Content strategy in depth

Good content brings your prospects and existing clients closer to you, resulting in better quality leads and stronger relationships with your brand. Let's dive in to what you need to consider when planning a content strategy.

By understanding your audience, you can, in turn, hone in on what matters to them.

Many businesses and organisations have website content that focuses far too much about themselves and not the people they serve.

Why is this? Our suggestion might be what Simon Sinek identifies as “The Golden Circle”.

This is what “engagement” is all about.

We believe that if you take the time to ask these important questions and really understand the responses, the interactions you have with the people you serve will change forever.

If that wasn't enough, you'll also:

• Beat the competition as you'll be the ones creating the deeper connections with your audience. In turn, you'll avoid being compared on price points alone meaning you're at a competitive advantage.
• Build a sense of common purpose within your organisation; improving morale and collaboration.
• Be able to attract the clients you want, rather than the clients who happen to come knocking.
• Have clients chasing you, rather than the other way around.
• Have your clients be advocates for your brand and they'll be more likely to share what you have to offer with friends and colleagues. In other words, they do the selling or promotion on your behalf.

Sound too good to be true? That's understandable - these are big claims, but we've seen all of the above be true on almost every client project.

Why not ask us for more detail and we'll be happy to give you some real examples where our clients have been pleasantly surprised.

We'll let you into a little secret. Well, not so much a secret, because it's important to know:

Our team have had extensive, in depth sales training!

While this shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise, it does make some of our client curious. You may be thinking:

Well, everything!

Our sales training has been invaluable in helping our clients connect with their prospects, write engaging content for their websites and drive their businesses forward.

For some, “sales” is somewhat of a dirty word. It conjures up images of unsolicited phone calls, well-rehearsed scripts recited by sales reps and people trying to getting to us buy their product or service even though they know nothing about us. Does this sound familiar?

However, what does “sales” actually mean? What should it mean? Let's suppose the following was how we define sales:

Sales (noun): The activities that an organisation does to reach new and existing customers for the purpose of seeking mutually beneficial value.

We think that's a reasonably decent definition.

The tone, timing and the type of content you publish speaks volumes about your brand, and your services. Timely blogging, content that is easy for your audience to understand and engaging content such as video and imagery can really make the difference between a website that's just 'ok' to one that really captures your audience and grows the brand loyalty you need in order to turn your prospects into customers. And to keep your existing customers coming back time and again.

Along with a great overall digital marketing strategy, and a well-built and structured website, a co-ordinated, consistent, and well composed content strategy will give you the power to reach more of your audience, get them hooked, and keep them interested. It'll help your search engine rankings by making sure your content is as relevant as it can be, and keep your presence current and front of mind with your audience. It can also help your professional networking and business partnerships, and keep your website fresh and exciting. With our content management tools and professional guidance, you can keep your online presence alive and kicking.

Once you've refined the key messages for your website in line with your brand, the first step is to decide how best to categorise, link and structure your content (whether hosted on your website, or on your social networks for example).

We can then advise you how best to make these decisions and open up opportunities to keep your visitors on your website for longer. Some examples are:

• Feeds of content based on similar content to the article being viewed ('You May Also Like...').
• Feeds of promoted content for your home page - e.g. news articles and case studies (see our own home page as an example).
• Feeds of content from your other online channels such as LinkedIn or Twitter (see our footer).
• Videos, image slideshows and galleries.
• Search functionality that returns meaningful and filterable results for your visitors.

• Makes all your content easy to rationalise for your own content management.
• Having sensible structure for your website mean a more consistent experience for your visitors and provides easier navigation.
• In the future you have options for integrating with new technologies.

We can do many things to make your content work harder (and your content author's lives easier and more productive!).

• We can apply automatic image styles to you don't need to worry about getting your images ready for the web and cropped in all the right sizes etc. - your website will dynamically place them correctly for all devices.
• The same applies to your font styles and copy.
• While creating content, all you need to do is complete simple data entry forms and the rest is magically taken care of.
• We can help you to create whole programmes of scheduled content, that will release gradually on the dates and times you set, and publish automatically to your social networks or other systems.
• ...and so much more!

Content administration needn't be a mammoth task. Lets create the right content strategy for you.