The Case for Website Content
Here we make the case for producing more website content. Whilst all digital content is a form of highly efficient automation, website content can be the most effective.
The business case for website content
Why is digital so powerful?
- Take elements of your best sales conversations and immortalise them in digital print. Create once and use again and again. Some of today’s most financially productive content was written years ago.
- Digital is asynchronous; your content (engage in your conversation) conveniently in their own time
- Content can be shared to network effect.
- The act of creating content commits your best to memory. Writing is the practice of the sales conversation, making your case, delivering your claims and arguments in a reasoned way, rather than off the cuff.
Does one-to-many digital replace one-to-one communication? No, it enhances it. You get more conversations when you write things down first.
Why specifically content for the website?
In most cases, the content on your website can work hard for you.
- Website content has the possibility of attracting new visitors and connections, repeatedly
- Write once with daily exposure to potential new clients without further effort
- There are new visitors with high potential as they are researching topics you help with
- infrequent needs, high value, often research decisions
- Those people searching for products, services and suppliers are in a short buying cycle
- You can serve thousands of different interests; there are more than you think
- A single piece of content leads naturally to other content on the website.
- The combination of content is more powerful than the single piece.
Timing is more important for traction than is first apparent. In fact, we can plan our content around that concept.
Website content is evergreen.
It attracts new people every week, so starting with website content and then reworking it for distribution on other platforms would make sense.
Think of an email list. What are the chances that you send the right message to those people at the exact time to make a difference? The people on a website are there to make decisions; their search has a current intent behind it (unless it doesn’t). You can understand those decisions through the words they use to get to the site.
The people you are connected to may have already made their decisions. Or, when they are ready to make a decision, they might arrive on your home page. Wouldn’t it be good to know the difference between Social and Search targeting?
Social, Email and Search have different audiences.
We are all seeking to connect with the right person, with the right message at the right time and in the right place, for them.
The right message at the right time. Answering those with a current need is far simpler than going out and trying to find them. Search and website content gives you that.
What Next?
Start with your content right now
We are on the cusp of ‘digital everything’, with AI-driven processes and automation being quickly integrated into all web interfaces. This is happening right now.
Unlike other major innovations, we don’t need to wait for the adoption of devices. Developers are adding AI to their existing software fast. If we need to learn anything new, AI will teach us.
It sounds obvious, but you can make a long-term difference to your business just by getting started. Don’t wait; change will happen far quicker this time and even faster next time.
Planning your website content
Designing automated sales and marketing conversations is where we are going.
The good news is, that success comes from being more human and understanding audiences better.
Being able to conjure the right message to the right audience at the right time
What people search for indicates where in time they are. Asking the right questions prompts the right responses. Look at what your audience is looking for right now, and practice by imagining how you respond to their questions.
Understanding propositions, and how to relate
Messaging and positioning draw power from the markets you serve. Our audience analysis will help with messaging. Websites have positioning capabilities that Social doesn’t lend itself to easily. You can serve multiple niches.
Appreciating and planning for the many decisions that ‘people’ need to make
The decision journey is longer than you might hope, and you need multiple phases of content to serve people as they make their way along it. Change your content for their journey.
Free Strategy Session
We take a little time to listen, and then show you how it all might work.
The Visitor Decision Journey
Conversationware started life as a search traffic company, gaining expertise on the searches people make, creating ads and seeking to understand keyword audiences to start sales conversations.
Soon enough, we realised the website design and navigation had a major impact on success. We got good at delivering websites, over time.
We’d love to grow into a leading content marketing company. For now, we are just good at knowing what to write and where to put it.
A commercial instinct to match what people are looking for
Working the search clicks is often just a question of courtesy, matching the text and the intent of the search and being as helpful as possible.
Translation for the words into levels of intent, testing and sifting.
The first thing we do with keywords is to group them. A single word is a fragment of intent, whereas a complete group around a topic forms a market.
A level of activity based on results and patterns
WordPress Blocks
Building a library of components and reusable blocks with Gutenberg and the Kadence theme will help with delivering more sophisticated pages more quickly.
As an open source product, WordPress is well-placed to benefit from developments in AI software and processes.
The easier to build, the slower the site, the worse the performance. WordPress just means ‘car’, you still have to pick the bodywork, the chassis, wiring loom, engine, suspension and tyres.
And it has got to go somewhere. A belief in navigation is to design the content for people earlier in the search process. Landing pages are short term. The comprehensive content we helped inspire is attractive to search engines.
Design and brand are utterly important, but service to others is where growth comes from, and you can grow into something worthy.
What are they looking for – how can we help?
Content was something we advised clients on, and continue to consult about. How could we ourselves create content for expert level companies? Frankly, we had enough to do in the early days. But we do know what visitors need, so we can help right.
We just tried to communicate our beliefs. Our most successful clients picked up on it, and delivered their expertise on the right pages.
What Is Happening?
This scenario is changing, competition means we can’t leave content to chance. We have been editing and providing frameworks for so long, that we developed our own expertise. Right content for the right search.
And so today we are witnessing an explosion in competitive development. A deluge of content from new believers, and increasing tempo in the levels of slick visitor experience.
The only people who don’t value this are the ones not worth persuading. The search engines want to share their value more widely, and who is to stop them? If they win at that then the other pillars have to perform more strongly.
Excellence is being demanded in order to be featured, in order to win.
Continuing the Conversation – What next?
Attracting the search engines continues to grow more demanding, but the rewards are still awesome.
Our job now is to steer a path for our clients to develop competitive advantage and continue to develop continuous streams of new business.
Maybe you don’t have enough wheels. Maybe you don’t know. But those that deliver the right content will win. They always have. The icing makes the cake.
STEP 1
Generate Great Offers
Create great offers in your business that serve a wide enough range of niche visitors to be profitable. Complexity is a given.
STEP 2
Filter the Traffic
Sift the search traffic to find the most valuable visitors ready to do business. Measure the reality of effect as close as possible.
STEP 3
Deliver an efficient website experience
Build a fast, relevant and enjoyable website experience, in double quick time, that makes it easy for clients and users to deliver more persuasive content.
STEP 4
Communicate effectively
Say the right things, at the right time, in the right place and in the right order to the right people.
STEP 5
Decision Making
Choose the most valuable thing to do next. Avoid spending too much in one area, and leave yourself short in another. Projects are full of friction. The major impediment to success is to ‘give in’ because the wheels are hard to keep turning. One wheel bigger than the other and you’ll go in circles.
What are we doing with our own content?
Sharing our skills more widely, giving away the basics to create demand for the advanced
Reassure clients we are on it, and working for their benefit by communicating
Continue to help deliver results, leads by example. When clients are successful they continue to want more, this is the best use of our time.
Selling to clients who aren’t, won’t or can’t be successful is actually a waste of our time – called opportunity cost. But if we can support more people more of the time in the short term gaps, then we expand our horizons.
What shall we do with this content in particular?
This process should be promoted within the company.. we all have things to say. Our clients all have things to say, capturing is the biggest challenge, the rest is just polishing.
Capture
My belief in responding in the moment, practicing and not letting a good idea get in the way of the flow of content is the ‘capture’ piece of the process. We need more of this from everyone.
We provide a notes platform, that nobody uses. That has to change,.
Capture is collecting the firewood to make the fire. Organising Distilling and Expressing is next.
Organising
Who is it for?
Clients, mainly. To share as we evolve our skills and services. To show history and direction. Which means, it can be a blog post, supported by email to promote it. Which means we need an email list and the platform ready to go.
What is it for?
To introduce the fact we are more involved with content and have always been successful with it.
Distilling
Value value value. Is all this worth saying, what are the highlights.
Say the same thing with fewer words. Use less words. (See what I did)
Is there a point that needs expanding – articles should go in the body of the site
Can we, should we, say it somewhere else and link to it?
Shall we break up into multiple pieces.
