Managing Your Firm’s Content Strategy

Once you have a more complex content strategy, you will probably begin to involve multiple authors throughout the firm across multiple platforms. At that point, it is a good idea to appoint someone on staff as your internal editor. This should be someone who has a solid understanding of the firm’s marketing objectives and culture, someone who is organized and adept at educating and motivating people, and, of course, someone with strong verbal and written communication skills. That person may or may not be you. It is an important role that takes a good deal of attention and time. The detail oriented, highly organized skill set required for this role may not fit so well with the general personality profile of the average small agency principal, so be prepared to delegate this exceptionally important role, if need be.

When considering this time and intellectual investment, it helps to view it as a pure marketing cost. How much time and money would you have been willing to spend ten years ago on designing, printing, and shipping three thousand copies of a six-color glossy fold-out brochure? If you invest the same resources into your web marketing (adding more time and less money), you will likely invest enough to see real benefits within six months or so.

The key here is consistency, so I suggest that you start small. Commit, for instance, to writing monthly newsletters, with two thousand words each. Once that becomes a part of your routine, maybe consider starting a company blog. Start with a soft internal launch while you develop the blogging habits as a firm and get a sense of who should and should not contribute and what direction they need. After those two platforms begin to run smoothly, adding quarterly webinars may be a natural next step.

A content strategy that fully embraces any of the platforms I describe here goes a long way toward making your website an invaluable marketing asset. If you cannot take on more than one platform, don’t sweat it, but I strongly suggest that you do commit at least to one, and stick with it.

This post is an excerpt from my book, “A Website That Works.”

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