Content as Strategy II: Ten Ways to Improve your Content- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog

Jun 12th 09 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

Content as Strategy II: Ten Ways to Improve your Content

“In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty better than traditional marketing techniques.”
Wikipedia

Leave the church of information: get out of the habit of thinking of your Web site as an information repository. Sooner or later, this kind of thinking transforms your site into an information dump instead. Every decision about what should be on your site should be driven by user needs: what do your core audiences need to see?
Ask your users what they think of your content: take the scary, but bold step of surveying users about your content. What did they find useful? Most intriguing? Least helpful? Running a regular survey or even incorporating it as a permanent feature on your site will help you more accurately determine what’s fresh and not-so-fresh.
Keep an eye on how often your content is taken elsewhere: are prospective students passing links to your content around the social Web? Anybody talking you up on Twitter? Del.icio.us? These, too, are good measures of your content’s impact.
Make someone the content removal champion: we often spend more time putting content on a site than we do taking it off. Yet removing poor or weak content is crucial to providing a better user experience. Give someone the task of eliminating what’s not working-and get rid of it (thank you Junta42).*
Do a content inventory of your intranet: for many of us, our intranet has become the information dump our sites used to be. Although we’re sure we don’t want it on the public face of the institutional site, we’re not always quite sure what to do with questionable content, so we toss it over the fence and there it sits…growing by the day. The problem is this site should be serving your internal community. If it’s clogged with a lot of useless, poorly organized content, it’s failing one of your most important audiences.
Tell your story again, but differently: your institutional story can be told in a variety of formats and ways. In the rush to get the message out, we sometimes err on sameness: building a consistent brand image, however, does not require the lockstep approach. An elevator speech might work great in an elevator, but not so well in a video, a format which thrives on drama and creative invention. Taglines look great on billboards, but terrible on your Facebook page where people will generally ignore them. In social media, you’ll tell your story through the relationships you nurture.
Use your Web content to drive users to your print content: usually, we’re trying to do this the other way around…designing and writing our print pieces to drive audiences to our Web sites. But this strategy isn’t helping flagging alumni magazines who have neither the money nor the resources to develop a robust Web presence. Consider doing what the Paris Review does instead…the site is designed to drive users back to the print piece by providing only teasers for pieces, never the full story or interview. Check it out at www.parisreview.org
Start at the end: instead of thinking about what kind of content to produce, think about where it’s going to take your audiences. Is this particular piece of content raising awareness or driving an action? Should it be factual, information-based, and practical, or out to spark an emotional response? **
Learn to love repurposed content: the stepchild of original content, old content is often viewed as dead content. But there are many ways to repurpose content. From aggregating email responses into an interview piece to turning PowerPoint presentations into articles, your content can take on new life and meaning and, more importantly, have new impact (a big thanks to Lee Odden and Topline Marketing Blog)*** The same trick works extremely well for video. Next time you shoot a video, think about how extra footage might be captured that would transform the video for other uses-for example, turning an admissions piece into a fundraising piece.
Make every word searchable: Google now reads a major chunk of your Web site, not just the meta language. That means that language all over the site can play a role in catching the giant search engine’s attention, especially in heads and subheads. Optimization is both a process and a way of thinking about language. What words describe you best? Google responds well to specific, concrete words and phrases. To find the right words, think like the people who are searching you out. What language would a prospective student use to find you?