Content Is Still King
by The Blazing Lucidity Staff
You've heard the expression Content is King, but have you wondered what this means?
Online content is an indispensable component of your web site. Effective content offers the best opportunity to gain people’s attention and differentiate your product or service from your competitors. People won't read what's on your homepage if what they’re reading doesn’t grip them. This is why your message must be concise and articulated in a way that your audience will respond to. With all of the competition online today, communicating with customers is essential.
It is our opinion that organizations have traditionally underemphasized the importance of online content. Some of the reasons are:
- Writing effective content takes time and expertise, and is out of the scope of many web development projects.
- Web developers and designers are skilled at creating web functionality and making web sites look attractive. Marketing personnel are focused on promoting products and/or services.
- Companies have not insisted that their content be top notch.
Number three is particularly important. Companies have not insisted on outstanding content because they haven’t yet fully appreciated the marketing power of the web. Online content creation is often a joint effort between a company’s marketing team and in-house IT or external web development firm -- and neither one really understands how to write it effectively. In addition, there is often little emphasis of keeping content updated, so copy remains virtually unchanged for months or years. Now we know what you might be thinking:
“Hey, my content isn’t so bad. It says what it is supposed to say.”
We believe you! But we also believe that more than likely your content can be improved for both your human readers and for search engines. As an intrinsically fluid medium, the web is always transforming, and your web media strategy should reflect this. If not, your company’s credibility takes a hit as visitors to your site get the impression that you don’t quite have things together. And that is definitley not the message you want to convey.
The best photos and layout can’t take the place of rich, meaningful content. As you have undoubtedly noticed, the web is chalk full of stale, predictable writing, and sites that look nice but do not offer a compelling online experience. A fresh, relevant, content-rich site makes a statement about your organization. It shows that your company is up to date, projects an attitude of prosperity, and inspires confidence. As your web site increasingly becomes the ‘face’ of your business, this is more important than ever.
