Marketing Answers Blog

Late last year, you probably saw several new year's articles emphasizing what you and your marketing team should do to improve results in the coming year. You probably read them, and after getting to the end of each one, you thought "yep, this year I'm really going to focus on that". You may have even set goals for your company and distributed them to your team who then read the list and said "yeah, that's right, I'm going to do that". In the back of your mind, you know that not many people actually keep their new year's resolutions, in fact the numbers are pretty low, barely 8% - 10% manage to achieve their goals

In the early days of online marketing (back in the '90's, that is) you could publish your website without too much thought beyond stuffing it with keywords. People often felt that if you had a site that was attractive, and included a lot of information, then you were pretty much done. 

Your website should perform as the digital storefront to your business. It's what delivers a first impression to your prospects and provides conversion paths for them to express interest in your services and products. In the past most of us have fairly religiously taken on the task of ripping everything up and rebuilding our sites from almost scratch every 1.5 to 2 years and it's usually a long and difficult undertaking. But there is hope for a more efficient and less painless process.

Increasingly, organizations expect their marketers to optimize efficiency in a drive to wring the most possible value out of them. Creating fresh content on a regular basis that is engaging, well structured and share-able requires dedication and focus, both of which add up to a large investment in time and typically result in a considerable amount of work.

Many of you already know that my background is in electrical engineering. I worked in R&D for 20 years as a wireless telecom IC designer for several large US companies working closely with a lot of other technical people over the course of my career before moving into marketing over 10 years ago.

My new client sat across the table from me, crestfallen and long-faced, chin almost drooping into his sandwich. While he was a good friend of mine, I had not become involved in his business prior to that meeting and now that things had become dire, with referrals drying up and bills to pay, Alan and I were at lunch talking about how to recover.

I used to say that if your technology startup website is more than 4 years old, it is definitely time for a complete rebuild. The reason for this is simple. Websites created prior to (roughly) that period are often vestiges of the '90s brochure-style web design that are the marketing kiss of death here in the new millennium.

I've spent the last several weeks sifting through the very predictable parade of new year's business advice and guides telling us the top 5 things to look for or behaviors to adopt or top 10 social media tips to follow and succeed and on, and on... 

We pointed out last week that there is often a correlation between the loss of your readership and the quality of your technical writing. While the article delved into what can potentially be the cause of high bounce-rate and low engagement at a low level, it didn't go into high-level planning.

What are you doing from a content strategy perspective? Do you have a plan or are you developing technical content 'when you get time'? Do you recognize the importance of structuring your efforts?