Content and Contact Strategies

Your content and contact strategies also factor into balancing the ecosystem and how it relates to your brand. For example, if you’ve determined that your particular audience needs a very high knowledge value, then your strategy will be driven by a need to provide informative, research-oriented content – something that’s actually building up that value in a way that meets audience needs.

At the same time, you may need a contact strategy that keeps the user in the fold if there’s an exceptionally long sales cycle. So, interspersing bits of content according to a timeline – on a quarterly, monthly, or even biweekly basis through the sales cycle – will potentially result in increased conversions.

But again, this is not about making sure your users have more advertising in front of them. You don’t want to be bombarding them with messaging when they’re not ready for it yet. It’s about creating content that’s valuable to users – whether it’s produced directly by your firm, drafted by a hired copywriter or syndicated from other sources. There are other ways to provide your user with value through content, too, by leveraging user-generated content, as well as widgets and things of that sort, if they fit with your brand.

The advantage of a strategy based on providing content that doesn’t need to be highly produced (such as the content developed directly by your staff, syndicated content or user-generated content) is that you can continuously impart value at a very low cost, at the same time tying that in with a low-cost contact strategy via email. That supports your contact strategy because it will allow you to reach out to a user with purpose and reason. The continued contact will keep them in the sales cycle and keep your costs low.

While there are sites that have real gold in terms of native content, not everyone is going to have that kind of material to offer. Don’t automatically sell yourself short, though. If you have an office full of engineers, you might think you’re really going to have a hard time coming up with compelling content, but maybe the best behind-the-scenes and how-to content can come from a solid engineering staff. If you don’t believe that, check out the magazine Make.

One thing that’s essential is to make sure you have a clear set of objectives before you try developing your content strategy. Unless you need to speak to a highly technical audience, keeping your content bite-sized is the most important factor after remaining on brand message.

Other questions to ask yourself: Are you trying to be sticky or convert visitors? What types of content assets are actually available?

Regardless of your strategy, keep it short and keep it relevant. It’s also a good idea to seed your content with important keywords. You may even want to think about things like syndication.

Remember that developing an in-depth content strategy isn’t for every company. If it isn’t in your DNA – and, just as importantly, if it’s not useful to your audience – then don’t force it. Just work with a publisher to get the impressions you need elsewhere. But if you do have natural talent or content that creates an experience, then by all means, use it.

One final caveat on content. It’s tempting to count entirely on user-generated content to build your site. But don’t. First of all, the number of active contributing users on the web is a lot lower than you probably expect, and for any specified demographic it could be significantly lower. Second, many of those individuals need a stage for their expression –whether they are doing it for popularity, or notoriety. Unless you can provide a sizable audience, you won’t be an attractive venue. Moreover, without a large audience, it’s unlikely you can find a democratic way to determine whose contributions should rise to the top. This lessens your chances of building out a content base with user-generated contributions.