UX & Content Marketing: Navigating How Humans Think Humans are strange, complex, fickle creatures. That said, it's our job as designers, content creators and marketers to deeply understand our audience as humans, not just "users" or "buyers." Why? So we stop making content people don't need, want or care about, and start delivering greater value. The biggest challenge we face is putting aside our own personal preferences and biases. The best way tackle this challenge is by diving head first into audience research to understand who we're talking to. In essence: We have to think less like marketers and more like our audience. This presentation given at DMFB explores action-based methods to begin untangling how people think. Throughout the presentation, we explored: 1) How the brain is structured to process information 2) Key questions to ask ourselves during content and design planning to help us think more like our audience 3) User experience (UX) research methods to apply throughout content marketing efforts, such as interviews and contextual inquiries 4) How to synthesize varying depths of customer insights into strategic outputs to guide content creation, and 5) A step-by-step "audience first" content planning guide that serves as a jumpstart tool for building content marketing programs around humans Uncovering what motivates people, surfacing unknown needs and gathering insights will ultimately help us figure out how we can serve them better. Unpacking the answers to “Why” fuels user experience research. And when applied to content marketing, it paints a clearer picture of our audience and helps us create meaningful content and user-centered experiences that win attention, respect and loyalty. For more information, please visit http://www.centerline.net or find me on Twitter at @caitvsmith.