Writing Your Homepage for Your Goals

No one is thinking through the language and presentation behind these systems.

The first problem is that the language and presentation often don’t fit with the rest of the brand. For example, reading the banners, flyers or ads for a Safeway store leaves you with an impression that they are friendly, clean and affordable. The self-checkout machine comes across more as loud and passive-aggressive when it asks, in a higher volume, “HAVE YOU SCANNED YOUR SAFEWAY CARD?”

This bugs me because: A) it’s so loud and B) the machine knows I haven’t scanned my Safeway card–asking the question is just a weak way of reminding me. Please, machine, man up and just remind me.

Think about it, Safeway: if you were standing in line and the cashier asked you “have you paid for your groceries yet?” as you were rummaging through your wallet, wouldn’t you feel strange? The cashier knows you haven’t paid–why wouldn’t they just either A) wait or B) jump start you by saying something along the lines of “your total is XXX.”

You need to think of your self-checkouts as cashiers. Automated ones, yes, but cashiers all the same. Your brand and presentation should be just as clear in the machine (if not more clear) than in your cashiers, who are presumably trained not to say bizarre things to customers.

King Soopers, which has won me over due to its endlessly better machines, takes a different approach. Not only does the volume of the machine reflect the average person’s hearing capabilities, but the machine very politely asks the user to “If you have a King Soopers card, please scan it now.” It’s not passive-aggressive. It doesn’t blow your eardrums out. And the tone feels friendly and inviting–it’s reminding you that you could save money.

When we think about content and brand in our organizations, we need to think of it as more than a website, a few brochures and some banner advertisements. It’s the way employees present themselves. It’s the spoken word. It’s the user experience of every system you have–be it online or otherwise.

Your self-checkout system is your content. Your employee presentation is your content.

It doesn’t mean you have to be static or sacrifice authenticity. But it does mean that you have to think about all your assets as a part of the bigger whole.

Where: Crepes & Crepes in Cherry Creek North

What: Come prepared to drink cappuccinos and discuss drafting a formal content strategy. If you have an example of a CS document to bring, you’ll be the life of the party.

Please RSVP if you plan on attending. I’ll make the reservations.

Qualitative Audit Questions:
First, let’s identify what this page is trying to do.

1. Who is the audience for this page? (Who is it designed for and who is going to click on it to read the content?)
2. What is that audience looking for when they click on this page?

For example: a page about economic development services may attract an audience of site selectors or business owners considering a move to your area. When they get onto the services page, they may be looking for a list of services your organization offers, what each service entails, who is eligible and what are the next steps.

Next, let’s ask ourselves whether this page is accomplishing its purpose:

1. Is this page content talking specifically to the audience you’ve identified?
2. Is this page providing answers to the questions that your audience is asking (from the example above: what services are available? Who is eligible to receive this help or benefit from this service?)?

And, finally, let’s ask ourselves whether the information on this page is easy to consume (your web users will leave if it’s hard):

1. Does the headline (and sub-headlines) tell the user exactly what they’ll find on the page?
2. When the user gets to this page, do they feel like they’re in the right place–like they’ll find what they’re looking for?
3. Is the page easy to scan for information?
4. Can the user download or print information to take away and read later?

Hopefully the answers to these questions are Yes! If not, the next step in your content process will be to fix the problems you’ve identified: if the page has no clear audience, identify one and edit the content to speak to this group. If the page is wordy and hard to read, it’s time to edit and make it scannable (79% of web users scan before reading). If the page doesn’t address the questions of your audience, it’s time to add content that will answer those questions.

And thus the audit has prepared you for what comes next. Now you can allot the appropriate funds or internal resources needed to prepare content, fix content or fill in the holes.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, please drop us a line. Let’s talk about what we can do to help.

So, what are the next steps? How does one get started on auditing content?

Well, first let’s talk about the two questions we posed yesterday:

1. Do I have the content my user is looking for?
2. Does that content accomplish what it needs to?

These two questions are the starting point for what we call the Quantitative Audit and the Qualitative Audit.

A Quantitative Audit is designed to identify holes in your content and to answer the question: do I have what my user is looking for? To start with your quantitative audit, here are a few first steps:

1. Create a Word or Excel spreadsheet to keep track
2. Fill in your spreadsheet’s first column with your new site map (if you’re doing a new website)*
3. Go down this spreadsheet like a check list: do you have all the content for the pages in your new site map?
4. Once you’ve identified the holes, you can start to organize your content for upload into a new website or you can start to ask the harder question posed by the Qualitative Audit: does this content accomplish what it needs to?

* If you are doing the audit after you’ve already launched your website or before you have a new site map, use your current site map and take a look at any industry standards that are available (for economic development, IEDC spreadsheets fit this bill). From the IEDC spreadsheets (or other standards), you can identify whether there are pages of information that your current site map is missing–add these to your document.

Let’s pause here so that you can collect your thoughts and your content. Watch for the Qualitative Audit soon.

A content audit is the process of sifting through all of your web content (from your website, blogs, social media networks, microsites, etc.) and identifying holes or issues with said content.

A content audit is most often done when you’re about to start writing new website copy for a brand new website, but it is also a good practice to do an audit 6 months into your new website, one year into your website and so on and so forth. The reason your prospects come to your website is to consume content. They come in search of information about your place, your organization, your services, your available properties–and all of this is content.

In fact, the number one reason they’ll leave your website and never come back is out-of-date or irrelevent content.

This is why you need to audit–to ask yourself two simple questions about every single page on your site (and maybe some pages not yet on your site):

1. Do I have the content my user is looking for?
2. Does that content accomplish what it needs to?

Whether you’re getting ready to up the ante with a beautiful new website or are just ready to have better web content, now’s the time to audit.

Originally posted on Latitude.

Details are as follows:

Date: June 15th
Time: 6:00PM
Location: Caveau Wine Bar on 17th (http://www.caveauwinebar.com/)

When you get there, ask for Gigi.

One thing I’ve never done before, though: content strategy.

Well, I shouldn’t say never. For years, I’ve been doing bits and pieces of what everyone’s now calling content strategy. Just never all in one document and never as its own project; in other words: never formal. So, you can bet that my current project–on which I have a lot of creative freedom–is pretty exciting for me.

As I take all these little bits and pieces from my work throughout the years (and from recent research), I also want to take the time to document what I’m doing. In my humble opinion (as someone researching the topic with some frequency) there isn’t enough information out there about content strategy. Particularly on what it is and how to get started.

So, here begins one content specialist’s experimental, collaborative, perhaps clumsy journey into a formal content strategy.

Part I: What in the world is content strategy?
I like to think of content strategy as a map: a landscape on which you can lay out how your content connects to, interacts with and affects everything else you are doing with your website, blog, social media and other marketing efforts. Where you can also lay out where your content lives and what it’s called.

If you compare your online marketing project to going on vacation–what do you need before you can even get out of town? A map. Vacations without it might be fun for a few hours (“wow, we ended up in the wrong town, but it was so cute and had the world’s coolest home-grown coffee shop!”), but, eventually, when you can’t find the hotel, your friends’ house or even the city, not having something to direct you (feel free to replace map with directions or GPS–I think the analogy still holds) gets pretty darn old.

What does this mean in real terms? It means that content strategy directs and informs the rest of your project.

Building your map
So, if I’m thinking of this as a map, the next step seems to be identifying what goes on the map. Do I want attractions? Which highways do I highlight? How far back do I zoom the map? What landmarks appear? What cities? Are county lines shown?

In content strategy, the “attractions” and “county lines” that we can decide to include or leave out are items like these (some, to be fair, seem to be more permanently fixed):

• Organization goals
• Project goals
• Project risks
• Project overview
• Project calendar
• Content calendar
• A map of content interactions across stages of the project (aka. in the design stage, what is the role of content? what does the designer need to consider in terms of content? etc.)
• Search engine optimization strategy
• Messaging document
• Sources of content/key influencers in your industry/field/etc.
• Style and messaging guide (tone guidelines, style guidelines–aka. do you or do you not use subheaders, an oxford comma, etc.)
• Content properties interaction chart (content flow)
• Content properties traffic chart (content funnel)
• Contribution and training strategy and calendar
• (and, obviously) recommendations (almost missed this one, since I’m not thinking of them as recommendations. Instead, I’m thinking of them as “obvious things we will do to make our online marketing better.”)

As alluded to above, some of these come from our social media strategy format, others from content projects along the way. I’d also love to hear any additional suggestions, documents or “landmarks” I’ve missed.