Associations have long understood that content is an effective tool for engaging their audiences and the cornerstone of creating a community. Content strategy is the guidance for how to use the tool to ensure that all departments are working toward a common goal and sharing content in an efficient workflow process for maximizing performance. Content strategy ensures that your content is aligned with your association’s goals as well as the member acquisition goals. So content strategy is the’ how’ and, more importantly, the ‘why’ to your content.
Association-wide content strategy ensures that your organization is efficient in your content creation process and targeted in your goals. Keeping departments working in synch presents a cohesive voice in your leadership of your trade niche, but most importantly it can eliminate the possibility that valuable content goes unleveraged. A clear content strategy keeps departments that historically don’t communicate, like sales (aka membership) and editorial in a dialog about the content and it’s goals. In short, it can help your content perform better.
An online learning center seeks to build upon the influence of the association by becoming a source for education and training for the profession and demonstrating it’s value in assembling expertise better than any other source. But, if the average professional in your space only seeks an education opportunity twice a year, that leaves about 50 weeks a year where they can forget about your online service.
Unless, you have offerings for them every day of the year.
Useful content, premium content, entertaining, poll or opinion content can increase the usefulness of your site. It doesn’t take a costly research project to believe that if your audience finds reason to visit your site on a regular basis, that when the small window of need opens up where they are seeking an educational goal that they will not have forgotten you and, more likely, they will look to you first.
The demand to engage and deliver value compresses time in such a way that a higher price tag is associated with missing the mark about what content is valued. Using your digital content analytics reveals your audience now, and they are your content curators. This is how you are sure which content is really resonating with your audience. Learning what action they take once they have interacted with the content also informs — do they share it, like it, read another piece, return to it, read other content that people who liked this one read, comment?
Armed with minute-by-minute data about your audience, you can respond with an agility to keep their attention and remain at the hot center of their interest. This underscores the import to align your content with your association’s goals. And now a redesign is more of a repositioning to the effect of getting your content to perform better which can’t be achieved wielding the latest design trends alone. However, align your design solutions with your business goals and then the design will serve a very important function in elevating the performance of your content.
