Sound familiar?

One of the biggest challenges companies face when designing their online presence is creating compelling content over the long term. It takes a lot of work to consistently crank out insightful blog posts, track conversations on social networks, and stay on top of the latest industry news. It’s hard to balance this with the day to day challenges of running a business – especially if you’re a smaller business.

How to Be the Master of Your Content Domain.
You work hard to plan your business – you have a sales plan, a human resources plan, and project plans. So, why not build a plan for your online content? Creating a content strategy is the first step towards being able to actually maintain consistent and compelling content across your online presence.

Answering the following questions may help you to start to get a handle on your web content strategy.

What are your goals?
What do you really want to achieve with your online presence? More sales? More attention? Brand extension? Defining measurable goals and objectives is a critical first step, for in order to get somewhere you have to know where you want to go.

Who is your audience?
Who do you want to attract? What are the characteristics of the people you want visiting your site? Where are those people hanging out now?

What stories do you want to tell?
What do you have to offer your audience? How can you make a contribution to the community?

What strategies will you employ?
Coming up with specific strategies that can be implemented over the short, medium and long term is critical to success. This is your to-do list.

What technology is needed?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Every company is different, and knowing your goals and audience will help determine what tools and technologies will work best for you.

Who is going to do the work?
This is often where it falls apart for most companies. It’s great to have goals, strategies, and content ideas, but figuring out who’s going to do what, and when, is key. You need to build an editorial calendar that’s realistic to how many people you have to do the work, and when they can realistically do it. Then, it’s up to you to ensure that it’s all happening as planned.

Having a content strategy in place is the only sure-fire way to ensure that your web presence continues to stay lively and relevant. It can be helpful to work with a content specialist to work out the plan and help you implement various aspects. The outside point of view can help you find the stories you need to be telling, and maximize the efficiencies of the technologies too. Additionally, someone who specializes in developing content can help you find creative ways to create content across various media like video, audio, and text. In the end, it’s all about having a plan that will help you meet your goals and do it in a way that’s realistic to the time, money, and ideas you have to put into it.

The same can be said for web sites. We’ve all been there – we launch a great new design, with spectacular new content, and then poof! Two or three years have gone by and not a stitch of it has been updated. The colours are bland. The technology is outdated. You are almost embarrassed to have the web site address on your business cards.

The solution? Start again and build a new site, of course! But building an updated site doesn’t always mean starting over. In many cases, our clients come to us because they’ve been told by someone that in order to do a proper update to their site, they have to start over from scratch, basically throwing away all the work they did before and spending exorbitant amounts of time and money to rebuild. We believe there’s a different way.

Sometimes a little TLC is all that’s required. There’s a good chance that you’ve got more going for you than you may think in terms of your web site. Many of our clients come to us with web sites that look circa 1997, but more often than not, they’ve got some great content lurking in the corners. We help them dig out the hidden gems, and explore other sources of content too. Almost everyone has brochures, ads, white papers, and presentations that they’ve been creating all along, even while the web site went ignored. All of that content is valuable. When we perform a content audit as a first step, we uncover the true stories, waiting to be told. With some close review and revision, we create a foundation. And with a foundation, there’s inspiration to find new ways to present the existing content in fresh, clean, clear new way. Think of it as cleaning house, putting a fresh coat of paint and some new pictures on the wall. After that, we do re-vamp of the look and feel and our clients are back in business, without the need to start from scratch.

A web site is ALWAYS a work in progress. With a fresh new look and feel and a message that sticks, you’re well on your way to regaining pride in your online presence. But it doesn’t stop there. Remember, the road to stagnant web sites is paved with good intentions. The last thing you want to do, after investing time and money into a freshened up site is let it go stale again. We tell our clients that building and maintaining a great web presence is about having a strategy in place to ensure its long term success and their positive return on investment. This means understanding their audience, understanding their lines of business, and understanding how they’re going to use online tools and techniques to connect with people and build lasting relationships that help their businesses to flourish. Businesses that succeed online do so because they have mastered the two-way human interaction that is fundamental and unique to online marketing, and because they are continually providing fresh, relevant content.

Ultimately, it comes down to your goals. It’s about understanding what you need to achieve with your web presence and then implementing a plan that is going to yield results. Keeping these things in mind, you’ll be well on your way to unveiling a new world of online opportunities that can only stand to benefit your business and your customers.