Is Your Website Talking to Your Buyers?

Without fresh content on it, your website starts acting as slow poison for your brand, as it gives the impression to your buyers and other stakeholders that your company is not active or it’s a dying brand.

By Rakesh Raman

While digital marketing has many components that promote your brand, a website is the most important of them that creates and keeps your brand’s presence in the cyberspace. And it acts as a direct communication interface between your brand and buyers.

In fact, a corporate or brand website is like your virtual marketing agent that never sleeps and is available to your customers all the time, all across the world.

However, this marketing agent can’t keep standing around the clock, if it’s not fresh. And it gets freshness from the regular supply of information or content. In fact, content is the lifeblood for a website (site, in short).

Without fresh content on it, your website starts acting as slow poison for your brand, as it gives the impression to your buyers and other stakeholders that your company is not active or it’s a dying brand.

While your website should not look like a stale poster on the web, you should update it constantly so that it keeps talking to your buyers and others – informing them about the progress at your end.

But big question: How?

Content is the most precious commodity in this world – more valuable than even gold. Obviously, good content is scarce.

There are specialized people and content service providers in the market. But either they’re too expensive or most are fraudsters who claim to be content specialists but can’t create content.

Given the situation, it will not be a wise step for many smaller companies to hire external content services for their websites. They can, however, build an internal process to regularly create content, which can be in the form of text, pictures, graphics, videos, and so on.

For this, they can identify a couple of people in their companies who have very good language skills and who are a little outgoing – expressive and lively. Website content management should be their primary responsibility.

They’d interact with all internal departments of your company and keep an eye on external content sources to regularly generate content. Thus, the website content management process will be like your other business processes, including financial accounting, sales, human resource management, and so on.

Important: As content creation is an uphill task, don’t expect content quality on your site through this internal makeshift arrangement. Gradually, you can allocate sufficient budget for content services and hire a good agency after proper evaluation for creating content for your site.

Moreover, just making an internal process is not enough. Now, you need to run this process by feeding it with the right content for your website. Primarily, there are four types of content that you can create for your site and keep it fresh. These are:

1. Static Content

It’s about your company, its products and services, key people, contacts, etc. While this content will rarely change, you should keep it in a structured format on your site so that it’s easy for site visitors to navigate and access the important information they want.

2. Activity-Based Content

This content is dynamic in nature, as it depends on the field activity in which you participate. For example, if you participate in an exhibition to display your products. You can create multiple content components on this participation.

This may include pictures or videos of your exhibition booth where you displayed your products, about your interaction with the visitors, panoramic view of the exhibition hall, etc.

You can even create content reports on internal soirees for your own staff, your manufacturing processes, clients’ visits in your company, your new tie-ups, and so on.  There are many other ways you can create such dynamic content for your site.

3. Allied Content

This content is about the industry in which you operate. There may be a possibility that you don’t have activity-based content as described above because you didn’t participate in any activity. But you can still create content.

Suppose you run a hotel. You can write a general article about trends in the hotel industry just to educate the travelers. It could be about a “green hotel” or tips for travelers when they book hotels online. Similarly, a garments manufacturer can write about the fashion trends.

If these are original and informative articles about your line of business, people will come to read them and your site will keep humming with activity while subtly promoting your brand.

4. Creative Content

This content may comprise engaging components such as short films, animations, mobile or social games, etc. around your brand. It can be delivered through your website. As this content is very expensive, initially you can avoid doing it.

But when you realize that buyers’ engagement is increasing on your site, you should make a plan to put creative content on your site to attract more buyers’ eyeballs to promote your brand all across the world.

The content approach described above can help you keep your site alive. Depending on the nature of content, you can either keep it under the main sections of the site or you can create a separate section in the form of a blog on which your allied content can reside.

But remember, when you add fresh content to any section of the site, just put an introduction about that content on the site’s homepage because it’s the most frequently visited page of your site.

The idea is to maintain a regular traffic on your site by offering fresh content to the visitors. So, never leave your site unattended and let it grow with the regular content supply. Let it talk to your buyers, as a dumb website can be more harmful than helpful for your brand.

By Rakesh Raman, who is a government award-winning journalist and runs free school for deserving children under his NGO – RMN Foundation.