It’s hard to underestimate the importance of your company’s digital content in today’s crowded marketplace. Having a robust online presence can boost lead generation, organic search success and branding. That means your content strategy must hit all the bases, cohesively incorporating impressive design with fresh, relevant content and a meaningful presence on social media. Here are a few things to consider when you’re thinking about your company’s digital content strategy.
Making a long-term commitment. For many companies, digital content is almost an afterthought. They’ll take a person from another part of the company, such as sales or operations and put them in charge, or bring on a part-timer or even an intern. Maybe that was fine for handling your company’s Twitter feed or cranking out the occasional blog, but successful companies realize it pays off, long-term, to have one person lead a cohesive, structured approach to website design and development, email, landing pages, blogs, newsletters and social media. When your company decides it’s ready for a long-term commitment and wants longer, sustainable growth, it needs to follow through and partner with a digital marketing agency or bring in a full-time employee.
Finding a leader who truly understands your business. Leadership involves learning about your business and its objectives, and determining if your current digital strategy is supporting those objectives and then choosing the digital content platforms that will lead to supporting the company’s brand awareness or sales growth. It’s also about playing well with others, both inside and outside your organization. An intern can’t be expected to know how to communicate with a C-level or Senior Sales executive. A digital agency has a dedicated leader who communicates with senior leadership and guides them throughout the process. Whether it’s driving purchases or raising awareness of your brand, you deserve a person who really understands your customers and is committed to growing your bottom line.
Developing a true brand ambassador. Every piece of content you share – from a blog to a Facebook post – tells the story of your brand, so the person in charge of managing that content should live and breathe your company. They should know your brand guidelines by heart and have a complete mastery over its tone and voice. This level of expertise doesn’t happen overnight – it takes more time than the few months an intern will be around.
Finding a storyteller. To be memorable, the content on your social media channels has to come together to deliver a consistent and unified message. That means it has to be story-driven, not just SEO-driven. We aren’t saying that technical SEO isn’t important – it is – but with great storytelling and a team (or person) dedicated to marketing those stories across digital platforms (email, blogs, landing pages, etc.) it’s a natural progression of search engines (both traditional engines like Google and newer ones like LinkedIn) to see the value and offer up the content more to searches.
Finding a business analyst. Metrics such as impressions, followers, shares and likes are great, but you need a person who understands the metrics that matter. Metrics is about iteration of interpreting and continuously evolving your digital content strategy. Most interns (and even a few agencies) either don’t know how to gather metrics or present them in a way so that the company isn’t sure what they are looking at or if they are supporting the company goals. An agency or full-time person will gather, understand and be able to interpret metrics. They will also be able to have hearty discussions with executive team members on what is working and what needs to be changed.
This is the primary reason you shouldn’t put an intern in charge. Interns are great for temporarily supporting certain digital content pieces and even as a pipeline to full-time employment for a company. When an organization is ready for the next stage of growth with digital content that is driven by long-term commitment and analysis of data, it may be time to think about moving forward with a digital agency, initially, and then a full-time person to drive the next phase.
If you’re not quite ready to bring on a full-time employee but decide to partner with a digital marketing agency to develop and implement a content strategy, we hope you consider On Advertising’s team of professionals to help lead the content strategy for your business.
Contact us today to learn how we can help!
