Developing a Strong Content Strategy

Similar to the weather, everyone’s talking about CONTENT, but no one’s doing anything about it. Seriously, how many pages of fresh, new client-interest content did you create for your website last week. Last month? Last year?

In the broad list of priorities every marketer has, website content development has a difficult time competing with more immediate and measurable tasks.

I’d like to propose a four-step process to get past this inertia:

1. Complete a journalistic review of your current content.

Read your Top 10 most trafficked pages. Then, go to your favorite magazine’s site and read a few articles. Notice a difference? Journalists are trained to write content that pulls you deeper in to the story. Their sites—commonly referred to as “editorial”—have much longer engagement times than most marketing sites. One article leads to a blog or reviews, which lead seamlessly to another. Would your company benefit from users spending more time on your site?

A good first step is to engage a professional journalist or a journalism student to evaluate the editorial quality of your site content. Have them grade the top 100 pages, and use these evaluations as a starting point for your work.


2. Consider content in different forms and formats

While you were on the editorial site, you probably noticed that the content comes in many formats—long-form articles, short punchy quotes, polls, videos, images, reviews, etc. It’s been proven that the more variety you offer, the more users engage.

This year, try to add two new forms of content that would be relevant to your users.


3. Create an annual editorial plan with monthly benchmarks

One of our clients recently started getting serious about refreshing content on their site by creating a biweekly homepage refresh schedule. Working with the broader marketing team on these refreshes drove a greater sense of urgency to refresh content throughout the site.

Try this, or a similar tactic to get the organization focused on fresh content for a fresh year.


4. Find efficient development resources

Interns. Freelance journalists. Two great sources for content development employed by editorial sites to publish the huge volume of content they create on an annual basis. You probably won’t get your management team or fellow marketers to write content to a level you need, but you can probably get them to sit down for an informal interview with a trained writer on your staff.

What tips are we missing? Please share your own content strategy in the comments.