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.

Content Marketing: The Next Big Thing

Apparently this is the year of “Content”. Conferences, articles, books, white papers, entire special editions of trade rags… all about the vital role of CONTENT in the online space. And more than a few of the items read as though they were explaining the dark side of the moon. My personal favorites are the ones that start with explaining what “content” is… now, there’s some remedial content.

I’ve been working to develop sites and eCRM programs that broadly meet the needs of desired participants since 2001. Looking back on many of these efforts, it’s true that there has been a real issue with providing information that users were seeking on sites, or interested in reading in email campaigns. Target users consistently request and value in-depth information about products and services, yet marketers struggle to develop content beyond three paragraph descriptions filled with positioning statements.

How did we get to this strange place?

You’d think that the opportunity to provide strong introductory copy, good differentiating information, and increasingly detailed product facts would be just a standard practice. That’s far from the truth. Early on in the online space there was a strong desire to replicate traditional advertising and sales models in a digital manner. Consumer sites pretty rapidly formed as either “brand experiences” or eCommerce, while B2B sites were little more than well organized brochures.

Over the years I’ve had to be an evangelist for content on quite a few occasions. And true to form, evangelists can end up being martyrs, too…

In late 2005 our agency got one of the largest consumer battery brands as a client. I was assigned to lead a discovery project that would drive a full site redesign. I immediately reviewed the site analytics and fielded an online survey to discover that people actually came to the site to learn about the product – especially more specialty products like hearing aid batteries and the like. Sadly, the site was almost entirely geared at the iconic nature of their brand advertising. And the marketers couldn’t part with their advertising-centric low-interest site.

Not long after that I worked on the largest athletic drink brand. I was excited when they decided to move all of their sweepstakes registrations online as they would be gathering over a million brand loyalists emails a year! Imagine my shock when I met with the CMO to discuss the amazing CRM opportunity that this afforded… to be told that really, they didn’t have any desire to engage in an ongoing dialog with consumers because she believed they didn’t really have enough content or desire to create more.

B2B marketers haven’t been much better. Another of my clients was a large B2B eCommerce player who wanted to be seen as providing business solutions, not just product from a catalog. They were also ceasing production on an established print magazine they had done for a number of years. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to create an eZine that would focus on the needs of their core customers and also position some of their products. The development was incredibly difficult as their site didn’t really allow for content modules and we had to go with a microsite. They had tremendous traffic and interest, yet there was a concern that it didn’t tie directly enough to commerce. Okay, okay, at least they did build and maintain the content.

Why the sudden interest then?

Four factors seem to have come together to finally push content development to the forefront:

• Proven demand – as marketers become aware of specifically how their site is being used from site analytics, they’ve come to realize that information about products / services is nearly always the top area of focus, yet rarely very engaging


• Email marketing – the desire to link email campaigns in to a broader conversation has always required content, but has not often been a fully realized opportunity


• Search engine optimization – a major spark, SEO experts have consistently lobbied for more and deeper content to improve keyword rankings


• Social marketing – ongoing interaction and dialog has both created much better understanding of customer interests, as well as heightened the need for content

Although some of these drivers are as old as the Internet, it’s the recent push to social marketing that seems to have really created the storm of interest.

My next few blogs will expand on a process to identify and develop high impact content. Watch for them!