Content design and good copywriting are essential for your online business.
Through content design you demonstrate to your audience that you understand them – their problems, wants and needs.
It helps build rapport with your audience and trust. It also allows you to communicate that you have the solution for them, and get them to take action.
Effective content design is about communicating information in the best way possible, for your audience, whether that is with text, images or video. Content design quickly conveys to a visitor whether they are in the right place to find what they are looking for. Every visitor to a landing page, website or other online platform are looking to evaluate and pass judgement on whether they should spend any further time there and they do that very, very, quickly.
The copywriting is about strategically crafting words (whether written or spoken) that get people to take some form of action.
While interaction design goes beyond simply designing a platform or website page, but considering how a person will interact with it.
“Content designers research their audience so that they can design effective content for them. They try to make it simple for that audience to find the content they need.” – Wikipedia
Content design and understanding your users needs
Understanding what your audience wants and needs is very much part of any online business. What are their pains? How are you able to solve them? What solutions are offering?
“Content design is very much a process of figuring out not just what a user wants, but what he or she needs. “ – Yoast, Content Design
Research, data and talking to you target audience is key.
The better you understand your user, the easier it is to serve them with solutions they will pay money for.
Customer interviews can be used to better understand how to design content, craft your copy and understand how best to connect with them.
Creating user stories to assist with your content design
User stories help you produce user-centered content.
A user story looks like this:
- As a [person in a specific role]
- I want to [perform an action or find something out]
- So that I [can achieve my goal of…]
For example: As a small business owner I want to learn more about online marketing so that I can achieve my goal of getting customers.
A job story is when a user has a specific task to complete
- When [there’s a particular situation]
- I want to [perform an action or find something out]
- So I [can achieve my goal of…]
For example: When there is a sale online I want to understand how they came to my website so I can better understand what marketing and lead generation activities work.
Using these techniques is part of user-centred design. Rather than just creating and putting content into the world, setting up landing pages and websites, creating adverts and other items. Design them with your audience and their needs at heart.
User stories allow you to check whether a piece of content meets their needs.
For example: As a business owner I want to create content that’s useful to my audience so that I can achieve more sales.
Did you see what I did there 😉