, and aligning it for the user’s intent, content design simplifies how users navigate digital spaces.
• Increase engagement. As users find helpful content that caters to their needs, it encourages them to engage with you a while longer. They’re likely to increase their dwell time and explore some more, increasing the chances of prospects becoming customers. 
• Build trust and drive conversions. If you help people solve their problems, one thing is bound to happen: they begin to trust you. When that happens, it becomes easy for them to become loyal customers. Reports show that 88% of buyers will make a purchase if they trust your brand. 

Speaking of trust, senior content strategist at BORN group, a global customer experience agency Caitlin Gebhard says: 

“Content design helps shape the relationship you have with your audience. What you say and how you say it can easily build trust and respect – or alienate the people you are trying to reach.” 

Simply put, content design is important because it can:

• Help you craft solutions that appeal to your audience’s emotions and respond to their needs.
• Make them feel like you understand them. 
• Help earn your audience’s trust. 
• Show them the next steps to take. 
• Explain how they can interact with your solution. 

***

The ‘shaping the relationship with your audience’ benefit caught your attention. 

Now, you’re thinking of who can help you make it happen. 

The person you’re looking for is called a content designer. And here’s a summary of their resume:

What does a content designer do?

A content designer’s role is to create data-backed experiences that are engaging and meaningful for users. 

They understand:

• Users' pain points by doing research. 
• Solutions users need by collaborating with product experts.
• The brand styles and audience’s voice so they can communicate the solution clearly.  

Now, a content designer’s role isn’t limited to problem-solving. They’re involved in every client-facing touchpoint of the user’s journey to create helpful content.

For better context, here’s what a day in the life of a content designer looks like:

• Research. This is how content designers know users' pain points and the best solutions.  Speaking of this practice, Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London says research makes content design different from other forms of writing. 

She says, “Content designers generally don’t move without research, [...] there has to be data and evidence of what the audience wants and needs.” 

We’ll dig into the content design process shortly. 😉

• Ideation and writing (creation). Content designers must collaborate with product design teams, UX professionals, content marketers, and other professionals to brainstorm ideal solutions for users. 

They think about …

1. What content format (infographic, text, GIFs, interactive content, etc) will have the most impact, 
2. The right language, 
3. Emotions and tone, 
4. Information architecture (layout of the platform so the content is easy to find),
5. Content strategy.

 Then, they create the solution in collaboration with other teams.

• Revision and iteration. Because content designers work in sync with other professionals, they get feedback. Sometimes, even from users. 

As such, their responsibilities also include revising and iterating where they pick content ideas worth building on and which ones to delete. 

***

So, that’s a summary of what a content designer can do. Want to see how they make it happen?

Let’s look at the content design system.

What is the content design process? 

In content design, the main goal is to create great experiences for users across all touch points. 

A noble mission, but to succeed, you’ll need a solid game plan. 

While the specifics might change depending on the challenge you’re trying to meet or even the industry, certain elements are essential in producing an exceptional experience. They include:

User research

In-depth research is the secret ingredient that informs a content designer’s decision-making process. 

They have to understand the users’ wants and needs, and how they navigate and engage with a product. 

This way, there’s no room for assumptions. The content designers know the problems users face and can make informed decisions.

Identifying user needs

Creating the great experiences users like begins with knowing what their needs are. 

You also want to know:

• Who they are.
• What they want to do.
• How they’ve been doing it. 
• The challenges they face.

To do this, you can leverage: 

• Desk research where you use already published surveys and reports to do your research. 
• Usability research which involves collecting insights into how people use your product with a tool like Hotjar. 

They’ve got tools like Heatmap for collecting information on how users engage with your product by monitoring their interactions. You can use it to identify bottlenecks in their journey. If you want to use Hotjar’s Heatmap, here’s what to do:

1. Sign up to Hotjar and find your way to the Heatmap tool.
2. Add the tracking code to your site.
3. Enable ‘Session Capture’ on your Hotjar Dashboard. 
4. Go to the Heatmaps menu and click ‘New heatmap.’ 
5. Enter the URL of the page you want to check and click ‘View heatmap.’

The Session Recording feature allows you to watch users’ journey from the moment they step into your site. It shows their mouse movements, clicks, scrolling patterns, and keyboard strokes. This way, you can find issues and quickly fix them.

Setting it up is similar to Heatmap’s process.

1. Log in to Hotjar and click the Session Recording in the Session Recording tool.
2. Add the tracking code to your site and enable ‘Session Capture’ on your Hotjar Dashboard. 
3. Once Hotjar detects traffic on your site, it starts recording.
4. From the Session Recording menu, you’ll find a list of the recordings. 
5. Click the Play button beside a recording you want to check and it’ll open a new tab and play it. 

A good ol’ traditional survey is another type of research to help you understand people’s needs. Instead of shadowing users, you ask about their needs directly so you can design experiences that meet those needs. 

Hotjar has a Survey tool for finding what users are going through. You create the form on Hotjar and embed it in your site as a popup or button. 

Now, that’s how to know what people need and want using data and evidence. 

In addition to identifying needs, another important aspect of user research is knowing all the steps a user will take to complete a task AKA customer journey mapping. 

Customer journey mapping

Mapping a user’s journey is about listing touchpoints they interact with the most so content designers understand the order a solution should be in and make it relevant to users. 

Sarah Winters says:

“Customer journey mapping lets us know:

• what the user’s motivation is when they come to our content,
• how much information they can take in on the journey,
• how much work it is for the user to get to a result,
• what information they need exactly at what point. “

If you want to create a customer journey map, here’s what you need to do:

• Define your objective. What do you hope to achieve by mapping users' journeys? If you want to increase conversions, you’d probably need to map their journey from the start to when they get to the checkout page. 

If you want to increase client satisfaction, you’ll need to map the entire user journey where they relate with client-facing teams.

• Collect information and get to know your users better. Who are they? Why did they decide to engage your brand? And how do they do it?

You can use the strategy we shared above to collect information. Then, build personas to understand their needs and empathize with users. 

• Identify touchpoints. What areas are users interacting with your solution or site? Think about how they affect customers. Is there information available to them in case there’s a challenge? Who do they reach out to if there are challenges?
• Outline stages in the customer journey using your research findings. List out every step you observe users go through when interacting with your product. 
• Start mapping. Create a virtual representation of the user’s journey at different stages, adding other details like touchpoints and their emotions at each point. Here’s a sample of how the map would look:

Image Source: Mindtools

Each intersection of the stage and touchpoint should indicate what users saw or did and how they felt. 

Content ideation 

The ideation process involves collaborating with other professionals to explore the best solutions users need. 

“Solution” here means any format that’ll have the most impact on users.

You also want to consider where they’ll see the content – social media, newsletters, ads, or websites – including: 

• The right medium, text, graphics, or videos users would love. 
• The correct language and words to help drive home the message. 
• The content’s voice and tone to ensure consistency with the brand’s guidelines. 

Now, this isn’t something you want to do on your own. 

It always helps to brainstorm with other team members from customer service to marketing, product teams, finance, and industry experts to discuss ideas, get suggestions, and improve on them. 

Content creation

After you’ve researched user needs and determined the kind of content to meet those needs, it’s time to craft the solution. 

As we’ve established, content isn’t about writing copy alone. 

It’s about creating anything — calculators, posters, interactive content, and more. 

But to pull it off, you’ll need to collaborate with different teams to create a user-centric product. 

If the research and brainstorming session points to using interactive content as the ideal medium (which is very likely that it will!), you can use Studio to create it. 

It’s a powerful design tool in the Ceros that lets you quickly create interactive content from customizable templates.

Content design testing and iterating

The content design process doesn’t end with creation. It’s a continuous experimental system where you keep trying things out. 

You always want to check if customers love the approach you’re using and figure out if there’s a way the experience can be better. 

So you test, learn what works, and apply your learnings. 

According to Winters, “No point doing any research, testing, or looking at data if we don’t learn, apply, and move on.” 

But how do you test and iterate?

You can collaborate with user interface designers to build prototypes that users can test. 

Consider using any of the user research options above to monitor how users interact with it. This way, you can ensure the content design experience is exceptional for your audience. 

***

Now, to ensure you have a seamless content design process, here are some top tips to help you be more productive.

What are some content design best practices? 

Ever visited a website only to leave almost immediately because it had a poor content structure and couldn’t find what you needed?

It can be frustrating. But, what if you could design content that not only attracts but also engages and converts?

Here are some best practices to help you achieve that: 

Keep the message simple

In a survey by Goodfirms, 34.6% of users say they’ll leave a site if it has a bad content structure. 

That tells you how important content is. If it’s too complicated or poorly structured, they’ll simply leave. 😳

The message you’re trying to tell through the content has to be simple and easy to understand. 

Here are some tips to help keep your message simple:

• Use tone and language they’re used to. 
• If it’s written text, use short sentences and paragraphs. Style it using italics, bold, or bullet points. 
• Use simple wordings to replace technical industry jargon. 

Collaborate with cross-departmental teams

Content designers don’t work in isolation. 

They need to have a content design team, collaborating with other teams so they find the perfect solution for the user’s needs. 

So as mentioned, make it standard practice to work with:

• Product designers
• Product managers
• UI/UX engineers
• UX writers and graphic designers
• Front-and-back end developers
• Customer support agent

Even stakeholders too. 

It takes a village, people!

So, how do you collaborate with other pros on the team?

Enter: Markup.io. A collaboration tool that lets you give and receive feedback in real-time. 

Here’s how it works:

• Sign up to the platform.
• Upload design files to create MarkUps. 
• Share with the team.
• Start collaborating by commenting and tagging people on the document.  

Stay on brand

Even though the user’s needs always come first in content design, you want to ensure the experience is aligned with your brand’s style and voice. 

Why is this important?

Alexa Chaney, a marketing partner at Healthy Dash of Social, a marketing agency emphasizes consistent branding. 

She says: “When your branding is consistent, customers know what to expect from you. It also leads to stronger brand recognition and higher company value.” 

This principle of consistency is crucial in building trust with your audience. By delivering a consistent experience, you ensure customers are never left doubting what your brand stands for anywhere they see your content. 

This familiarity reinforces brand identity and customer loyalty, boosting the perceived value of your company. This way, they’re not in doubt whenever they see your content anywhere. 

Here are a few tips for staying on brand:

• Define your brand’s voice, tone, and visual style guide using existing content and the ideal target audience’s preference.
• Create templates for posts across physical and digital platforms that you can reuse. This will help you maintain consistency AND save you time!

Create relevant content and be consistent

Winter, a content strategist and founder of Content Design London describes content design as answering a user’s needs. This highlights why creating relevant content is crucial. If your content fails to address people’s needs, it becomes irrelevant to your audience. 

Knowing this, it’s vital to get your content ideas from thorough user research and collaborative brainstorming with team members. This ensures that every piece of content directly addresses your audience’s specific needs.

Any other addition may not be as effective as you’d like. 

Another practice you need to embrace is ensuring a consistent approach across all channels. 

Users should have a similar experience whether they visit your site or social media. 

By prioritizing relevance and consistency, you ensure users’ needs are met and they have an impressive experience overall, leading to increased engagement with your brand. 

***

Content design can do a lot of good for your brand, capturing people’s attention, solving their challenges, and making you relevant. 

But it’s not without its own challenges. As you prepare to embark on this content design journey, here are some drawbacks you might experience.

What are the challenges of content design?

Like most good things in life, there’s usually a catch, and content design is no exception. 

On one hand, it’s a great content strategy for turning visitors into loyal customers. However, the road to that path comes with obstacles such as:

• Understanding user needs – We’ve shown you how to identify user’s needs. But the part we didn’t cover was how it can be tiring and time-consuming, especially when you’re dealing with a diverse audience. 

You have to interview several users to understand their preferences and needs then analyze and brainstorm with other professionals to generate befitting content ideas. It’s a lot. 

Our advice? Get more hands to join in user research or collaborate with marketing and UX design professionals. 

• Balancing user and business goals – Content design is all about the user’s needs has been a key design principle in this guide. However, sometimes what users want isn’t always in sync with business needs. 

For instance, your brand is in a phase where generating sales is a priority while users are raving about getting a response from customer care. 

Now, they’re both important but balancing them can be challenging. In a case like this, just remember that happy customers can go above and beyond for you. So, while it may make more sense to launch a full-blown marketing campaign that meets your needs, prioritizing them will help your reputation in the long run.

• Ensuring consistency – If you have a large organization with multiple departments, being consistent across the board can be difficult.  That’s what gov.uk experienced before Sarah Winters’ breakthrough. There were just so many moving parts and unwritten rules that prevented consistency in the government’s site. 

But by having a marketing team, speaking to team leads in different departments, and being determined, she turned things around. 

Collaboration and getting everyone on the same page help ensure consistency.

• Measuring effectiveness – After all your hard work, you want to know if your efforts are paying off. But it is also a lot of work. You have to gather user feedback, analyze, and interpret. 

The way out here is to collaborate and leverage digital tools like Hotjar so you’re not overwhelmed. 

***

And now, for the last lap of this guide, let’s go over some tools that can streamline your content design workflow.

What tools to use for content design?

Besides whiteboards and markers used in strategy meetings, here are some tools content designers can use for design and research:

• Ceros is a creative tool for designing interactive content. It helps content designers transform static content into a more engaging version that users want to interact with. Ceros is a web-based software that supports real-time collaboration.   

Best for: Helping expert and non-expert designers create interactive experiences. No code required!

• Guru is an AI-powered search engine tool that helps consolidate all your company info into a centralized location. This way, it’s easy to search for company-related information and get relevant in-context answers. It’s like ChatGPT trained with company knowledge, offering users personalized responses.

Best for: Connecting company apps and knowledge base to create a single source of truth. 

• You can use Hemingway to ensure written content is easy to understand. The app scans the text and identifies complex words to edit, making the content more comprehensive. 

Best for: Improving copy’s readability. 

• Hotjar is a user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand everything you need to know about your audience. With Hotjar, you can identify challenges in your user experience and make required changes.

Best for: Understanding user’s pain points and monitoring their journey. 

• Google Analytics helps you collect user data on your digital platforms. It lets you know who’s visiting your site, where they’re from, and the actions they’re performing. With this information, content designers can optimize their digital strategy so it’s relevant to their audience.

Best for: Monitoring and collecting user engagement data on websites or apps. 

• Maze is a user research tool that allows you to study the target audience and make data-informed decisions. You can use it to set up surveys and interviews, test prototypes, and monitor user behavior on your platforms. 

Best for: Doing in-depth user research and testing content design experiences. 

***

And just like that, we’re at the end of this guide and pretty sure you’re excited to begin your content design journey. 

Now, the ball is in your court!

Over to you!

Creating good content design is a team effort. 

As you’ve seen, you need the right human resources and tools to ensure your digital product is tight. 

We’ve shown you some of them in the previous section. 

But one that’s worth mentioning again is Ceros. 

Why?

It can help you present the answer to users’ needs in an interactive and captivating way. And that’s a big deal as 59% of marketers have already said that interactive content has helped them drive engagements.

In essence, it’ll help you answer their needs in a way they expect.

Schedule a demo with Ceros to see how it works.