We all know what content can do for an organization, including achieving top level business goals. I bet that you have even stepped up your content efforts in recent years.

But.

• If your content team doesn’t know their why, then they can’t identify the how.

• If they can’t identify the how, then can’t develop specific goals.

• If they can’t develop specific goals, then they can’t measure performance.

• If they can’t measure performance, then they can’t improve their efficiency.

• If they can’t improve their efficiency, then they can’t meet the demands.

• If they can’t meet the demands then they won’t be able to get results.

• If they can’t demonstrate results, then why have a content team?

Remember, it all starts with why. Does your team know theirs?

Create a written content strategy, today.

Notter is spot on when he says, “Today’s environment requires speed, which, in turn, requires the people and departments in your organization to collaborate effectively. Friction there slows everything down. We put up with that in the past and did okay, but the same won’t be true moving forward for a real social business.”

Nowhere is the need for improved organizational collaboration more critical these days than in meeting your content demands. The hunger for more and better information is well understood but delivering on that appetite demands high-level collaboration. It’s clear that it will take a significant leap for many organizations to get there.

According to our 2012 Content Marketing Readiness Assessment study, organizational silos remain a significant barrier. More than half of the respondents reported that cross-department collaboration is not the norm in their organization; internal departmental silos hinder their efforts.

So, how do you go about removing these barriers? Vijay Govindarajan says that companies don’t change because they want to, they change only when forced to.

Professor Govindarajan, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, describes the forces at work as customers, competition, advances in science and technology and government regulation — only when change is being forced upon the enterprise will people seek or accept help.

In his Harvard Business Review article, he states that change does not happen without leadership embracing change. The burden is on them to effectively communicate why and how it must happen. Here are his first two critical steps in breaking down silos:

1. Create a Compelling Case for Innovation Why is a powerful motivator. (Just ask Simon Sinek) Break through the change-resistance that’s embedded in most cultures by inspiring your people with the compelling case for why change will ensure the future health and growth of the enterprise.
    
2. Create a Fully Aligned Strategic Innovation Agenda – That’s right, get an Innovation Agenda in writing! It creates necessity, inspires collaboration and in the best cases it demands that they do.

Another key insight from the 2012 Content Marketing Readiness study is that only 1 in 4 respondents reported actually having and following an organization-wide content strategy. While having one is critical to success, the process of creating one can also help you achieve another important objective – breaking down your silos to jump start a new type of collaboration.

Imagine an organization where everyone walks around knowing their Why.

Not your organization’s why. Their own why.

So, your organization, for example, serves people with diabetes and their circle of loved ones and caregivers — but that is not what your editorial or marketing team does. You know that the org needs a why and you’ve got that down. But, do your content creators throughout your organization have their own clear why? In writing?

We all know what content can do for your organization. I bet that you have stepped up your efforts to produce more and better content in recent years. But if your content team doesn’t know their why then they can’t identify the how.

Think about that.

If your content team doesn’t know their Why, then they can’t identify the how.

If they can’t identify the how, then can’t develop specific goals.

If they can’t develop specific goals, then they can’t measure performance.

If they can’t measure performance, then they can’t improve their efficiency.

If they can’t improve their efficiency, then they can’t meet the demands.

If they can’t meet the demands then they won’t be able to get results.

If they can’t demonstrate results, then why have a content team?

Be the organization that exceeds goals, and one sure way is to have a written content strategy. 

This is what companies typically report that they are happy with after they launch a new site:
• It looks better
• It is easier and faster to update content
• The content is more organized and consistent
• It functions and navigates better
• Ease of highlighting social activity and videos
• It integrates better with our database and/or other third-party software

All important criteria and if you can say yes to them then you are well on your way. So why then did we give an “F” to a newly launched site that had these qualities? Well, it comes to what defines a high-performing site.

If you want the bottom line right now as to what a high-performing site is, jump to the Pass/Fail list below. For those who are still with me, think about these scenarios:

Jen chooses a doctor: Go to the local list serve and search archives and postings that mention pediatricians. Go to doctor review sites, then the Facebook page for the practice that most people were positive about. Narrow your options, check out their website, book an appointment. Ask brother-in-law if he has heard of the doctor.

Mack buys a printer: Read about what the printer manufacturer does to help the communities where their products are made. Check out their tweets. Go to comparison shopping sites, identify a model and best option for where to buy. See if there are a lot of the same model you are considering selling on Craig’s List. Figure out the sales cycles for printers, buy when it goes on sale or is offered bundled with other products.

Dante selects a restaurant: Walking down a street in NYC, hunger hits. Luckily, there are no less than 20 restaurants within sight. He scans the options, selects a cuisine and pulls out his mobile to check Yelp and Zagat. Done, selection made from many customer reviews that are very positive and a quick review of the menu online. Only five minutes from hunger pang to sitting at a reliably good restaurant enjoying salmon nigiri drizzled with lemon and a cold carafe of unfiltered sake.

It’s easy to see from these examples how the customer has all the power; easy access to information about you and, more than likely, others’ opinions of you and to your competitors as well. This is true for all businesses, from product sellers to professional service firms. How people choose to buy has shifted. That means that your site is all that more important, and it means that it must deliver results.

So back to high-performing sites.

A website is a marketing tool. It functions as a hub for your content to attract and inform your customers/members/volunteers. It’s the place where you can continue the ‘conversation’ about who you are and what you believe in. That hub is connected to your social channels and, hopefully, it has a lot of links back to it. But it should also deliver information to you about your visitors, more than Google analytics will give you. Your site should be nimble, with an ability to be modified easily, affordably and quickly.

Here is the scorecard for the site that we gave an F:

1. Pass — Did the site help move us to a new level in our marketing?

I can’t answer this question for this site yet so I will give them a Pass, but since this should be the first question asked about a site, I am including it here.

2. Fail — Social integration

The firm’s social footprint is not integrated throughout the site, nor is social sharing encouraged by making it easy for visitors to do. Placing social media icons at the top of the homepage is not sufficient social integration.

Social Media Examiner: If you use social media to keep your customers or clients apprised of your recent happenings and are actively managing your outlets on a daily or bi-weekly basis, it might be wise to showcase your Twitter feed or Facebook posts directly on your website.
Smashing Magazine: Your website should be the hub of social interaction, not sitting on the sidelines. It has the potential to draw together conversation across multiple networks and allow users to interact with friends, whether buying a camera or sharing an inspirational quote.

3. Fail — Marketing automation

We all know the import of the customer experience and at this site I get the same calls to action copy every time I visit, regardless of my past actions (or inaction). Only with an automation system can you avoid this annoyance and display content that comes from the advantage of knowing more about your visitor. With an automation system in place, calls to action and content can be effectively delivered to measurably increase business in addition to improving the user experience.

Inc.com: Using marketing automation software is like working with thousands of couriers who deliver the right content at the right time to all of your Internet-based prospects. All your team needs to do is pre-build great content into your marketing funnel, and the software takes care of the rest.
Hubspot.com: Despite an increase in traffic due to their blog post, Main Line Family law didn’t see many conversions of that traffic into leads. Then came an ‘aha moment.’ After attending a webinar series from HubSpot, [the owner] realized that she was missing a key part of the marketing playbook: calls-to-action. Thus, she created “On the Move” a planning guide for a healthy marriage separation in PA, using the Landing Pages tool. This made their marketing efforts gel together and they started receiving 3-4 qualified leads per day, leading to a high increase in clients.

4. Fail — Content Marketing and Tracking

If you don’t have an automation platform in place then you can’t truly close the loop on tracking your content. Without tracking your content, aka content marketing or inbound marketing, you can’t be sure that your content is delivering the results that it should.

The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing from HubSpot: “While it is clear that businesses are gravitating towards inbound marketing [blogging, social media, SEO], some are moving more aggressively than others. Those who move first are more likely to reap the tremendous business benefits of this new era of marketing.”
American Bar Association: …50 percent of responding small law firms (2-9 attorneys) and 53.3 percent of surveyed solo practitioners that are blogging reported retaining clients directly or via referral as a result of their legal-topic blogging, based on the recently released survey. That’s not just attracting website visitors or fielding phone calls for free consultations, but landing actual new business. Forty percent of respondents at larger firms (100-499 attorneys) who are blogging reported generating new business from their efforts.

5. Fail — Story

The web is loaded down with business sites, but some captivate with the story of the business. On those sites, you get to know how a company thinks, where they have been – you may feel more connected because you know them a bit. The site we reviewed lacks humanity, it lacks personality. The content is all about them but not in way that imparts what is special about them. We don’t get to ‘know’ them and likely we won’t remember much about them or favor them.

Forbes.com: Infuse personalities into stories. Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.
Theglobeandmail.com: If you ask a brand manager or chief marketing officer where they’re putting their priorities, the majority will say, without a doubt, online. Two companies that are seizing these new opportunities better than most are Coca-Cola Co. and Nike Inc. The most revolutionary way they’re doing it is by evolving their story-telling style, and social media is leading the way.
Contentmarketinginstitute.com: According to Google ZMOT, in 2011 people researched and digested 10.4 unique pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. If the internet was made up of only visuals and pretty designs, would it be any use? Your online content is the voice of your company, speaking to your customers and telling your story while you’re busy growing your business.

6. Fail — Appropriate Content Management System

If you use a proprietary CMS, it must do more for you than make it easier for your web manager, or your vendor, to update your site! It should come with a universe of free help for you – from free web marketing guidance to third-party plugins for more functionality. It is hard for any proprietary CMS to deliver in the way that the open source options do. In the proprietary vs. open source CMS debate, I don’t always vote for open source, but in the case of this business they are locked in to the CMS of the web designer and there is nothing, NOTHING, in the way of help readily available online. It does not come with a community. To me it feels like they’re painted into a corner, right where the marketing firm wants them.

Redkitecreative.com: With an open source CMS, you can take it with you. You can move it to any host that provides the required server software, at any time you choose. If your site is managed with a proprietary CMS, you can’t do this. And – what if your provider goes out of business?
Bestrank.com: Search engine friendliness – Just because somebody offers you a content management system does not mean that it will be search engine friendly right out of the box.  A lot of proprietary as well as open source CMS’s out there require extra work (sometimes a lot of work) to become search friendly. Thankfully some open source CMS’s systems like Drupal and WordPress come pretty search friendly right out of the box.

7. Fail — Rotating images at top of homepage

Look at a site on your mobile and you can see why wasting valuable real estate or slowing load time for a moving sales image is a big Fail! On the other hand, if you have a mobile version that minimizes this element, reducing the real estate taken up, and can justify the space with content that the user will find worthwhile, then you get a big Pass!

Adobe.com: Performance is the new sexy. Mobile users have a bewildering number of choices for interactive engagement. Any new mobile site has to compete with 500,000+ iOS apps, 260,000 Android apps, and more than 4 million mobile-optimized websites (2011 data). Users have no tolerance for slow performance, but a strong appreciation for mobile sites that get the job done.
Mobilemarketer.com: Load time matters. A study from Gomez found that 40 percent of consumers would abandon a mobile Web site if it takes more than three seconds to load.

8. Fail — Mobile

This business does not have a mobile site nor is it well optimized for mobile: gobs of tiny content on the homepage, difficult navigation, a behemoth rotator image. The mobile experience is dreadful. What a huge Fail. ‘Wait,’ they may counter, ‘our analytics show that few people come to our site on their mobile devices.’ Don’t count on that to justify a less-than-stellar mobile experience. Mobile usage habits are changing at an alarming pace and the time to create a carefully crafted, positive, and memorable mobile experience is now, not when it is clear that yours is failing.

AllStateLegal.wordpress.com: It’s not just products, people are also looking for professional services. 21% of smart phone users and 12% of tablet users have searched for a professional like an attorney using their device. (“How Today’s Consumers Really Search for an Attorney,” LexisNexis 2012)
Gigaom.com: In the year 2020, today’s smartphones will look like the glorified PDAs of the last decade, according to AT&T SVP Jeff Bradley. What should consumers expect? Handsets with nearly 30 GHz of processing power, terabytes of internal storage and half-gig connections to the mobile network.

9. Fail — Secure site

No secure signs anywhere. If I am going to buy anything, I want you to show me that the site is secure before I will even start the purchase process. That means everything from webinars to tshirts. Consumers are savvy, they know to look for a secure site. You also want your site as secure as possible from hacking of any kind, even the ‘invisible’ hacking that netmagazine.com talks about in the article below.

Mashable: If you’re selling anything online, you need to put some effort into securing your site with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients (i.e. a credit card number, Social Security number), which will allay their fears of providing such information, since there’s so much identity theft on the web.
Netmagazine.com: You may not think your site has anything worth being hacked for, but websites are compromised all the time. The majority of security breaches are not to steal your data or deface your website, but instead attempts to use your server as an email relay for spam, or to setup a temporary web server, normally to serve files of an illegal nature.
 

 So, how did your site do? Pass or Fail?

Content teams want a content strategy, philosophically they understand that they should have one. Understanding what a content strategy is is a place to start.

We have to start here with the de facto definition:
Planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
Kristina Halvorson, founder of Brain Traffic, and author of Content Strategy for the Web.

Using ‘words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.’
This analogy is too good to leave off of this list:
Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.
Rachel Lovinger “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data.” Associate Content Strategy Director at Razorfish

Look at the fabulously intense Rahel Bailie contradicting Halvorson. Food for thought!
Content strategy deals with the planning aspects of managing content throughout its lifecycle, and includes aligning content to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, production, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance. What content strategy is not is the implementation side. The actual content development, management, and delivery is the tactical outcomes of the strategy that need to be carried out for the strategy to be effective.
Rahel Bailie, coauthor of Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits and principal of Intentional Design

Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and useful governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.
Margot Bloomstein is the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston.

Content strategy encompasses the discovery, ideation, implementation and maintenance of all types of digital content—links, tags, metadata, video, whatever.
Robert Stribley  Information Architect at Razorfish

A plan for adding unique, expert, and indexable content to your site on a regular basis.
Mark O’Brien, author of A Website that Works: How Marketing Agencies Can Create Business Generating Websites.

The mindset, culture and approach to delivering your customer’s information needs in all the places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process. It is a strategic approach to managing content as an asset, with a quantifiable ROI.
Another good one from Michael:
A content strategy flips the tables on traditional, linear marketing by defining the process and then securing the right resources for producing a consistent stream of content mapped to buyer needs across all phases of the buying cycle. This is done for each buyer type or “buyer persona” that is involved in the B2B decision-making process.
Michael Brenner, SAP, Author “What is Content Strategy and Why Do You Need it?” on Forbes.com

Content marketing strategy [must come] first and this requires goals, different forms of content for different customer touchpoints, mapping the needs of people, the channels they prefer and the content or stories, etc.
Joe Pullizzi Founder of Content Marketing Institute

We define content strategy as: getting the right content to the right user at the right time.
Kevin P. Nichols SapientNitro

I think Halvorson’s de facto definition still is relevant, I would add: content strategy is what guides content teams to best processes for each stage of the content cycle.
Monica Bussolati adding to the de facto definition by Kristina Halvorson

• I promote my own articles [in the social channels]
• I respond to readers’ comments
• My work is 50% journalism, 50% social media
• I crowdsource interview questions
• I embed tweets into articles using Storify
• I find industry experts using LinkedIn, Quora, and HARO

Her list is just another indicator that things have changed, but we still see many teams that adhere to the content process they used years ago. And for good reason, it works. But what exactly does it do for you? It unifies teams to allow them to create great content on deadline. But, there is so much more that content teams must achieve now.

Long-form or bite-sized, there is an ideal way to create, govern and deliver your content in this ever-evolving information-sharing economy. And your process must include ways to “listen:” such as, tracking/analytics, looking for patterns, reading and responding to comments, participating in discussions on issues that matter to your audience – not as a facilitator or expert, just as a helper, sharer, listener, etc. Content teams are responsible for many channels now and how they function to address the high demand must evolve. The writer’s list captures that. Take a look at this comparison of an association editorial team and processes then vs. now.

What other significant shifts are you observing in how editorial teams are creating, governing or delivering content?

But. Yeah, I hate that word too, but there is a but here. There are some things that may render your efforts wasted. There are some enemies of content strategy. These things can lead to a Content Strategy Fail. Gasp heard throughout the world. 

Without that content strategy it’s back to flying blind: not knowing if you are producing the right content, or if it is helping your goals, not knowing much about your content at all. Worse, not being able to defend your efforts or prove your need for resources.

But – in a good way this time – that doesn’t have to happen. You can succeed with your content strategy development. Just keep an eye out for these Villians of Content Strategy:

Villain #1: Silos

Despite decades of embraced ideology about the damage from silos, they still persist. Silos happen for a lot of reasons, and some of them are actually good: developing pockets of expertise is one of the true advantages when a group that silos off from the whole. But when it comes to content marketing for your organization, silos are thoroughly evil.

Who is creating content at your organization? You may have an editorial, marketing, education and membership department each creating content. Are they communicating with each other, are your content efforts aligned? If not, it is painful to consider the possibilities for redundancies and missed opportunities to support each other.

With the intense demand for content to fill all of your channels, you’re going to fall short if you don’t tap all possible resources. Not doing so leads to a culture and process that is very hard to undo. A culture where this happens: 

• Redundant content
• Missed opportunity for content support
• Lack of pooling resources
• No one outside of your team has your back
• Loss of mindshare within the org
• Loss of innovation that could arise from a multi-focused team

Villian #2: Lack of Governance

Word docs filed in folders on various drives or servers is leaving a lot of potential for fully leveraging your content untapped. Even remarkably orderly file management is woefully inadequate for today’s content demands.

What you need is a Content Management System (CMS), or better, a CMS designed specifically for the unique cadence of content marketing and tying your content to measurable results. This type of system is called a lot of things  – software providers seem to each have their own name for it as they are trying to lead the pack while redefining themselves in real-time in response to the shifting marketspace – but primarily they are called marketing automation platforms. Sometimes, Content Marketing Software. 

Whatever you call wish to call it, a governance system will allow you to:

• Map and track your content 
• Align your content teams
• Develop and easily adhere to an efficient process
• Perform diagnostics on your content
• Support your need for resources 
• Prove your efficacy
• Strike when you hit a content homerun to magnify the gains
• Succeed in achieving top-level business goals using your content as your leading tool. 

Villain #3: Outmoded Websites

Not all of your content will go on your website, but even so you are attracting your audience back to you. Your site must deliver and perform for your audience – and for you. Content creators need a site as a critical link in the content delivery process and yet the bulk of content teams may not be involved with the website development or management. As the one place that can inform you about what your audience is reading, how long they read, and what other behaviors are associated with high- or low-reading, you need access to how your content is performing. Wouldn’t you love to know what is the magic number of pages read that correlates with 100% renewed membership? With the right site and systems in place, it is possible to determine what is the magic formula that drives retention.

Content teams need a good site and access to analytics to inform and guide their content creation. This also makes another case for busting those silos. Content teams need to work rather closely with marketing and IT in order to create a closed-loop system for an informed content creation cycle.

Do you see any other Villains of Content Strategy?

The appearance triggers a chain of ingrained habits.

First, I review the cover. Read everything on it and then plan my attack. The magazine is placed in the same space next to my desk. From that moment on, each visit with my to do list or calendar has a secondary motive – to find time that I can devote to the publication. When that time comes, I look at these things, usually in this order:

• review cover again
• flip to the last inside page
• scour the toc
• then off to the first thing, lately it is usually a department
• I end with a feature

It has me thinking about my habits and the habits of readers. Likely there is some variation on this theme for all readers. What do you do when a magazine arrives in the mail? More importantly, what do your readers do?

Like you, I am a busy person with a to-do list that seems to never shrink. But the arrival of the magazine for me is like how the habit of a morning run or kitchen clean up after a big meal unfolds for others.

We complete our habit behavior without thinking about it. There are triggers that stimulate the habit, like the arrival of a magazine, and the habit routine is followed by some sort of reward. Mine is when I think, ‘hey that was interesting, glad I happen to have read that.’ (I am one of those types that thinks everything I read will be useful to me later.)

It’s a habit sandwich described in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

Habit = Cue + Routine + Reward according to Duhigg

• Cue: magazine arrives in the mail
• Routine: I work it into my busy schedule. Read it, usually following a predictable pattern. This is the part of the sandwich that we usually refer to as the habit.
• Reward: I find at least one nugget of information that I think will somehow help me later

I realize that my habit ritual with a magazine is a big part of why I keep renewing my subscription and how I make the time to actually read it, when I struggle with making time for so many other important things. But, I have not yet developed a habit with digital magazines.

My way of interacting with digital magazines is rather hit or miss. There is no cue that is stimulating a routine yet. I am late to download issues and I don’t have a predictable way of moving through them. One magazine that I really enjoy to glean I chose to receive digitally because it is free. It seems wrong to add to their print run, especially since I am not in their demographic. I am just a marketer who likes to read about science, not a scientist researcher like their audience. But, I keep getting behind on downloading the issues. (I honestly never read it, but my eyes roll over every page and there are always good nuggets).

Is the loss of habit a big loss for publication publishers? Or will I develop a new habit for digital magazine consumption? Right now my digital pub habit is much like my web reading habit, which is more like a serendipitous experience where I skip from one nugget to the next. It gets me what I need, but it also wastes time on things that are off-topic.

Is it that this one particular publication is not high priority reading for me, it’s too off-topic? Or is it really the loss of habit that is the hurdle here? Could a new cue, like an email ping, trigger the development of a new routine of downloading and reviewing, followed by the same reward of feeling that I discovered something valuable? Is an email ping enough though?

Duhigg writes:
A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Our habits are changing our brains!

If our habits are changing our brain so that the magazine’s place gets hardwired in, then establishing a habit surrounding digital magazines is going to be very important.

In the mountain of information online, how are publications to compete and distinguish themselves. I think part of the answer lies in the careful cultivation of new habit loops.

Have you thought about the habit of consumption of your digital publication? What are you doing that might cultivate habits that will keep your readers reading (and apparently changing their brains)?

The phrase “website redesign” is outmoded because it creates the illusion that the challenge is primarily a visual one, with an assumed understanding of a technical component. This misnomer misrepresents the scope and import of a new website.

These are some of the important areas that you will need to focus on in order to create an effective site that is nimble and can work hard for you to achieve goals and provide insights into attracting more of the right visitors.

This is what you’ll really be focusing on when you create a new site:

Content

Prospects and clients are searching for information or help and they are going to find it online. But whose content will they find? Will it be yours?  Who will assume the leadership role as the purveyor of useful content for your audience? If you are not ready to make the investment, there are many who will. Because the upside is big.

But that doesn’t mean that all of your content will need to be on your site. In the universe of content, your site may be a spec of dust. So, your content is your most valuable marketing asset as it can travel through the universe attracting people to you. You need to create content that can be adapted to perform for you in many channels. And while it seems counter intuitive, visiting your website may be deeper in the sales funnel than you may have ever considered.

Robust Search and Analytics

Don’t fear, eventually they will get to your site! And once they do, it better be easy to find what they came there for. Your search function needs to think like them in order to serve them. (Stats show that people don’t move through sites in the same way any longer. They don’t use buttons on sites as much as they link through content products and use search.)

And as they move through your site they are giving you great insight into what they need, what they want. You’ll learn where you hook them and where you lose them. You learn what they search for. The information they are offering is so valuable you would pay for it, but once you have a good analytics set up, you don’t have to pay for this data. It’s free, well almost free, you pay for it in time; the time you invest to understand the patterns and habits of your visitors.

Mobile and Compatibility

User stats around the world show a trend: weekends = mobile. As our mobile devices deliver more functionality, and they get far better year after year, and our habits become ingrained, businesses will see their analytics show more mobile users than they ever expected. You can either get ready for that surge now or scramble in real-time to ensure that your website and its best content is easy to consume on a mobile device.

And it is not just one of the mobile devices, it is all of them. That’s right. Your site can’t only work best for the iOS platform or only the Android platform. So, we all know by now that means no Flash, it also means that you will need to invest resources into this technical aspect on a regular basis so it should be part of your ongoing budget planning. Because no one knows for certain what just 3 years from now will bring for us in terms of mobile computing.

Content Strategy

If you don’t have a written content strategy informed by data-driven buyer personas, then don’t bother creating a new website. You think that language is too strong? I can tell you that is sugar-coated.

If you don’t know who your 4-5 buyer segments are, how can you write or design for them or provide them with an outstanding user experience? You simply can’t.

Even a content creation team of one will benefit from being guided by a thoughtful and purposeful content strategy. Content strategy is like food and water: you need it. There shouldn’t be any question whether any organization can go without it. No exceptions.

Social Integration

Your next buyer may be following you on Pinterest and Twitter but has never been to your site. They may enjoy articles that you publish in mainstream magazines or on niche blogs.

Plus you’re not the only one talking about your brand. If your marketing is successful, there will be many more people out there who talk about you, sharing or consuming your content, retweeting, Like-ing or pinning you. 

So why should this robust discussion end once a visitor arrives at your site? Well, it shouldn’t. On your site, a visitor should be able to see an integration of your social universe. We are all becoming wary of online marketing, we don’t entirely trust what you have to say about yourself, first we want third party recommendations.

If lots of people are singing your praises, then you will attract people to leave their universe and enter yours. Your site has to be good because in some ways it is like a dead end street off the universe. Social integration can bring life back into it with real-time connections to the rest of the universe.

Psychology Triggers

Humans visit your site, not robots. Well, actually robots do visit but we are not concerned with them here. When visitors come from Pinterest they are primed to connect with images. But when they come from a financial site, they likely will respond to a more analytical experience. You have to make a site that will work for both.

What color is the best to use on your site so that a link will get clicked? Easy — and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — it’s the color that stands out the best. If your site is very blue, then red or orange might be your color. But something to consider is that maybe you should design your color strategy with limited color so that you can gently guide users using color?

When you list information, group it in threes because people can grasp and recall a cluster of three best. If you want subscribers, be careful about how and when you give them choices.

And if people are buying through your site it is important that they can recall on which site it was that they found something that they liked. Attention must be paid to how you can trigger memory for a visual versus a spatial memory. One person might recall the oversized, purple, serif subheads while another remembers the three-column presentation of content.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it shows you that there is a lot to thoroughly explore and solve before you begin to turn your attention to the design. Don’t waste your time with design unless you have the other important elements fully resolved. And if you are thinking of skipping some of these steps and getting to a great looking site, then that may be the most costly design you ever buy when you factor the loss of revenue that will eventually be linked to a poorly performing site.

This is not an isolated incident. Associations are no longer the only game in town when it comes to content coveted by members to help them stay informed, competitive and credentialed. Consequently, the ability of associations to hook members through its content is under siege — from everyone.
 
While this sounds like doom and gloom, there is good news here. Associations know how to create killer content and have a content-creation machine in place. The bad news is that the machine needs to be rebuilt or reconfigured for the new playing field that is being shaped by social and mobile. The approach to content creation and curation needs to evolve to match the constantly shifting ways that we now share and consume information. 

What you can do: 

• Take cues from content marketers who know that creating great copy isn’t enough. Success comes when you tap the right distribution channels and measure and track your content.
• Add your voice to a study being conducted to determine how prepared associations are to protect their membership by leveraging their content as a marketing tool. The results will help you see where your organization is doing well and where there are gaps.

How vulnerable is your association or how hooked are your members? Find out here.

I have an issue with how it usually works when creating a version for each platform: design your print version then design your digital version.

Why do I have a problem with that? I understand that the print needs to lead in the schedule to have arrival timed with the digital release. I get that. But, there are times when your digital content should drive the design and you should back it out to the print. And that does mean that sometimes digital content is not identical, but that is a whole other debate, isn’t it?

For example, if you have particularly interactive and multi-format content for your digital version then that platform will likely be the more complex design challenge. The visual solution should be created to work best for the most complex need. Once resolved it can be adapted to the simpler need. So, it should not always be print first, digital after.

I propose that the print and digital are done at the same time, with influence traveling from one to the other as needed. A skilled publication design team can adapt designs in either direction to yield a heightened reader experience for each platform.

Despite the schedule needs, should digital should start dictating the design more often? And if so, shouldn’t content be created for the possibilities of the digital environment then adapted for the ‘limited’ print environment?

Do you currently design your digital AFTER your print? Why? Does the idea of having some measure of differing content in digital vs. print make you want to scream?