Top UX Mistakes in Content Marketing

User experience (UX) can make or break a content marketing campaign. The right creative in the right place will entice users to click and engage. But it’s their experience after the click that determines whether they will take any further action and even has a lasting effect on their brand perception. Ensure you’re getting the most out of your content marketing efforts by avoiding these common UX mistakes.

Not Creating Content for the Platform

One of the best media buys in content marketing is native advertising. This type of buy seamlessly integrates your ad into a publishing platform so that it looks like just another news or blog article. A user who is browsing a media site reading articles will see your interesting headline, photo, and preview description and want to click through to read the article.

But wait—what if you don’t have an article to send them to? Suddenly you’ve created a jarring experience in which you’ve led a user to believe they’re clicking on an article in order to trick them into visiting your product page. How is that user going to feel about your product now?

They could be confused and think they’ve somehow ended up in the wrong place. Where is that article they wanted to read? Or they might be annoyed at discovering they’ve been fooled into clicking on an ad.

The solution: If you don’t have the content your ad is promising, create it. Even if that means making a landing page that’s only accessible to people who click on the ad.

Burying the Lead Form

You’ve set up a landing page with compelling copy and a strong CTA to fill out a lead form. Your ad creative is performing well—people are clicking through to the landing page even more than you expected. This campaign is kicking butt…sort of. The only odd thing is hardly anyone is filling out the lead form.

When this happens, take a close look at the landing page on desktop and mobile. Pretend you’re a user—is the lead form front and center? Or is it way at the bottom of your content?

A user will only spend a few seconds looking at the content on a landing page. It’s important they’re able to quickly access the lead form without having to scroll. Simply moving this form to a better spot could have a significant impact on conversions.

Only Designing for Desktop

More than half of all web traffic is mobile, so a mobile-first content strategy should be a priority. You can have the most stellar content, but if a mobile user has difficulty reading and navigating it, it’s not going to get you the ROI you deserve.

A website redesign is a huge undertaking, so if that’s not in the cards for the launch of your content marketing campaign, there are still some improvements you can make to give mobile users a better experience.

1. Optimize images for the web. You can significantly decrease the size of your image files without sacrificing quality. Doing so will allow your pages to load faster, which can decrease the number of drop-offs from mobile users. We recommend images be less than 250KB for peak performance.
2. Try using AMP technology. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page, and it’s a technology that allows mobile content to load instantly. AMP is mostly geared toward a blog post format, so if you’re sharing blog posts, this is an option worth looking into. WordPress has an AMP plugin that makes it easy to implement on your current site.
3. Invest in a responsive design. If a user has to scroll side to side to read your content on their phone, then it’s imperative you consider implementing a mobile-responsive version of your website. This is a more cost-effective solution than a mobile-first design overhaul. It involves taking your existing design and manipulating how it appears on mobile to better serve those users.

Investing a little more time and resources into creating the best experience for your users will help you get the most value out of your content marketing campaign. For more on content marketing strategy, check out our post on how to serve the right content at every stage of the marketing funnel. If you’re looking for a partner to develop a content marketing campaign, let’s talk.