How do you test and experiment with different content formats, styles, and tones?

Defining goals early in the content creation process can shape the final product and influence results. Say, for instance, you're in charge of content production for a SaaS and you know you should produce something around a new feature launch. If you want people to try your new feature, you should share aspirational content with examples of different outcomes or instructions. If you want to to stand out amongst competitors, you should create side-by-side comparisons. This helps with brainstorming. Instead of starting from a place of "oh gosh, what should I share on this subject?" you start with a desired action you want your audience to take, and you can easily evaluate ideas that are more or less likely to get them to take that action.

One of the first questions I ask my freelance writing clients before I begin their project is “what tone would like?” The answer to that question alone helps me know not just how to write an article or blog post, but how to research it as well. If they want to sound like a subject matter expert then I’ll approach my research differently than if they want to sound informal/fun. Getting a client/boss to express what tone they want also helps them understand what they really want — which cuts down on miscommunication.

Always begin by understanding your target audience. Identify their demographics, interests, preferred content formats, and online behavior. Use tools like Google Analytics or social media analytics to gather insights about your existing audience and content performance.

Understand that your KPIs are almost exclusively going to be lagging indicators. This means that the data you gather to measure against your KPIs is going to be time-delayed. Think deeply about two things here: - How much of a delay is there I'm the data gathering process? - How much does that delay matter to that indicator? The amount of impact that time delay matters to each indicator will vary, so don't treat each KPI's data the same. For example, you can optimize older pieces of content around a new keyword, but one week isn't a good cadence to measure against it's KPI. GoogleBot indexes between 4 and 30 days, so changes you make may take a while to show measurable effects. Establish measurement timelines for each KPI.

To evaluate how different content elements effect your KPIs, you may start experimenting with them based on the data and insights your analytics tools provide. You can test several content formats, for instance, including blog articles, podcasts, videos, infographics, and ebooks. Additionally, you can experiment with various content styles, like official, informal, funny, and emotive. Additionally, you can experiment with various content tones, like pleasant, provocative, authoritative, or inspirational. You may build, perform, and compare the results of A/B or multivariate tests on your content using tools like Google Optimise, VWO, or Optimizely.