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Content is King – So What's Your Content Strategy?

kingmark_cogginsYou’ve heard it before – content is king.  Well without regularly updated useful content your business website will stagnate.  It’s the end of the year and a good time to reflect on how you’re using your website and the Internet to further your business goals.  Take a few minutes to think about how you can use content to help your customers and further your goals.  The good news is that content strategy can be cheap (in dollars) to implement and can provide excellent returns on investment (helping you reach your goals).  Here are some questions to consider in your content strategy:

  • What goals are you trying to reach with your content?
  • How will you measure your progress towards those goals?
  • What content should you provide?
  • How often will you post new content?
  • What types of content will you post (text, audio, video, images)?
  • How will you use your content and get your message out to your customers?
  • How will you connect with your customers and have rewarding, useful conversations?

In the next few posts I’ll give you an example of a content strategy that can work for any business and how to measure progress towards your business goals.

(photo by Mark Coggins @ Flickr CC)

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To Twitter or Not To Twitter

Twitter has become fairly popular over the last year and is a powerful tool for communicating with your customers.  However, as with most business decisions, you should consider some things before you make your decision:

  • Is Your Audience on Twitter? Search for some of the keywords important to your industry to see if your audience is on twitter.  Even if there are only some, it may be worth at least monitoring twitter.
  • What’s being said? – If your customers and industry is on Twitter.  What are they saying?  You can use tools such as Tweetscan, Twitscoop and Twist to take a look at conversations and keywords.
  • What will the effect be on your brand and reputation? For some brands, their reputation may be negatively affected if they are not actively participating on Twitter.  Everyone should be aware that anything said on Twitter will be around in the future via search engines.
  • Who will tweet and monitor? It may be helpful to have multiple people using Twitter, but they should have a general idea of what is ok to say and what the plan is for using Twitter for the company.
  • What persona will you use? Does your brand or company have a mascot or other persona you should use?  If multiple people are tweeting, make sure they aware of any personas.
  • How will you integrate Twitter with your website and other marketing efforts? Twitter makes it fairly easy to include your tweets on other websites.  Where will you include it?  How will you let your customers know about it?
  • To follow or not to follow? When people start following you on twitter, will you follow them in turn?  This may make it easier to follow conversations (and it is a nice gesture), but following unsavory feeds may not be a good idea either.  Deciding on a follow policy beforehand can make it easier.

If you are already using Twitter for your business, what did you consider beforehand?  What advice would you give to others who are trying to make the decision?

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Why Every Business Should Have a Content Management System (CMS)

cmsdandelucaYou may not be aware of whether you have a content management system (CMS) for your website.  However, if you have a system that allows you to change and add content to your website without coding in HTML or some other language (php, asp, etc.), then you probably do. I think having a CMS is key to making your website work for your business goals and here’s why:

Ease of updating content

Having great content that is updated regularly is key to attracting visitors to your site and getting repeat visits.  A good CMS will give you the ability to regularly update your content without having to have a developer hand code everything for you.

Multiple types of content

Sometimes it makes more sense to create a video to show how a product works than just having a written article.  You should be able to easily add different types of content to your website with a CMS, enhancing the customer experience.

Ability to publish to multiple channels at once

Most readers still come directly to your website, but others will read your content through an RSS feed, or on an aggregator site.  Having a CMS which supports XML (RSS) feeds will make it much easier for your content to get out into the wild and give your customers the option to read it however they want.

New features

If you choose a CMS with a good development cycle, you’ll be able to implement new features and ideas as they hit the market.  While a website doesn’t need to be cutting edge, it’s a good idea to keep up with features that most visitors expect.

Accessibility

While it isn’t dependent on a CMS, most CMS’ include good accessibility practices which allow your content to be visible to people on a wide variety of devices (mobile, text readers, etc.).  This will become even more important in the near future as the mobile market continues to grow.

Portability

A CMS usually stores all your content in a database so even if you move to another CMS it should be possible to migrate your content.  Many CMS’ have the ability to export your data in a way that can be imported elsewhere as well.  Having a site in HTML or some other language is also portable, but a CMS separates your content (important!) from the design and functionality of the site, making it much easier to switch to something else.

Focus development on differentiators

Having a CMS lets your developers focus on features that may differentiate you from your competition.  This helps put expenses into projects which are more easy to measure return on investment (ROI).

Let experts work in their expertise

Designers, programmers and consultants can still be very valuable to your business, but now they can focus on what they do best – making great, usable designs and functions to help you attain your business goals.

Support

A CMS is a product that comes along with its own support system.  If you have a custom-coded website and it breaks, you have to spend time and money getting it fixed, instead of running your business.

Summary

Even with a CMS there is a time for custom-coded features, but a CMS will give you the ability to spend effort on those features that will make a difference to your business instead of re-inventing the wheel.  One caveat – if your website is a product or service, you’ll obviously want to spend time developing that product.  But even then, you should still have some way to create and edit content on your site, and that still means a CMS of some kind.

(photo by dandeluca @ Flickr CC)

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