Content strategy is more important than a lot of people think, but that’s mainly because of the hype that surrounds SEO. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is super important for your entire site, but content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive.

Think about a piece of paper that is shredded into a thousand little pieces, these pieces represent each page on your site. To help those pieces be more understandable, we’ll have to pour on some glue to mend them back together – that’s our SEO. But sometimes things get messy and we realize that we don’t actually need or want all of those thousands of pieces, because people don’t really like the dull, ugly pieces. So, we cut out the ugly pieces and we’re left with a beautiful, bright and shiny collage that even a child would appreciate (this analogy has gone too far). The point is that, that beautiful, bright and shiny collage is your content strategy. Of course there’s a lot more to it, but the results typically pay off for you and your readers/customers.

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Your CMS should bring your content creation and editing processes into the 21st century. (Photo: Creative Commons License)

If your company is in the market to upgrade their CMS platform to a shiny, new model, or just beginning to research options, it’s important to compare all the bells and whistles you’ll need to keep  your web experience management (WEM) capabilities strong, relevant and fresh. There are many newer features out there you may not have even thought were available, and some that will quickly turn into favorites making you wonder how you ever survived without. Take some time here – and over the next few posts – to familiarize yourself with some of the coolest features built into the iAPPS Product Suite, and then imagine these capabilities as an intrinsic part of your content management process. Chances are that much of the intuitive basic functionality built into iAPPS holds what you’re looking for – whether you know it yet, or not.

To effectively research a solution, step away from the processes and environments you’ve become accustomed to and really look to identify the goals you’re trying to accomplish – on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. Then, ask how your CMS can help you to achieve those goals. Too often, users take current processes – frequently and unnecessarily complex – completely for granted. This narrow view makes it hard to be fully aware of any potential new functionality that may be available that can actually make a difference. As you vet all the possibilities, be sure you’re not missing the chance to solve many of your problems with the right CMS by identifying all the options available to you. (more…)

Make your content work for you over and over - re-imagine, don't just recycle. (Photo: apSos.de)

This past week, My good friend Ann Handley and I participated in a Webinar about re-imagining your content. The main takeaway:

Don’t just re-purpose your content. Look at it and figure out ways to present it to new audiences, in new formats and with differing end-goals. Re-imagine, don’t recycle.

In a nutshell:  Build out a plan – by quarter, by year, by season – with focus on each section on a single theme. Next, build one major piece around that theme that covers all you want visitors, customers and readers to take away from your business. You’re the expert, and here is where you prove it. It can be in the form of a seminar or presentation, a white paper or eBook, or some other weighty item – as long as it’s both focused on the current  theme, and complete enough that it covers many angles.

Next, use that larger piece to make smaller, bite-size, well-timed, targeted chunks that you can use to spread the word out over time, assert your industry expertise across a few different channels and keep interest in the theme high – all of which will consequently keep visitors coming to your site for more.

Sounds simple? In essence it is – but it’s hard work, as Ann and I discussed. (more…)

I write a lot of content on the Internet.  Sometimes it’s for personal reasons, other times for SEO blogs and this blog, and a lot more for Bridgeline clients.  Each of these outlets has its own unique personality, and that personality has to show through the voice in the writing.

First of all, the writing (or content) voice has to be concise across the entire site, because it is technically the personality that represents the company, but this can be hard to do – especially when there are multiple people adding content to a single site.  So, it’s important to figure out what that voice is and make sure that everyone involved with writing on the site is informed as to what that voice should be.

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It’s no secret that one of the cornerstones of Web Experience Management (WEM) is the common eNewsletter, and your subscribers are each a piece of marketing gold – directly attached to traffic, engagement and, yes, conversions. While it wouldn’t be wrong to call each email address a lead, it would be discounting their potential. More accurately described, your subscriber list is a screened and vetted collection of opt-in, targeted, hungry leads, complete with a stated interest in exactly what your website has to offer.

Money can’t buy love

It seems obvious that one of the most important things you can do to increase your site’s web engagement would be to grow your e-mail list, organically rather than by purchase of addresses. One way to accomplish that is through goal oriented, multi-channel campaigns and by applying constant optimization to your website landing pages and form pages. (more…)

In today’s web-covered world, everything is richer, faster, more colorful, and more relevant to each user. The old bait & hook, mass-blast marketing isn’t enough anymore, and can genuinely annoy its intended target – your potential customers. Marketers need to focus their messaging efforts now, more than ever, across multiple channels to effectively manage successful web engagement, and they need to take advantage of tools that can help them do just that. Today’s Web Engagement Marketing (WEM) strategies require an implementation that is derived from specific goals or objectives, and campaigns need to be able to be easily and quickly altered in individual channels for continuous optimization.

Goal Driven Marketing involves setting specific goals for an overall campaign and deploying a WEM strategy that exploits various channels to achieve those goals and that can be measured against benchmarks that make sense to your company. Effective Goal Driven Marketing leverages accurate, relevant web analytics to enable real-time adjustment to each channel in order to reach and exceed these goals.

You do this now. Need to fill more seats for your next company seminar? You set a campaign goal for increasing the number of registrants then associate that goal to a series of channel actions: email campaigns, banner ads, paid search, social media efforts, etc. As the campaign progresses, you keep a close eye on analytics from each channel, figure out what is and isn’t working, then make necessary adjustments to optimize for maximum effect. (more…)