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This is my first post on this-is-marketing, although I have blogged before. If you haven’t read my bio, I guess I could be described as a practitioner of content management, specifically Web Content Management and have come into it from a technical background, so you might be asking yourself – what am I doing here, writing on a blog about marketing?
It’s because marketing isn’t just about execution (or as David pointed out in this previous post on execution and measurement). Marketing is also about engagement and persuasion.
In order to engage with someone, to converse with them or persuade them about something, we need to know a bit about the folks we are talking too. We need to analyse the reaction our audience has to us – what they buy, where they go, how they get there, where they came from, what they tell us they like, what they really like, what other people who like them like, what’s their propensity of doing something else with us is…. All things that we’ll talk about a lot on this blog.
To get this conversation or your customer engagement rolling, we need a message and obviously online that message is your website. The quality of your service and products, your brand, the culture of your company are all reflected in those pages. Your website is you.
Your website is your opportunity to introduce yourself into this engagement, as the site visitor gives you that most important commodity in marketing – their undivided attention and consent.
But, this opportunity could be very brief, your site visitor has probably come out of a sea of possible clicks – the 10,000 Google results that matched their keywords – and their cursor hovers over the back button, ready to hang up on this conversation and give the next website a shot.
There are some basics we need to get right, we need to ensure that we are there when a visitor comes to call, that our website is reliable, consistent, fast, that it is readable and accessible to the needs of the visitor.
We need to ensure that it adheres to corporate and legal governance, to ensure that the content is approved by the right people, that we maintain an audit of what and when we offered something to our audience, we need to know who updated the page and see the updates they made.
Through ensuring that we have the right subject matter experts from our organisation contributing and therefore engaging with our audience, we need to make sure we have good quality content, that it is fresh, relevant, frequently updated, written in a compelling style, forged from understanding of what our audience want.
We need to be dynamic and agile, for our website to be alive to the changes in our market, to our competition, to world events and to the changing needs of our audience.
This is content management.
