In this month’s article, “Want a Smooth Website Build? Let’s Talk About Content!” Lis speaks to the importance of having a strong content strategy to guide the development of your website. When you take this approach and understand its value, you’re more likely to have a seamless website build and a final product that appeals to your target audiences. To begin developing content that will ensure website success, you’ll want to first examine your business and its goals followed by the needs of your audience.
- Content & Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand – Just as Lis mentioned, the marketing world is full of content cliches and while they may be relatively annoying at times, there’s no denying they generally have their roots in truth. One such cliche would be “content is king,” but just as a king rules throughout his whole realm, content rules over the whole marketing realm because if you don’t have good content, people will find another source for their information. For this reason, we cannot emphasize enough how having a good content strategy at the start of your website build will make the website design and development that much easier.
- Discern Where You Are & Where You Want to Be – The term “content” is quite broad, which begs the question of where to even begin. Start by determining whether you already have a website or not. If you do, take an inventory of what you currently have and areas you can improve and streamline content. If you do not have a website, start by figuring out what information you think is essential to your business and begin a rough idea of how you want to “map out” the site. Bring these plans and ideas to your introductory meeting with our web and content development team, and we can help you organize and optimize the website to meet your marketing needs.
- Cater to Your Audience – Once we have developed a preliminary strategy for your content, but before we get to actually writing it, we’ll want to determine what people you want to attract to your website. As Lis mentioned, one tool we like to use are personas, which outline who your “ideal” target audience members are, what their story is and what they are looking to accomplish on your website. These personas will help us further refine your site map, consider site navigation and start developing calls to action.
- Provide Clear Direction for Your Audience – Speaking of calls to actions, this is one area that can also be easily overlooked in content and website development. Because the online world is ever-changing and very competitive, you need to ensure visitors to your website can find what they’re looking for quickly, otherwise they will move on to the next source of information in a heartbeat. One tool that will help you succeed in keeping visitors on your site are well-developed, purposefully-placed calls to action that clearly direct visitors to complete tasks, such as using your services, purchasing products or contacting you for more information.
- Consider Your Audience’s Prior Knowledge – Another important aspect of content on websites is finding a balance between educating your audience while not talking over their head. Content wise, that comes down to your use of verbiage and industry jargon. Website wise, that comes down to how you communicate your message visually (e.g. text, charts, tables, infographics, videos) so you can reinforce your brand standards. One tool to help with gauging your audience’s prior knowledge would be the smart use of keywords throughout your site, which will help optimize your SEO, guide more visitors to your site and provide them with relevant information. This tool is another aspect we’ll want to discuss with you from the onset of a website build.
Do you need help creating content or websites that click with your audience? Please give us a call at 701-478-1111 and ask to speak with a Marketing Advisor, or visit absolutemg.com/contact to get started.