Web Content Continuous Improvement Strategy
How did the need for detailed focus on content emerge in the heavily visually oriented field of web design? As website functionality has increased and web users have become savvier, sites have had to meet the demand for sophisticated interaction and more content to support it. However, simply more content won’t do; it has to be accurate and relevant. It has to be meaningful.
What is Web Content Continuous Improvement Strategy?
Web Content Continuous Improvement Strategy (WCCIS) or Content Strategy (CS) plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful and usable content. CS helps you understand not only what content needs to be created and published but why.
Content planning, oversight, production, need to share a new homebase. Content needs infrastructure, it needs to scoped and planned for not thrown together from brochures at the last minute. It needs, ownership, oversight, resources and priority.--Kristina Halvorson
At its best, a content strategy defines:
- key themes and messages,
- recommended topics,
- content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements),
- content gap analysis,
- metadata frameworks and related content attributes,
- search engine optimization (SEO), and
- implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.
In her groundbreaking article, Content Strategy: the Philosophy of Data, Rachel Lovinger said:
The main goal of content strategy is to use words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences. We have to be experts in all aspects of communication in order to do this effectively.
That’s a tall order. I’d like to propose that, in fact, there are far too many “aspects of communication” for a solitary content strategist to truly claim deep expertise in all of them. Instead, let’s assume that there are a number of content-related disciplines that deserve their own definition, by turn:
- Editorial strategy defines the guidelines by which all online content is governed: values, voice, tone, legal and regulatory concerns, user-generated content, and so on. This practice also defines an organization’s online editorial calendar, including content life cycles.
- Web writing is the practice of writing useful, usable content specifically intended for online publication. This is a whole lot more than smart copywriting. An effective web writer must understand the basics of user experience design, be able to translate information architecture documentation, write effective metadata, and manage an ever-changing content inventory.
- Metadata strategy identifies the type and structure of metadata, also known as “data about data” (or content). Smart, well-structured metadata helps publishers to identify, organize, use, and reuse content in ways that are meaningful to key audiences.
- Search engine optimization is the process of editing and organizing the content on a page or across a website (including metadata) to increase its potential relevance to specific search engine keywords.
- Content management strategy defines the technologies needed to capture, store, deliver, and preserve an organization’s content. Publishing infrastructures, content life cycles and workflows are key considerations of this strategy.
- Content channel distribution strategy defines how and where content will be made available to users. (Side note: please consider e-mail marketing in the context of this practice; it’s a way to distribute content and drive people to find information on your website, not a standalone marketing tactic.)
What is Web Content Continuous Improvement Goal?
Content Strategy goals are not about ‘just’ web writing, as that doesn't address strategic questions. It’s about making content useful and useable, purposeful and profitable resulting in higher quality content that improves customer service, leads, and brand integrity. Additionally, content strategy coordinates, collects, and preserves all digital assets and balances commercial objectives and informational needs that are sustainable, practical, on-brand, and legal, search engine-friendly and useable.
Why Does Web Content Continuous Improvement Matter?
Content matters because it tells a story; answers questions; inspires and entertains; drives decision-making; manages expectations; brings your brand to life; builds or breaks – trust. Content matters because “It's what informs customer action or inaction or both, online and offline".
It’s all about… who?
- Most sales and writing underperform because it’s all about the writer and not the reader.
- Business owners are in love with the company. Managers are in love with the company. Writers are in love with themselves.
- Who’s in love with the reader? Whos trying to figure out what their needs and wants
What if we asked these questions
- What are the commercial objectives of the site?
- Who are the target users? What do we want them to think, feel or do?
- What content in what formats will achieve both 1 and 2?
- What do we have already and how good is it?
- What additional content, formats, training, and guidelines do we require?
- How will we produce, publish, measure, and maintain this content? And who?
Quality Content Improves Reach, Engagement, Activation & Nurturing (REAN)
Continuous improving content allows content to reach prospects and customers via search engines and brand communications on publisher, social and other sites. Quality content can engage customers through its effectiveness and credibility. Quality content can convert (activate) engagement into business value - generating leads and sales. Quality content nurtures building relationships throughout the customer lifecycle through online and community content.
What Does Web Content Continuous Improvement Strategy Solve?
Content strategy can solve Digital Medias’ old problems such as lack of content ownership or expertise; post launch content production erosion and lack of standards. Moreover, CCSI can solve Digital Medias’ new problems such as quantifying revenue models; search engine optimization; social media; multichannel content production; user-generated content and other technologies. Content strategy treats content like a critical business asset that optimizes conversations with customers, vendors, and employees.
The idea that companies must “delight” their customers has become so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort – the work they must do to get their problem solved does.--Harvard Business Review
Research shows that loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Yet most companies have failed to realize this and pay dearly in terms of wasted investments and lost customers.
The single most important thing a website can offer it’s customers is content that’s valuable and it can do that by identifying and reducing the effort it takes to complete that task.
The essence of the web is action. We go to the Web because we have a task; there’s something we need to do; there’s a problem we need to solve. --Killer Web Content, Gerry McGovern
Low effort produces the following results:
- 94% of customers who low effort content strategy experiences said they would repurchase from the same company
- 88% of low effort customers said they would increase their spending
- 81% of the customers who experienced high effort activity said they would engage in some type of negative word of mouth
Content makes money by influencing customer decisions, building trust, providing purchase path instructions, up-selling, soliciting feedback or request for information. Organizations are beginning to understand that a long with the products and services they offer, one of their core products is information. Content is always about what the reader needs or wants, not about the company itself. This is where most marketers go wrong - they want to talk about their needs/their products/their services. The art of understanding what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a compelling way is called - Content Strategy.
Web Content Continuous Strategy can help create better user experiences by assisting brand development, information architecture, search engine optimization and marketing, web writing, web design, and so much more.
