Thinking about revamping your website or digital tools, but not sure how to manage all that content?
I can help.
Over the years I’ve worked with a wide range of organisations to improve their customer content as part of a website revamp and content overhaul or to improve how they manage their content.
My work homes in on these 3 areas:
1) Writing content
2) Managing content
3) Publishing content
Why are these areas important?
There are many reasons, and I’ll discuss each briefly below.
1) Writing content
Whatever sector your organisation operates in, your online content is your 24-hour shop window to your products and/or services.
You may have a single person, a small or even a large team of people who write content for your website or other digital tools.
Everyone involved in writing your content should understand the type of language you use to speak to your audience.
So, for example, your business may deal with specialist machinery that all your customers know of by a specific name.
Or you may prefer to write a service or product name in capital letters.
For consistency, your service or product name should appear in the same way, wherever it is written.
But there are more things to consider when producing or writing content.
Some questions you should have firm answers to include:
- How do you decide on the topics to write about?
- Who is writing your content?
- Is more than one person covering the same or similar content, and why?
- Who is checking the content?
Putting all of the above into a content style and rules guide – and sharing it with everyone who writes content for you is one way to ensure you’re producing content of a high quality.
Being consistent about how you produce content will help you with the next step.
2) Managing content
This is important when there is more than one person looking after your content, particularly where teams have overlapping responsibilities or cover related topics.
Some questions for you to resolve include:
- Is it clear who is responsible for each topic?
- Have you carried out a content audit?
- Do you have an agreed way to deal with content updates – and any duplicate content?
These are major decisions that will affect how well you can manage the next step.
3) Publishing content
However large or small your content team, if you’re publishing content, you’ll be using some form of content management system (CMS) to update your website content or to create new content and make it public.
Setting up and using a CMS (and I include WordPress under this general heading) is easier if you produce and manage your content efficiently.
Depending on how complex your organisation is, you’ll need to set up your CMS so that it is based around permissions.
For example, most people who are responsible for creating your content should have access to your CMS and have the ability to add content to it.
But only a select few should have full publishing rights allowing them to make that content public.
Some organisations need a more sophisticated publishing workflow arrangement, complete with alerts and the ability to push content back to other staff in the publishing chain.
But for some, it will be enough to move content from a ‘draft’ state to fully published in one simple step.
How I work with you
I can:
- Write, manage or publish your content for you
- Show you how to manage and publish content
- Carry out your content audit
- Produce or update your content style guide
Let’s talk about your content management needs.