How to Create a Content Outline for a Digital Experience

You’ve officially invested in implementing a digital experience platform into your business and are now ready to begin creating your first digital experience. Where do you go from here? The best place to start is on the content outline for your digital experience.

Why is the content outline important?

The content outline is important because it provides the structure for how your experience will be built. If a digital experience were a house, a content outline is a blueprint. Think of it as the assembly instructions for your entire experience. 

Your customers will use the pages you create as a way to interact with the content in your experience. A thoughtful page structure and logical content flow creates an intuitive user experience. By creating a digital experience that is user-friendly, you will make your customers happy. A disjointed digital experience will frustrate customers and cause them to seek helpful information elsewhere.  

How to create the outline?

To begin creating your outline, start by thinking about who is your target audience and what you want them to get from your experience. Are you providing existing customers with information about one of your products? Are you exhibiting a trade show or convention and want to let partners or vendors know about the event? 

By identifying the target audience for your digital experience, you will also identify where they are in the customer journey. This tells you what the target audience knows of and needs from your brand.

Now that you have defined your audience and core message, it’s time to start thinking about the goals for your digital experience. Your content is what helps prospects and customers learn about your business or product. That’s why it’s important to ensure your digital experience content is engaging and accomplishes the goal you set out to achieve.

Common goals for a digital experience include:

• Drive revenue within a business unit or product line;
• Learn more about customers and capture zero-party data;
• Build a network of brand advocates by increasing brand loyalty; and
• Improve employee engagement.

Your digital experience goals establish metrics of success. You need to determine how you will track these metrics of success and incorporate that into your digital experience content. Let’s take a common use case:  A brand wants to inform existing customers about a new product. The goal is to drive website traffic and online orders, i.e. demand generation and drive revenue. This means the content outline must include a call to action (CTA) links taking customers to the product information page; customers need to be a few clicks away from adding the product to cart; and the brand must understand what product features need to be highlighted to compel quick purchase decisions.

Once you have determined your target audience and your primary goal, you can begin drafting the content outline. If you decide you want to create an experience that highlights one of your products, start thinking about what information your customers will need and expect. You may want to provide a frequently asked questions section, product manuals, display specs, or provide your customers with a contact form and a place to submit issues. All of this information will assist in creating the outline. 

Now that you have defined the key areas you want to include in your experience, you are ready to begin your outline. Based on the pages we defined above, your outline structure could look similar to the following:

• Home
  • Include product photo
  • Highlight key product features
  • Create a prominent link to the Product Information page
• Product Information
  • Include specs
  • Documentation
• Contact Us
  • Form to submit a question
  • Chatbot
  • Submit an issue or support request
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • Include a link to the Contact Us page where customers can submit a question or chat live with a specialist.

Templates

Lumavate provides more than 40+ best-in-class Templates for the most common use cases for your business. Depending on the use case you want to utilize a digital experience for, each template comes with an outline that has already been created. This will allow you to launch faster, as each template provides step-by-step instructions on what content you need to include. Instead of spending time thinking about what pages you want to create, Lumavate has already done the heavy lifting for you!