Is your company planning on launching a new website, or doing a website revamp? To keep from overburdening budgets, some companies take on the task of creating a portion of the content for their site on their own, even if they’re working with a web developer or marketing firm to “do the rest.”
They often find, however, that creating great content can be the most time-consuming part of developing or refreshing a website. In fact, for the hundreds of website projects we’ve worked on, the most painstaking part of each has been the content creation process.
Plain and simple, there’s often A LOT of web content that needs to be developed and, not only is it time-consuming, but many bosses expect perfection right out the gate. This leads to a lot of overpromising and under-delivering on the project timeline, adding more stress to the process for everyone.
To help clients avoid situations like this and reach their inbound marketing goals, we give them the following advice to help with new website content development.
Some marketing “departments” are small or may only have a single person: you. When that’s the case, it can be a challenge to create every bit of content. Trying to do it alone will inevitably lead to mistakes — sometimes costly ones. Not only will you be overwhelmed, but it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. To avoid mistakes, tap into others in your company to be a part of the content creation team.
Look for those who have a knack for the skills you need and the kind of content you want to create. It’s important to clearly define each team member’s role; some may act as subject matter experts, others may be grammar buffs and help proofread, while some might help write content. By recruiting others to collaborate with and share in the tasks ahead, you’ll be more assured of your website’s power to reach your target audience and persuade prospects.
Before your team starts writing content for your website, there should be a solid plan in place to ensure the content you create is hitting the mark — the “mark” being it reaches and resonates with your best prospects.
How do you know who your best prospects are? By knowing who your buyer personas are and what their buyers’ journeys look like. These prospects are the people you’re writing your website content for, and you want to keep their needs and pain points in mind. This means aligning their needs/questions at different stages in the buyer’s journey with what they’ll find on different web pages.
Pages targeted toward prospects in the awareness stage should have different types of information than those geared toward prospects in the decision stage. For example, the blog post you’re reading now is an example of an awareness stage website page, in comparison to our pricing page, which aims at the decision stage.
RELATED: How to Create a Content Strategy Aligned With Your Buyer's Journey
You can have the most beautiful website design and responsive features in your industry, and you may craft the most convincing copy on the planet, but if your ideal prospects can’t find it through an online search, it won’t matter much. One of the most important aspects of content marketing for a new or updated website is making sure it’s optimized for search engines.
Whether a home page, landing page, case study or other type of content, it’s critical to leverage proven on-page SEO best practices. Do proper research for relevant keywords and include them in page titles and metadata. Make your content user friendly by naturally incorporating helpful and authoritative hyperlinks. It’s equally important to avoid keyword stuffing, though, or your site could be penalized for violating search engine guidelines.
Get Our Complete SEO Survival Guide here
Marketers tend to be an optimistic bunch, and the timeframe for building or redesigning a website can easily be underestimated. To help you determine how much time people need to create content, work backwards from your planned launch date. This will help give you a better idea of the scope of the project, and can help you plan around people’s schedules.
A simple way is to keep track of all the associated tasks on a calendar (being sure to note the start and end date of each task), and share capacity and the project’s status regularly with your team. Some people prefer a gantt chart tool that allows you to view tasks at a glance in a linear fashion. This way, your team knows what needs to be worked on and when, and how to prioritize tasks.
Another crucial part of timeline management is team accountability. Any delays on your end create a ripple effect on your website developers. Granted, they could default to “lorem ipsum” placeholder text, but they’ll still need to have an idea of how much copy and how many sections you need, if any images are needed, etc. With that said, it’s okay to start small by determining a framework and providing the basics to get your point across and stay on track. You can always add more later, which leads us to our last point.
Post-launch, you and your web developer or marketing agency will likely identify opportunities for improving your website, including additional pages to build and content to add. And that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t expect that a website is a once-and-done project. As you analyze website metrics and assess how users navigate your site with the help of conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools, you’ll be able to tweak it.
If you take a growth-driven design (GDD) approach to building and maintaining your site, your initial launch goal is to get a minimally viable product — the 20% of your site that generates 80% of impact — off the ground, and refine pages later based on user data captured from the new site. You can test different ideas from your website wishlist this way, and ultimately determine what is best for your user’s experience based on data.
As you might already know, launching a website can be stressful and challenging, and it’s even more difficult to launch a site on time. That said, if you can manage your time, resources, and tasks using the tips above, you should be able to limit any hiccups you encounter! Want to know how to take a continuous improvement approach to website design with GDD? Visit our GDD web page containing all the details. Just click the link below.
Of course, we’ve got a team of talented web designers (and copywriters) who would love to help. If you’d like to talk through your project and learn what an inbound partnership looks like (including creating or updating a website), let us know.
Topics: Content Marketing, Website Design
