Make Your Content Stand Out
By Ross Hall, Newsletter Publisher
Why are websites so bland? Companies have a wonderful opportunity to communicate with their customers in an exciting way, and yet the content of so many sites is still little more than a sales brochure. Facts are repeated with little or no value-add, product descriptions remain fairly bland and "press releases" litter the site as if posting these is better than posting nothing.
Part of the problem probably stems from where responsibility for the site lies. IT Departments might rule the computers, but often it is the marketing department that has the final say over the words. In virtually the same way that brochures are checked for "brand consistency", web site content flies around the building, following a "workflow" until it is approved as a "corporately correct" item to be added to the site (subject to the additional flash past the Marketing Director's inbox because "this is the Internet we're talking about.") By the time the item is ready for posting a couple of weeks may have passed, the passion of the original article ripped away and it might even mean something completely different to what was originally meant.
What this all adds up to is a site where visitors stay for 1 or 2 page views and then vanish, or newsletters that have fairly high unsubscribe rates - or just deleted when they arrive.
Some sites have tried to make their content interesting by using "gimmicks." Ananova, for example, is a news site that has a computer generated news reader. At first listening to the monotone voice is quirky, interesting even. But after a while you realize all "she" is doing is churning out the same "facts" as the BBC news site, the Telegraph, CNN and others. The content hasn't changed - only the medium it is delivered through. And that, frankly, isn't compelling enough.
Nor are the "newsletters" that drift in and out of the inbox which state how wonderful the company is, and what fantastic deals they have just signed. One we've just unsubscribed from came from a company specializing in affiliate marketing deals. Unfortunately it consisted of a long, long list of all the different programs that were available, but none of the advice about setting up and running a program that would have made it stand out.
So how do you make your site stand out? In one word...
Opinion.
Facts are posted ad infinitum on the Web. How many users, the growth of online markets, the cost of fraud, the number of people who also drive VW Golfs and so on. Some of these facts are vaguely interesting, a few might even be relevant, but mostly they are boring and repeated. What makes a site stand out is the interpretation put on these facts by individuals.
ClickZ is an excellent case in point. The site is a valuable resource for those involved in eMarketing in whatever shape or form. Articles cover topics as diverse as permission marketing, site design and branding, and all of them are written by actual practitioners and often in tones bordering on the subversive. The result is an easy to read site which is updated often, has a strong reader base and which gets recommended more often to people as a useful resource than a list of deals does!
Hang on, you cry, ClickZ is a publication. I sell widgets / insurance / professional services. I can't create a daily round of content!
Maybe so, but there are serious lessons to be learnt here. Perhaps the most important is to let go of the reigns a little. Inside your business there are people who have an opinion on something happening in your business or market. When you find them they will be as reluctant to become "journalists for the day" as you will be to let them put an article on the site. Yet you need to help them learn how to write, and reward them for the effort they put in. And as always you need to balance this with the need to satisfy customers on a day-by-day basis!
Nor do you need war and peace everyday. Much of the content produced for our own site is around 500 words in length, and new features in the pipeline for early next year will have even fewer. This appears to be fairly standard across rapidly updated sites, with a heavy focus on simple, high quality opinion rather than complex, overlong and unreadable mush.
Speed matters as well. A development in your industry first thing in the morning should have an opinion from your business within a couple of hours. It makes your business look interested, particularly if that opinion is how the development affects customers, and particularly if you have a list of people who want to be eMailed whenever you have something to say!
This creates two demands on your business - first you need "editors" who are empowered to make decisions about what can and cannot go up on the site without recourse to senior management, and second you need tools to get the content up on to the site quickly. There is little point having a great opinion piece sat in your inbox within an hour of the announcement if it then sits there for 2 days until the IT department can get round to adding it to the site!
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to be brave. Giving staff a voice to communicate directly with the mass market goes against a lot of accepted "norms" of traditional marketing. But with so much information floating around the web today - and it will get worse - it might become the most effective way to truly connect with your customers.
Why are websites so bland? Companies have a wonderful opportunity to communicate with their customers in an exciting way, and yet the content of so many sites is still little more than a sales brochure. Facts are repeated with little or no value-add, product descriptions remain fairly bland and "press releases" litter the site as if posting these is better than posting nothing.
Part of the problem probably stems from where responsibility for the site lies. IT Departments might rule the computers, but often it is the marketing department that has the final say over the words. In virtually the same way that brochures are checked for "brand consistency", web site content flies around the building, following a "workflow" until it is approved as a "corporately correct" item to be added to the site (subject to the additional flash past the Marketing Director's inbox because "this is the Internet we're talking about.") By the time the item is ready for posting a couple of weeks may have passed, the passion of the original article ripped away and it might even mean something completely different to what was originally meant.
What this all adds up to is a site where visitors stay for 1 or 2 page views and then vanish, or newsletters that have fairly high unsubscribe rates - or just deleted when they arrive.
Some sites have tried to make their content interesting by using "gimmicks." Ananova, for example, is a news site that has a computer generated news reader. At first listening to the monotone voice is quirky, interesting even. But after a while you realize all "she" is doing is churning out the same "facts" as the BBC news site, the Telegraph, CNN and others. The content hasn't changed - only the medium it is delivered through. And that, frankly, isn't compelling enough.
Nor are the "newsletters" that drift in and out of the inbox which state how wonderful the company is, and what fantastic deals they have just signed. One we've just unsubscribed from came from a company specializing in affiliate marketing deals. Unfortunately it consisted of a long, long list of all the different programs that were available, but none of the advice about setting up and running a program that would have made it stand out.
So how do you make your site stand out? In one word...
Opinion.
Facts are posted ad infinitum on the Web. How many users, the growth of online markets, the cost of fraud, the number of people who also drive VW Golfs and so on. Some of these facts are vaguely interesting, a few might even be relevant, but mostly they are boring and repeated. What makes a site stand out is the interpretation put on these facts by individuals.
ClickZ is an excellent case in point. The site is a valuable resource for those involved in eMarketing in whatever shape or form. Articles cover topics as diverse as permission marketing, site design and branding, and all of them are written by actual practitioners and often in tones bordering on the subversive. The result is an easy to read site which is updated often, has a strong reader base and which gets recommended more often to people as a useful resource than a list of deals does!
Hang on, you cry, ClickZ is a publication. I sell widgets / insurance / professional services. I can't create a daily round of content!
Maybe so, but there are serious lessons to be learnt here. Perhaps the most important is to let go of the reigns a little. Inside your business there are people who have an opinion on something happening in your business or market. When you find them they will be as reluctant to become "journalists for the day" as you will be to let them put an article on the site. Yet you need to help them learn how to write, and reward them for the effort they put in. And as always you need to balance this with the need to satisfy customers on a day-by-day basis!
Nor do you need war and peace everyday. Much of the content produced for our own site is around 500 words in length, and new features in the pipeline for early next year will have even fewer. This appears to be fairly standard across rapidly updated sites, with a heavy focus on simple, high quality opinion rather than complex, overlong and unreadable mush.
Speed matters as well. A development in your industry first thing in the morning should have an opinion from your business within a couple of hours. It makes your business look interested, particularly if that opinion is how the development affects customers, and particularly if you have a list of people who want to be eMailed whenever you have something to say!
This creates two demands on your business - first you need "editors" who are empowered to make decisions about what can and cannot go up on the site without recourse to senior management, and second you need tools to get the content up on to the site quickly. There is little point having a great opinion piece sat in your inbox within an hour of the announcement if it then sits there for 2 days until the IT department can get round to adding it to the site!
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to be brave. Giving staff a voice to communicate directly with the mass market goes against a lot of accepted "norms" of traditional marketing. But with so much information floating around the web today - and it will get worse - it might become the most effective way to truly connect with your customers.
posted by ironshirts @ 11:12 AM
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