Web Content - Too Easily Ignored
Today more and more content is sloshing onto the web as people rush to fill their websites with content, under the mistaken impression that more is better.
This is in fact not so – content without purpose and strategy is nothing more than wasteful trash – gumming up the system and stemming the flow of useful and relevant information. Creating content for content’s sake is a big mistake. Content has to have meaning and purpose. For content to be meaningful it must:
- Specifically and authentically embody your brand
- Help your audience DO something. This can take the form of finding useful, useable information on an actual problem, convert viewers to customers, or by helping them find the correct product.
Content strategy is built upon three pillars:
Delivery
Governance
At LightSpeed, we will be undergoing a small content strategy process, focusing on the Blog section of our website, and sharing our findings.
We’ll be utilizing the 3 steps method, and going into each Step with more clarity as we go along. But for now these are the 3 Steps:
Step 1: Audit
A content audit is necessary to find out and document what type of content you have and if it’s useful or not.
Useful content is content that serves a clearly defined purpose, be it for your business or project objectives or to your customer or audience needs.
A content audit can also form the basis for when you need to decide what content to create next, by showing what content you currently have, where it’s situated on your website, and how popular and successful the existing content has been.
Step 2: Analysis
Web content does not live in a vacuum. Organizational goals, real world resources, who your users are, what they want, competitor activities and other factors all affect whether or not your web content will be successful.
During the Analysis phase, the objectives, assumptions, risks and success factors of the content in question has to be decided and documented.
Step 3: Strategy
The result of the strategy phase is to create actionable, achievable recommendations for content creation, delivery and governance.
This will include recommendations on voice and tone of content, style guidelines, metadata, content sources as well as the schedule for creation, publishing and maintaining your content.
For more information on Content Strategy in the digital age, check out Kristina Halvorson’s excellent book on the subject – Content Strategy for the Web
