Over the past few years, we have been continually evaluating our marketing plan based upon the introduction of new technologies and trends, as well as our own experience from the field. As a result, we’ve come to a better understanding of who we are as a company, what we do best, who we do it best for, and how to talk to those people about what we do. It sounds simple, but I believe that this is the clearest statement of what it means to be a healthy company right now. But, in addition to our company’s self-awareness, it is evaluation of data like the visitors to conversions set that has really enabled us to solidify our web content strategy. We demonstrated our most current web content strategy method in a webinar on The Modern Marketing Website, in which Mark O’Brien identified a four-step process to a more value-oriented strategy.
Step 1: Planning
Planning involves properly identifying the audience you really want to speak to and the types of content most appropriate to that audience. In the context of planning, an audience is often comprised of multiple personas- specific types of people identified by all kinds of criteria including age, gender, geography, role, professional goals, etc. depending upon the type of product or service you are offering. It’s helpful to even give them names, perhaps after actual people you’ve worked with in the past. Unfortunately, identifying personas requires that two often separate sides of a company join together, and this is often where planning can go awry.
One of the key missed connections in my statement above (“we’ve come to a better understanding of who we are as a company, what we do best, who we do it best for, and how to talk to those people about what we do”) was connecting the prospect with themessage. People in new business development venture out, making new relationships, and in the process gain significant knowledge about what their prospects need. Meanwhile, people in marketing send out mass messaging hoping to engage interest from prospects in what their companies do. But are the business development and marketing teams talking to the same people? I’ve noticed that, surprisingly often, they are not. This means that if each team were tasked with identifying personas, their choices would probably not be the same either.
In our own case, it was only after merging the perspectives of new business development with that of marketing that we were able to come to a point of clarity as to who our actual personas should be. Once you’ve done the same thing, you can proceed with planning the types of content that would be most effective in engaging the needs of your prospects and bringing them into relationship with you. This might include writing newsletters, blogging,creating videos, webinars, practical use of social media, and the like.
Step 2: Writing
Since the majority of your website’s content is likely to be written, it’s safe to generally identify the process of creating content as writing. For the most part, even videos and webinars begin as written content. But as I mentioned at the outset of this article, you must strategically orient your writing toward people. Many of our clients mistake search engine optimization as the only reason to write. But search engine optimization is merely a tactical approach to increasing your content’s visibility. In other words, optimizing your content for search engines helps get people to your content, but it doesn’t help them read it. So good writing must come first, and since robots don’t read, writing for them will not be good writing. I’ve already said quite a bit about writing in the past, so I’d encourage you to watch my presentation on Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer, or read How to Write a Newsletter.
Step 3: Engaging
The third element involves engagement with your audience through your site and other social channels in order to build relationships with them around your expertise. Your offsite interactions, whether they be comments and conversations on industry forums or blogs, Twitter posts, or the like, are a form of content as well. Again, this is a topic we’ve said quite a bit about already, so take a look at our webinar on A Practical Guide to On-Site Social Media, or our newsletters, A Practical Guide to Social Media and Doing More with Less, which discusses how to implement clear calls to action on your site.
Step 4: Measuring
A content strategy can only be deemed valuable by being continually calibrated based upon your evaluation of external feedback and data collected through the analytics tools you use on your site. This requires a basic understanding of how to use google analytics, the key metricsyou should routinely be paying attention to, and organizing that data based upon converting traffic to specific goals (i.e. content subscriptions, event registrations, purchases, meeting requests, etc.).
While no one step in this process is more important than another, measuring will have the most impact upon each of the other three- that much is clear from the visitor-to-conversion data I showed earlier. Your planning, writing, and engagement should all be continually tweaked based upon the reality of the data you collect, particularly if that data shows search referrals delivering fewer conversions.
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