In this second part of Marketing Health Check, we will talk about how small to medium-sized businesses can manage their digital content.
The task of creating the right content and building upon existing ones is becoming more challenging for companies looking to expand through digital presence. There has never been a time where content has taken center stage for marketing. Gone are the days when someone writes a news release and sends it out to media contacts hoping they pick up the most important messages and publish them in newspapers and magazines. Today’s multi-media touch points require robust and sharper content, delivering the right messages to the right target audience. But how can small or medium-sized business in Sydney create and manage digital content so that it contributes concretely to the organizations’ gains and sales?
Identify content owners.
Not all businesses can immediately resort to hiring a full-time content writer or outsourcing digital content. One of the first key steps that business owners should think about is identifying from within the business the owners of the content which are intended to be published on the website for public consumption. If the intention is to write more content about the technical specifications of a product, then the content owner should be the product managers who are developing the product night and day. If the digital content is supposed to talk about the different store locations in different neighbourhoods, then the owner of the content should be store managers. This is not about centralizing the source but finding the right expert from within the company who can deliver the right message fastest.
Set your top three metrics and set baseline measures
Many businesses struggle with understanding how their investments on digital content are impacting business results. Identifying at least three important metrics helps managers create a system to monitor, measure, and analyze the performance of the content they put out there. It is also important to set baseline measures so as to have a point to compare with once the numbers come through during reporting periods.
Set content topics and schedule
One mistake a business does is to think that digital content can be written as a one-off. That once you’ve finished writing content for a portion of the website, that remains static for at least one to a couple of years down the road. But content writers will advice organizations that content is dynamic and never-ending. Therefore, it is crucial to set content topics and plan which ones to write for ahead of time. Plotting a regular schedule for content creation also helps integrate this task into the workload of existing staff.
There are more ways businesses can maximize digital content for their marketing efforts. Businesses should keep in mind though that digital content is only as good as the business’ IT infrastructure. Without an effective IT system that can host content, and an IT service provider that can facilitate storage and retrieval as needed, the greatest digital contents written for a business may be lost and put to waste. Talk to CMSIT today to learn how we can support you in your digital content requirements.
