Christopher Butler

Storytelling is the Future of the Web
Most of the successful marketing campaigns that stand out in my memory all revolve around characters. Some of them are simply charismatic spokespeople, like Geico’s gecko, Nationwide’s “Greatest Spokesperson in the World, or, I suppose, Burger King’s creepy king. Others keenly represent the intended customer—think way back to Wendy’s “where’s the beef?” lady, or more recently to Apple’s mac and PC guys. In all of these cases, it was decided that a more compelling message could be created by using characters to tell a story, rather than putting the product itself front and center.

Relating to characters and their stories is essential in order for people to make an initial connection with brands. Sure, some brands eventually transcend the need for connection and become themselves defining characteristics of people. In fact, Apple’s “I’m a mac/pc” was somewhat self-referential in that way. But in the beginning, people need to connect with a story in order to believe that a product or service matters to them.
Of course, this isn’t news. This has been established marketing thinking for a very long time. But somehow, the concept of storytelling doesn’t seem to have worked its way down from the worldwide mega-brands to the next tier of businesses in which you and I work. But why shouldn’t it? After all, we’re endeavoring to speak to the very same people they are!
This month I’d like to explore storytelling, dispel the myth that we can’t tell stories on the web, and identify some ways we can hone our craft as web-based storytellers.
Read More >

Most of the successful marketing campaigns that stand out in my memory all revolve around characters. Some of them are simply charismatic spokespeople, like Geico’s gecko, Nationwide’s “Greatest Spokesperson in the World, or, I suppose, Burger King’s creepy king. Others keenly represent the intended customer—think way back to Wendy’s “where’s the beef?” lady, or more recently to Apple’s mac and PC guys. In all of these cases, it was decided that a more compelling message could be created by using characters to tell a story, rather than putting the product itself front and center.

Relating to characters and their stories is essential in order for people to make an initial connection with brands. Sure, some brands eventually transcend the need for connection and become themselves defining characteristics of people. In fact, Apple’s “I’m a mac/pc” was somewhat self-referential in that way. But in the beginning, people need to connect with a story in order to believe that a product or service matters to them.

Of course, this isn’t news. This has been established marketing thinking for a very long time. But somehow, the concept of storytelling doesn’t seem to have worked its way down from the worldwide mega-brands to the next tier of businesses in which you and I work. But why shouldn’t it? After all, we’re endeavoring to speak to the very same people they are!

This month I’d like to explore storytelling, dispel the myth that we can’t tell stories on the web, and identify some ways we can hone our craft as web-based storytellers.

Engaging

Depending upon your website content strategy, you’ll have many different opportunities to engage with your audience. If you maintain a user or customer forum, your engagement will be fairly traditional (i.e. responding to and participating in discussion threads), but most of today’s opportunities are centered around monitoring how people discuss your brand in online spaces you don’t control. On the other hand, if you maintain a blog or a regular on-site newsletter that allows reader comments, this is your best opportunity to bring those discussions to you. Don’t squander that opportunity. If you receive a comment, respond to it directly and quickly. Find out all that you can about the person who left the comment and find ways to connect with them. A simple Google search will probably help you to locate your commenter—perhaps on Twitter, LinkedIn, a company bio, or their own blog. Once you do, start to build a relationship by reading their blog and contributing to discussions around its posts. Remember, this is not to build incoming links to your site for search engine optimization. This is to engage and bring some humanity to your brand.

For those discussions and mentions of your brand offsite, make sure to participate in them as well. You’ll need to either use reputation monitoring tools or do it yourself using Google alerts and other RSS feeds to watch for mentions of your company, product or keywords related to them in blogs or on Twitter. You’ll probably have to set up a Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook account, too, if you haven’t already. If you’re groaning, I understand, believe me. But the reality is you can either build your online reputation yourself through this kind of engagement, or let others determine it for you.

For more information on engaging with readers, check out our newsletters,Monitoring Your Online Reputation and A Practical Guide to Social Media, or our blog posts on Using Social Media to Connect Professionally, how my blog comments attracted INC Magazine’s attention, and Allowing Un-Moderated and Anonymous Blog Comments.

Measurement

The importance of measurement is so clear that I’m not sure I need to put forth any argument for it at all. Keeping a close eye on on traffic and tracking data will help you to adjust your website to best serve its purpose and provide the best experience for its users. But the only way to do this well is to make it part of your weekly (if not daily) routine. The more activity your website gets, the more closely you’ll need to monitor the data you’re collecting. If you’re using Google Analytics, you have an incredibly powerful tool at your disposal, and a mountain of knowledge offered by Google themselves to help you use it to its full potential.

For more information on measuring your website, check out our newsletter onHow to Use Google Analytics and our blog posts on measurement (there are many).

The Cost of Complexity

The more complex a website is, the more work it requires to manage day to day—not to mention the more people required to do this work, the more functional upgrades or changes it will need over time, and the more it will cost to maintain. This is a simple principle that I call “the cost of complexity.” If you are planning for a website project or are getting ready to launch a new site, you will need to realistically plan for the amount of time and money you will spend on it in the year after it is launched. Yearly budgets for complex and active websites are often commensurate to the cost of the initial project; if the initial project cost $30,000, managing the website over the next year is likely to cost the same or more. If you are engaging and measuring to the extent you should be, you will discover many reasons to adjust and improve the design and functionality of your site moving forward.

Many websites quickly exceed the expectations of those who create them, in terms of lead generation and on-site activity, which is certainly something to celebrate. However, it’s also something to respond to quickly in order to make sure that a website’s architecture can sustain continued growth of the kind it’s already seen. In some cases, it may be necessary to rebuild the underlying architecture of a website, or at least a particular portion of it, in order to improve its performance given the level of user activity it has reached. For example, websites that allow user-generated content may become sluggish once the number of users or the amount of data they submit begins to exceed its initially expected capacity. It’s at such a point that reconfiguring its database would not only radically improve its performance, but also prevent it from becoming unusable.

The Long-Term Life Cycle

We have clients that we’ve worked with for over a decade. During that time, some have redesigned or completely rebuilt their websites multiple times. Beyond the cost of complexity issues I already mentioned, the long-term life cycle of a website typically involves various points at which business decisions or new technologies will make major update necessary. This could be an aesthetic facelift, a redesign based upon new branding, or a complete rebuild of the site. Whatever the case may be, we’ve observed that the normal pace for this sort of thing is every three to four years. If that’s shocking to you, consider that the Facebook was first opened to the general public only 3.5 years ago in September, 2006 (and redesigned multiple times since). A lot can change in just a few years!

On that note, we just redesigned and rebuilt our own website in January, which was the 7th version in 10 years!

If you’ve just gotten started with a new site, don’t worry too much about the next one yet. As I hope you’ve learned from this series on how a website is built, you have plenty to think about right now in order to get the most out of your website. But, it doesn’t hurt to think ahead, either.

12:33 pm • 8 March 2010 • 1 note

When it comes to creating content for the web, many often confusestrategy with tactics. I think that Wikipedia’s definition of strategy will help to clear this up a bit:

“A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. The word strategy has military connotations, because it derives from the Greek word for general. Strategy is distinct from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy. Military strategy is the overarching, long-term plan of operations that will achieve the political objectives of the nation. It is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals, strategy, operations, and tactics.”

A web strategy, then, is a “master” plan to achieve particular objectives, whether focused on user engagement, marketing or sales, that identifies who the audience is, and what types of content will be most effective. In other words, it’s the conceptual planning that needs to happen before you actually do any content creation. However, the act of creating any particular type of content, or the how—whether newsletter articles, blogs, whitepapers, or the like—is tactical. The tactical issues are the necessary practical steps that will enable the success or failure of your strategy.

Conceptual Planning

Ideally, much of the planning that will determine your content strategy will happen in a planning phase well in advance of the website going live. However, that doesn’t mean that the strategy won’t ever change. It’s very common for our clients to gain more clarity or new insight into their strategic direction once the site is live, has been used, and has gathered feedback. It’s at this point that those who manage the site may regroup and repeat—often in abbreviated terms—some of the initial planning steps like persona development. We’ve already written quite a bit on the subject of planning that I encourage you to read through if this applies to you:

For more information on planning and web content strategy, check out our newsletters on Who Are You Speaking To?, The Web Development Planning Process, How Much Work is a Website?, and Developing an Effective Content Strategy.

If you are clear on the objectives and the intended audience of your website, then the next step is identifying the particular types of content that are most appropriate to use. Written content, of course, will enable your site to gain the most traction from users coming in through search engines. The more written and indexable content on your site, the more accurately search engines can determine what your site is about and connect searchers (those looking for your material but not yet aware of it) to your site. But identifying content conducive to search engine optimization is only part of your strategy.

The other part of your strategy is identifying content that will actually speak to users in the most direct and satisfying way while reinforcing your brand as well. For many consumer products, blogs and video are the most user-friendly content types that can easily connect users to your brand and facilitate their engagement with you. However, for more technical products like software and hardware, additional types of content, like user and customer support forums, can be a great way of continuing the engagement beyond purchase, letting happy customers vouch for your brand and unhappy customers vent and receive help all in a setting you control. For business services, on the other hand, more in-depth and informative resources, like newsletters, webinars, or whitepapers, may be the most appropriate way to educate prospects. Whatever the choice, it should be made on the basis of what type of content is most appropriate to your message and intended audience, not what seems the most trendy at the moment.

Practical Planning

Once you have identified the types of content that you will be producing, you’ll need to get serious about your plan to produce. The best system for this is an editorial calendar that specifies who is responsible for creating each type of content, how often it will be published, and even the particular subjects that each piece will cover. This kind of structure allows you to think in advance about how to communicate your expertise over time,who on your team is best suited for specific subjects and/or methods, and provides accountability for everyone involved.

Keep in mind that no system alone will support your strategy. Everyone, from the top down, must be committed to the goal and the work required to achieve it. Creating content, whether writing blogs or newsletters or producing videos or webinars, takes a lot of time, so your editorial calendar needs to take this into account. If you are just starting out, consider a conservative publishing schedule (e.g. blogging a few times a week, writing a newsletter once a month, and producing a webinar quarterly) so that you can actually sustain the work your plan requires beyond the initial weeks of excitement around it.

12:06 pm • 3 March 2010 • 2 notes

The web—the entire web, including every individual website in it, even yours—is a work in progress. Once the initial planning, design, development and testing of a website is complete, there’s actually plenty more to be done. So before you schedule that vacation, make sure you’ve taken into account the content entry and go-live process, as well as the schedule you plan to follow moving forward with your website content strategy. Content entry? Go live? Content Strategy? If you’re hearing this for the first time, then stick around. This article is for you.

Last month, I began our short series on How a Website is Built by covering those initial planning and production phases, describing in detail how we prototype, design, build and test a website. This month, I’ll finish up the series by covering the last steps that occur before a site is launched and then some thoughts on the ongoing life of your website. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right to it…

11:07 am • 2 March 2010 • 2 notes

I’ve read plenty of interesting analogies used to explain what building a website is like. I’ve even written a few myself. From various points of view, a website could be compared to a car, a house, a cellphone, a movie, or all kinds of other things. I’ve even heard a website compared to a clown (don’t ask)! Most of the time, these analogies are striving to find the most effective way of emphasizing the time, cost, complexity or purpose of a website project. Rather than construct yet another metaphor around that point, I’m just going to come right out and say it: Building a website is a complex task that takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. But that’s not the really interesting part, is it?

The really interesting part is how it gets done. Think about some of the analogies I listed—a car, a house, or a movie. Each of these is obviously the result of a long, costly, and complex process. But a striking difference is where a car, house, or movie can be made with almost no direct input from the consumer, a good website cannot be built without significant involvement from the client throughout the project. It’s this difference that makes it so critical that anyone anticipating a web project be well versed in the process.

Over the next two articles, I want to show you what it takes to build a new website. This month, I’ll cover the planning, design, development and quality assurance stages of a project, focusing on how it all comes together through the work of developers like us and the people we work with. Read More >

10:00 am • 2 February 2010 • 3 notes

What a thrill—the latest version of Newfangled.com went live this morning! After six months in development, I’m so pleased with the results. The success of this redesign really comes as a result of one simple decision—to follow, for the first time, the same process we use for every one of our client projects. Our process enables the success of many new projects ever year by diligently pacing the client through every step, from planning to go live. Why not give ourselves the same value. So, starting with the budget and scope planning that happens in every sales negotiation, we treated ourselves just like a client. Once we determined our budget, we handed the project over to Katie and Brian to manage. They, along with Justin and Dave, showed us first-hand how valuable our process and people really are.

Planning and Prototyping

Our goals for this redesign were pretty simple. We needed our site to more closely reflect the identity of our company, to make clear and more easily accessible the huge amount of content it contains, and to simplify and focus the user experience to enable readers to more easily connect with us and our content.

During prototyping, we settled on a much simpler main navigation that exposed all the site’s main pages without requiring the user to explore any sub-menus. Our most important content, those pages that outline our process and contain our newsletter, blog, and webinars, had been buried beneath top-level pages that did not clearly indicate what they were about. This new approach divided our entire navigation system into three simple verticals: pages about our company, pages about our process, and pages containing the content we create to educate our industry. The image to the left shows a comparison between the old version of the site’s navigation and what we prototyped for our new version.

Another major change that we settled on early in prototyping was in making the homepage a much richer display of the most important and current website content. Our previous site’s homepage contained a long positioning statement, three videos, four calls to action, and several tiny links to new projects. In rethinking this experience, we realized how foolish it was to think that any user would respond to a call to action from the homepage when there was no real content to compel them. In our new version, we followed a simple principle for the homepage. Links to our most valuable and current content on the homepage ARE calls to action. If a user comes to the homepage, what’s most important to them is to see current activity and be led to experience new and engaging content. With that in mind, we replaced the positioning statement with an interactive overview of our process, and then added links to the most recent entries to our most valuable content, like our newsletters, webinars, blogs, case studies, and events.

Other key functionality decisions were made during prototyping, including adding a related content widget to subpages, creating a global advanced search tool, and replacing our portfolio gallery with a case studies section. More on those later.

Design

In redesigning our site, our main priority was to give it an updated look that accurately represented the personality of our company—a warm, vibrant, confident, and intelligent group of people—while not obstructing the content itself. Mark had received feedback on several occasions from people who really loved the mood of our people page. The images there were large and authentically communicated the warmth of our staff. So we knew that featuring our people and space in the design was key. Justin’s moodboards, shown below, focused on fusing a more contemporary look with more personal imagery.

The large interactive slideshow at the top of our homepage was designed to replace our positioning statement. We’d already (unsuccessfully) worked through several different approaches to this element during design when Justin created the sketch shown here. I love the way he rethought the interface, which starts by showing a glimpse into each of the process steps, ordered left to right, but then expands to reveal a fuller view with more text when the user selects one. As I said, we’d been batting around several sketches done in Photoshop for the slideshow, but Justin’s hand-done sketch really nailed it and restored everyone’s excitement about the project.

As for the rest of the design, be sure to spend some time clicking around the site. Justin exceeded everyone’s expectations by creating something that satisfied all of our goals while being completely different from what we may have envisioned at the start of the process.

Key Functionality

I mentioned earlier that we felt that our most important content was not as accessible as it could be. While the changes to our main navigation will help in making globally clear what kinds of content are available, we wanted to make another change that would help users connect to more content once they’d already made their way down to a lower-level page. Reviewing our Google Analytics over the past year lead us to conclude that we could improve our bounce rate by providing links to related content on our newsletter and blog pages. Many readers were coming to our site looking for information on a wide variety of topics, from design to web marketing, but once they’d read through the article they landed upon, they had no way of knowing that we probably had several other articles on that same topic. Dave built our new site to allow each piece of content to be categorized and tagged. We have a set number of general categories and an open tagging system; categories allowing for larger themes and tagging for specific topical connections. Rather than representing this taxonomy visually with a tag cloud or list of links, we chose to use it to drive our “Related Content” widget, which sits at the top right of every article and blog post on the site. The links to other articles are determined by a match in category and tags, and then ordered by recency.

Our previous site had a pretty basic text search option, which, frankly, was not that helpful. Users that are search-oriented rather than inclined to browse for content were likely to leave our site as soon as it returned a list of results to their query and never know how much helpful content we really had. Rather than building a complicated advanced search tool that required the user to filter through numerous types of content, we decided to follow the same approach as the search tool we recently built for Brahmin.com. Like Brahmin’s search tool, ours allows you to use intuitive search queries, which are matched with various kinds of content and ordered by type and relevance as you type. Dave even built this tool to pull images from the content and display them right with the listing in the search results. Spend some time playing with it. I’m pretty sure you’ll find something of interest to you.

Finally, we added case studies to our site. In the last version of our site, we had a buggy, flash-driven gallery showing all the various projects we’d done. By showing images the final designs, it may have been visually enticing, but it didn’t communicate the value we brought to each of our client relationships. Also, the list of projects was long, which mistakenly communicated a focus on quantity rather than quality. Today, we have a “Featured Projects” page that displays a focused group of in-depth project case studies. Each study reviews the project goals, major decisions made during the process, the budget and industry, and of course includes a beautiful slideshow of images from the final design. Take some time to read through them.

More Faces!

One last thing: Earlier I mentioned the compliments we’d received about our “People” page—particularly the images of each employee. We kept those images, but added landing pages for each person, which include a brief bio, a listing of projects from our “Featured Projects” section that they worked on, a listing of their most recent blog posts, what they’re currently reading, and links to other ways to connect to them online. I’m showing mine to the left because at the time of this writing, my page is the most “tricked out.” But be sure to read them all to get to know the wonderful people that work here and who deserve all the credit for our new site!

P.S. Ten Year Flashback!

Here’s a quick visual review of how Newfangled.com has evolved over the past 10 years:

9:07 am • 12 January 2010

10 Questions to Ask Before You Start Your New Web Project

Building a new website is a big deal. It takes a lot of time and effort from many people. If you were expecting to simply place an order and be notified when your site is done, you should be prepared for disappointment. That is how basic templates are delivered, not howgreat websites are built.

If you’ve ever been involved in building a house, you probably have some insight into how building a website really works. Before any wood is cut, thousands of decisions are made, from choosing a plot of land to choosing the knobs on the kitchen cabinets. In between is a wide spectrum of issues that concern many players—the architects, developers, construction workers, interior designers, landscapers, and of course, the customer. With the cost of the design and construction of a house, you’d expect the project to require a lot of time and effort from many people. We need to have the same expectation of web projects.

It’s the first month of the new year, and like most of us, new projects are probably on your mind. Now that I’ve generally set you up with more realistic expectations of scope, complexity and time, I’d like to recommend a few specific questions to consider in advance of any new web projects you undertake in the coming year…

10:00 am • 6 January 2010 • 3 notes

Social networks are voluntary, opt-in communities. Because they attract willing participants to a virtual setting, social networks coalesce largely around common interests rather than particular factors, such as location, gender, age, ethnicity, or occupation. When users encounter content within virtual social networks, they are “pre-qualified” for it and more likely to trust that it is more relevant to their interests than any content that appeared in their most recent search engine query. If a friend sends me a link or simply posts one to a social network profile, I am much more likely to consider it a recommendation worth following up with than one of the millions that return in search engine results. While this may not affect the fact-checking or “look up” power of search engines at the present time, top engines like Google know their days of search preeminence are numbered. Their Social Searchexperiment, which delivers results pulled from your specific social network within their algorithm-generated results, is indicative of their recognition that trust is central to the way people find and engage with content. People trust people and people act upon trust.

More >

11:10 am • 2 December 2009

We are all librarians now. I’ll back that statement up over the course of this article, but if you’re already picturing a stern, bespectacled figure who might shush you at any moment, think again. Today, our lives represent a fusion of roles hitherto segregated to a minor piece of society- the author, the producer, the librarian. The libraries I’m talking about are networks of content on the web, and they’re run by ordinary users just like you and me. We create the content, using all kinds of simple yet powerful tools, with a prolificacy unheard of ever before. With those same tools, we can immediately package our content for distribution. And any content we find valuable—whether our own or someone else’s—we make sure to quickly share with others. Like librarians, we guide the reading of our contacts, and they perform the same function for us. We are personally doing the creating, the organizing, and the connecting- and this changes how the content is found and received.

In past articles, I’ve focused on creative strategies and helpful tools to enable you to plan effectively and execute professionally on the web. But I haven’t taken a close look at how we as users organize all this content and connect other users to it. This effort is much bigger than individual applications and has become such a natural part of our daily lives that it just hasn’t stood out much. But it is now clear that the way we organize online is having a profound effect upon the world of search.

Search has changed significantly, and just as we adapted to the algorithmic approach of search engines, we must also adapt to today’s crowded social environment. This month, I’d like to look at the ways that our use of social tools affects how we connect with content, and the practical ways we can apply this knowledge to improve websites.

Read on >

10:00 am • 1 December 2009

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.

4:08 pm • 5 November 2009 • 1 note

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.