Last week Amanda and I traveled to Washington DC to present at Sage Summit, The Sage Group PLC’s annual education and training event. The session that I presented to Sage Partners was about managing and growing your website through content in order to generate leads for your business. (You can check out the slides from my presentation below.)
As I concluded the presentation I left the audience with five major takeaways and things they should do with their business websites.
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Photo credit: maury.mccownDetermine Audience Personas – With B2B websites we understand that we need to fill the needs of three major groups with our content: Researchers, Purchasers, and Current Customers. Those can be audience personas, however, since we know so much about our audience and our clients, we can further break down those groups. For example: Visitors who are current customers that have support questions or visitors in the restaurant industry researching ERP software. The purpose of understanding the different audience personas that are visiting your site is so that you can develop content more geared toward their needs. You cal also create clear paths throughout your website for them to navigate through to convert.
- Create a Content Strategy – Determine what content you will create, when you will create it, and where it will be published. Then review stats like organic traffic, likes, and retweets to decide if the content “worked.” Did it help bring traffic to your site? Was it popular? Did it aid in conversions on your site?
- Create a Conversion Strategy – Each page on your site should have a call to action, something that asks the user to “do” something. However, not all sections on your site are relevant to the diverse group of visitors on your site, so it wouldn’t make sense to have the same calls to action everywhere on the site. Break your site into sections or even use the personas you defined to create calls to action that will speak to and compel the different types of visitors on the site. If you have a large site or not a lot of time – take a look at the site’s analytics over the past year and determine the top 20 most visited pages. Then, review the calls to action on those pages – do they need to be updated or edited?
- Humanize the Content that is Published – Any time you have the opportunity to create content, try to add a little bit of your personality or the company culture in it. The last thing you want to do is continuously create is dry, long-winded, boring content.
- Repurpose Current Content– It takes a lot of time and effort to create new content so instead of new all the time, try bringing new life to old content. Here are some examples:
- Write a blog post based on one slide of webinar or recent presentation
- Turn a blog post into a short video and post that on your YouTube channel and Facebook page
- Use a series of blog posts on one topic to compose an e-book
See, it doesn’t have to be hard, you don’t even have to wrack your brain for a new idea – just use a little creativity to renew content you’ve already created.
I got a lot of thought provoking questions about web content after my session, please ask your questions in the comment section below.