February 2008

Get Control of Your Web Content

Is this the year that you resolved to "get control" of your company's Web content? Here are the five things to remember as you develop your 2008 Web plan.

By John Kovacevich

How are you doing on those New Year's resolutions?

Yeah, me too. I really did want to drop a few pounds and clean out the garage, but I just have a million other things to do.

Companies with large websites often find themselves in a similar boat. They resolve to "get control" of their Web content, but the day-to-day work of keeping the site refreshed and running keeps such initiatives in the background.

But getting a handle on your content—strategically managing how it's created, deployed, and measured for success—is critical if you want to clearly demonstrate return on your Web investment.

Here's what you need to remember:

1. You need a content strategy.

   Does your company have a well-defined, broadly understood strategy for Web content?

   If you spend most of your time responding to requests to "get this posted on the Web," or have a dozen different business units creating stuff in their own silo, the answer is probably no.

   To develop a good Web content strategy, you must first understand your company's sales cycle, what your customers are looking for at each stage, and what you want them to do. Once you understand what your customers want, you can map out a strategy to deliver the appropriate content at the appropriate time.

   Your strategy must then be integrated into the tools your marketing teams use on a daily basis. These tools help stakeholders ask and answer the key questions before posting: Why are you adding it? What are you hoping to accomplish? Is it providing value to your readers? Will it move you closer to your business objectives?

2. A content management system is important, but it's not a strategy.

   Six-and-a-half years ago on this very website, I wrote a piece called "Making the Move to a Content Management System."

   Today, many of the ideas contained in the article are quaint. Content management systems are standard for large sites, and off-the-shelf software makes content management accessible for even the smallest organizations. But like I said back in 2001, a delivery system is not a content strategy.

   Many large enterprise sites have too much content. While the stats are fluid (and hotly debated), we're in the neighborhood of 30 billion Web pages now. Content management systems are partly to blame-they make it simple to post, so everybody does. But just because it's easier to do it doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

   A CMS without an integrated content strategy is like setting loose 1,000 construction workers to build a skyscraper without a blueprint. You'll end up with a building, but is anybody going to lease space?

3. Think of content in smaller, bite-sized pieces.

   There is a lot of buzz right now about modular content. Forward-thinking companies need to approach content in a new way.

   In the "old days," most people thought of Web content as a Web page. But now, a single piece of content may have online and offline applications-and online, it may be just one element on a given page.

   At Tendo we're developing tools to help companies strategically manage these individual content assets. It's more than a CMS—it's about using collaboration tools across the enterprise to give greater visibility into content creation. You can target content toward specific business objectives and leverage it as broadly as possible. You save money and time and increase ROI.

   Ironically, we're talking about fragmentation as a way to do more integrated marketing. By boiling content into its most modular elements, you increase flexibility and make sure that your messaging is consistent across communication channels.

4. If you can't measure it, don't do it.

   How do you know if your strategy is successful? You must be able to test and measure. If you can't measure whether an individual content asset is moving you closer to your goal, you shouldn't post it.

   And that's where metrics come in.

   Like content management systems, analytics tools have made Web metrics more widely available. It also means that many companies are drowning in Web metrics without a clear understanding of what they should do with the information.

   A good Web content strategy ties Web metrics into the sales cycle. It's not just about click-throughs, but demonstrating progress moving people from awareness to consideration to preference to purchase to loyalty. That's the true measure of Web success.

5. You need a maintenance plan.

   Too much content on your site has a negative impact on your bottom line. It can make it more difficult for customers to find the information that is most likely to move them forward through the sales cycle. Plus, maintaining an inventory of Web assets has associated costs.

   Companies should periodically review their Web assets, evaluate them in light of well-defined criteria, modify as necessary, and prune when possible.

   My colleague Ian Miller wrote a great piece last spring called, "Pruning your Online Garden." (We love our seasonal themes here at Tendo.)

   But before you prune, you need a plan of attack. To create that plan, you must first understand the landscape. That's why so many of our client engagements start with a content audit. You must understand what you have, map it to what you need, and identify the gaps.

To read more about our six-step approach to content audits, you can download the free "Tendo Tip Sheet" entitled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about a Content Audit, but Were Afraid to Ask."

About the author:

John Kovacevich still needs to clean his garage. He is also Tendo's VP of marketing services. Email him.