People seem to be obsessed with driving traffic and counting visitors while paying little attention to engaging people with content. Anyone that comes to your site comes for a reason, you have a moment to tell your story and keep them coming back for more. In today’s age with so much information how do you successfully do this?
Traditionally we develop a website and expect the visitor to log on via a computer, open the browser and view. Truly successful websites understand that this approach is very limiting and fully embrace that it’s the content that matters not the site.
That is why each company provides numerous ways of accessing their content beyond their websites. YouTube’s embed feature is a great example of this and allows it the ability to reach audiences who may never go to their websites.
Twitter is probably the best example of all. If you use Twitter then ask yourself what percentage of the time do you read tweets (or post them) via the twitter website? If you are like me, then the answer is very rarely.
The lesson here is obvious – as website owners you need to start thinking in terms of a broader web strategy and releasing content from your websites. How then do we do this? Well, lets explore some of the possibilities.
1. Embrace mobile.
Yeah I know we have been saying it for years but it really is increasing. Devices such as the iPhone have seen phenomenal sales and account for the rapid growth in this area. It allows full rendering of HTML websites however for ease of viewing, its not that difficult to produce a mobile version of your website. If you have a mobile device try it out on marketinginmalta.com to see how it renders the content in a fast easy to access way.
2. Start a newsletter.
If you don’t already have one then this is an excellent way to keep visitors updated with your offerings. You also know that people have opted into receive content on what you are offering. Make sure when you sent this up you strike a balance in collecting enough information to segment your audience without putting them off the registration process, this way you can deliver more targeted information. Having a newsletter breaks out of the browser and delivers your content in the users email client. Why we are on the subject, why not join mine.
3. Get blogging.
Blogging allows you give your company a human element, share ideas, keep people updated and interact with your client base. It’s also fantastic for SEO, RSS feeds connected with blogs allow users to subscribe via a number of channels as well as allowing other sites to syndicate your content.
4. Don’t resist Facebook and those other sort of sites.
Don’t dismiss it as something aimed at the younger market, it might surprise you is that over the last year the number of users between 35-54 has jumped by 276% to over 6 million and growing. This demographic also applies to users in Malta.
Facebook groups – These are ideal for building a dialogue, you can easily invite people to participate and those people in turn can invite others. This makes groups ideally suited for viral marketing. A very good example of a Facebook group is the one for Inspire “Life Coach and NLP”.
Facebook fan pages – Fan pages are basically public profiles for organisations rather than individuals. Unlike groups, pages are public facing. This means non-facebook users can see them and they are indexed by search engines.
Hire an application developer – Facebook allows third parties to build ‘applications’ that can be add to user profiles. The possibility of users embedding your content into their profiles makes this an attractive proposition if you have appropriate content.
5. Syndicate your content.
As I mentioned before, You Tube do this in an excellent way, however you don’t need to get into video or anything of the sort, you can just as easily write for other websites, magazines and blogs with a reference back to yours. Twitter also allows you to do this perfectly and with a wider reach, you will see that each tweet logs as a comment on this site.
It’s also becoming increasingly unnecessary to limit your content to the written word. Creating audio or video content has become trivial although creating popular content is harder than it first appears. Don’t believe that simply uploading a clip to You Tube will generate millions of views. You need to be work on something that will get people talking, the strategy for this I’ll cover in another post as its something that I’m working on more with a recent client.
Let us know how you are breaking out of the browser and how its helping your company by commenting to this article.
