Online content marketing – unlock the power of your website
Producing good online content marketing requires you to approach your content production like a journalist.
All well and good, but what happens when it’s time to put your content onto the site and you find yourself faced with something out of The Matrix?
Many commercial websites, especially in B2B, have been designed as a static showcase. Quite often they will include lots of fancy Javascript-based animation and design. Good design is intended to look good. But it can prove awkward when it comes to putting up regular articles.
This can play havoc with your content marketing strategy.
If you are building up your content library and think you might need to introduce some structure, this article provides a checklist for what you are likely to need. Go through it before briefing the developer.
Site CMS
Make sure your developer has created an easy-to-use CMS for uploading stories. You don’t want a site that is so complicated on the backend that you have to brief a developer just to upload a 150-word blog.
Website design
Probably the most obvious and yet most overlooked point. Commercial sites are fundamentally designed to showcase the company and its products. All too often the content features small type and ill-fitting pictures. Yes, it might look nice but is it conducive to easy reading?
The blog and any articles require a secondary design to the main site. While retaining some of the original CSS, it should be formatted like a magazine site – with its own home page and feature pages designed to hold related content. And add search.
Content categorisation
Categorise your posts. It’s easy to start putting up posts in isolation, but hit 20 or so and you will begin to lose track of things. Before you start producing content, try to envisage the end result in terms of subject and theme.
Breaking this down will help in terms of navigation and the creation of different types of pages as you look ahead.
Content marketing picture sourcing and quality
Use pictures of all the same size and with plenty of colour please. Failing that, use black and white but make sure the imagery is striking. Also ensure the picture is landscape and of sufficient size to work on retina-standard screens.
Related stories and other extras
Make sure you include related stories – this is where your tagging should come in. The aim of any news-related site is to make it as sticky as possible.
Likewise, don’t forget the sharing buttons. Put them at the top, beneath the headline.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the above shows that you needn’t bring in a WordPress site. The blog can sit a little outside the style of your main website, while retaining the fonts and colours.
But above all, editorial should have its own distinct place. So if someone comes straight on to it, the consumer knows how it works and what to expect.
Your content deserves an editorially-driven site is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.