Most often when we fail to achieve the results we are after, it is due not to inadequate effort, but to doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We tend to set goals far more easily than we determine how to actually achieve them. And yet, when we don’t reach our objectives, we are confounded as to why. This truth is at the core of why many companies (including Newfangled) struggle with maintaining a web content strategy: We know the results we’re after, but we don’t go about achieving them in the right way. We know that our goal is to build our businesses, so we must shift our focus to online engagement. But we are often reticent to let the chaos of constant and ubiquitous content remain the status quo and search engine optimization the only means to that goal. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So we do, creating plenty of meaningless content and burning out in the process.
This month, I want to share with you the conclusions we’ve come to about the right way to conceive and execute a web content strategy. Put simply, it comes down to the answer to one question: Who are you speaking to? Only by clearly identifying your prospects can you go about creating content that is truly valuable. Oh, and despite the obvious importance of search engine optimization, please don’t misidentify search engines as your prospects. Robots don’t read, people do.
What is valuable is entirely subjective, so for the purposes of this article, I’d like to define what I mean by valuable content in this way: Valuable content is material created for your prospects that engages their need and brings them into relationship with you. This definition may require you to completely rethink your content strategy. Or it may simply merit a subtle tweak in factors like the type of content you’re creating, messaging, or frequency. Either way, if you do calibrate your strategy for value, your content will be more in tune with the needs of the people you are positioned to speak to by your expertise, and therefore much more likely to convert them from passive readers to real prospects. But before we get into our conclusions about how to create valuable content, I’d like to demonstrate how the evaluation of our own website data brought us to them.
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