“When taking a content-first approach, our job as marketers is not to create more content … it’s to create the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of results.”
Robert Rose, Content Marketing Strategist and Author
When it comes to evaluating the design of your website, business cards, brochures, or pamphlets, you likely pool a crowd for feedback, right? While bad design is an obvious brand killer, there is another enemy lurking close behind it: content.
Your website and media content is there to ultimately convince your audience to purchase your product or service, but how do you know if it’s really doing its job? Is your content truly driving action or is it simply getting lost in the shuffle?
Media content testing, also known as usability testing, is the practice of testing whether written media content is appropriate, suitable for the target audience in question, and whether or not it is driving the desired action. The main objective of content testing is to ensure the customer can understand what is being said, it is relevant to them, and they know what to do next.
As content is a crucial part of the sales process, it is essential for businesses to test their content properly with a media content evaluation.
Learn why it’s important to evaluate the content and media you’re producing and how Fuel Cycle can help today!
Getting Started
Content testing is one of the best ways to ensure that your media content is effective for your audience. To get started evaluating your content and media, you must first:
- Identify your evaluation goals within these buckets:
- User requirements – What do users need to know?
- Content strategy – What do you want users to do?
- Context of the content – Does this content make sense here?
- Targeted users – Is this content speaking to the audience?
- Create your evaluation plan:
- Once the aim of testing is decided, you need to decide on the media content evaluation methods you will use, like qualitative and quantitative user research
Looking Ahead
The last step in usability testing is to analyze the results from your evaluation plan. By analyzing the output/results, your organization can take the necessary steps to improve the quality, direction, and context of the content moving forward.
There are several advanced programs used at Fuel Cycle to help capture feedback such as Pilotly which tests TV shows, films, and ad campaigns for effectiveness, or Affectiva which analyzes the emotional appeal of your content.
The Fuel Cycle Research Engine provides a path for organizations to combine the best technologies and solutions for their usability testing needs. Fuel Cycle is on a mission to provide businesses real-time customer data through online communities, panels, and custom research solutions catered to fit the needs of their unique industry.
Fuel Cycle believes that brands need access to the most sophisticated tools to gauge and enhance the user experience like card sorts, user tasks, user funnel, heatmaps, tree testing, and competitive benchmarks.
To hear how CBS is leveraging insights technology to inform their communication strategy, register for the webinar with CBS’s SVP of Research, Michael Haggerty, on Wednesday, 12/16 @ 9am PST/12pm EST.
