Costly problems content strategy solves for SMEs

You’re running a small business so you want a web site but you can’t afford to waste money. You’re wary of snake oil salesmen who might try to exploit your inexperience with technology. You can only justify expenditure for services that obviously benefit your business.

So when someone offers you “content strategy” as part of a web site, you’re going to be suspicious, right?

Perhaps he tells you that if you don’t get help with your content right at the beginning, you’ll pay for it later. Perhaps he tells you a story about camels to back up his point.

Suspicious?

You should be. You should ask, quite bluntly, what problems does this content strategy solve for me? Seriously – what will actually go wrong if you don’t have it?

Here are the first four problems that content strategy overcomes. The next four are published here.

Your first problem: your content is not good enough

Content means the text, photos, videos, audio, forms and the like on your site. You’re a small business so you want to cut corners. That’s fine. But publishing copy that is full of mistakes, badly written, waffly or childish is not saving you money in the long term.

When your content is too long for the attention of users on the Internet, when it is repetitive, unclear, written in the wrong tone or inconsistently voiced – then you lose customers and undermine your brand by appearing cheap and unprofessional.

You wouldn’t write a magazine. Why do you think you can write a web site?

Your second problem: your existing print content does not work on the web

One way around the first problem is to reuse existing copy from your print media. You’ve got brochures and fliers – why not just put those words and pictures to work on the web site?

The answer is simple: the web is a completely different publishing environment to print. You’ll be pleased to know that people have studied how different they are. I’m not making this stuff up.

Your print copy will be too long. It will be written for a surveying and page-turning experience rather than a scrolling and clicking one. It will probably be too formal and it certainly won’t be written so that Google picks it up in search results. It will not have the essential pieces of information in the parts of the page where your visitors’ eyeballs go, nor will it have microcopy that represents it all around the web. It will assume that people will take time to read it, when online they won’t. And it won’t direct people towards their next action online.

In short, it will fail.

Print copy is a seven course dinner for guests only. Web content must be a space pill for anyone who drops by, or no one will swallow it.

Your third problem: it takes time to produce good content

It’s hard enough as a professional writer to meet deadlines, even with an editor’s reminders or a team to collaborate with. So what happens when your administrator, manager or trainee is suddenly expected to churn out quality writing in a short space of time?

She’ll freeze. He’ll stall. They’ll try to get someone else to do it or just keep putting it off. The project deadline will pass and they will eventually send incomplete or substandard work to your web team, and we’re back to problem one.

Only now it’s really late.

Good content is hard to write and it takes a lot of time. If you try to produce the content yourself because you want to save a bit of money, and then end up delaying the web site launch for months because you are strugging to produce it, then you are costing your business money by holding up the project.

Was this web site important to your business? Would you like it to be? Because expecting your staff to produce the content is like asking them to produce a TV show. It will take them ages to learn how it all works, never mind actually produce anything worth looking at.

Your fourth problem: there are bits of web content that you have never heard of

Who is going to write the metadata? The microcopy? The messages and labels? I’m not inventing these – metadata for example, is the information about the web page, such as the page title, page description, metatags and web address, some of it behind the scenes, all of it essential to the success of your content online. And all of it needing to be carefully written.

The visible words on the page are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to web content. But what is under the water is desperately important, in particular for online search. You need to get the metadata right to improve your site’s findability and usability.

The default, when you don’t get help with your content, is for the designer just to make something up. She may or may not be very good at it. Writing, editing and advising on content is not what she does. She may leave whole portions blank. Is that a risk that you want to take? – did you want a web site that does more than just look good?

If no one can find it or it’s confusing to use, then you’ve wasted the money you paid for it.

That’s only the half of it

In our business of making web sites, we see these four problems over and over again. You can’t afford not to have a professional help with your content. The content plan is the glue that holds the web site design together.

Content strategy is not about fleecing you at your point of uncertainty – it’s about saving you money in the long run, ensuring that the whole fee you pay for a web site is not wasted.

Basically, pay now or pay later. Just like the camel on Mount Sinai.

Next week we’ll look at four more problems that content strategy will solve for your business. Until then, why not grab a free sample of my work, or get in touch to explore how a focus on content now will bring returns for your company in the future?