I taught a wide range of content creation courses for over a decade: text creation, web content, graphic communication, and video production. I keep up with general best-practices for content creation in all of these areas and across many popular publication media.
When it comes to creating new material, I have a good idea of how it ought to be designed to get the impact I am looking for, but I also know what design features to test for the best results.
Consider this draft landing page, promoting a series of related products. An average-sized screen will render half of the blue line of content on screenload (thanks to some careful planning with the vh measurement). The empty space in the the “Get the full soil water story” box is reserved for several button or link options: anchor links to jump down to various points on the page, or buttons to direct readers straight to the products being promoted. The first point that this page will test is whether folks clicking to this page from an ad want to read a lot of detail or if they just want to see the product.
The content in the blue bar will either be left as plain text or it will hold links to the headings below, letting readers click directly to the value that appeals to them (and providing us a little tracking information about what values people want to see most often).
The image placeholders provide an opportunity for several approaches to graphics: technical renders of products, photographs of products in use, animations, videos, or other content can be held here to see what engages the particular audience we are trying to appeal to.
The form at the bottom of the page is long. This is a holdover from current practice, but it is now in a slightly different design (the typical design puts all of those checkboxes into a dropdown menu). This will allow us to test various levels of complexity with the form: removing product options to emphasize the things that are often paired with these sensors, removing different contact information fields, pre-filling checkboxes or fields based on the landing page and the ad clicked by the user.
The End Results
At the end of this process, we have several landing pages on a single subject, all of which can be rotated in and out of circulation to combat creative fatigue. We can cycle in pages with video content for audiences that want to engage with information, or we can cycle in pages with more direct links to product information for audiences that already know what they need to buy. We can craft forms that meet readers exactly where they want to be met: giving them the flexibility to ask for a quote about their specific project needs or indicating a few, common “starter” packages for readers that don’t know exactly what they need with this type of sensor.
In the end, we are able to create better user experiences by finding what readers value and adapting content to fit those expectations.
