January 4th, 2009 | 
Author: The potential of the Internet as a constructive force (and even as a disruptive one, if you consider how it has fundamentally altered interpersonal and organizational communication) has been proven without doubt today. Traditional hindrances such as distance and geographical proximity have been shattered, as the Web has given all businesses a level playing field, irrespective of their size. However, the same level of flexibility that has made the Internet so powerful brings with it a host of challenges.
With the Internet representing an ocean of information, your company’s Web site has to be positioned in such a way that it stands out. In a world where information needs change rapidly, Web sites need to be constantly updated with fresh content. Users and even search engines such as Google seldom visit Web sites that have stale content. In such an environment, developing an online audience that looks forward to your Web site is a daunting task.
This white paper describes some tactics you could use to develop your online audience, the challenges involved, and how a CMS can facilitate your organization’s ascendancy in the online space.
Making your Web site a star
Audiences everywhere – be it print, television or online – do not have patience. In the latter medium, this ‘patience’ is worth only a few seconds. There is literally an infinite number of other places the user can reach with a few clicks of a button; and loyalties can change at rates faster than any traditional medium. Developing an audience that has your Web site bookmarked and regularly visits it requires a smart and systematic approach.
However, before you proceed, it is extremely critical that your organization understands the key objectives or goals that you want your Web site to achieve. For example, if your organization is hosting a portal, your goal could be to attract the maximum visitors or ‘eyeballs’ as they are often called and hope that the browsers or surfers will eventually turn into buyers of the products of your advertisers. Or if your organization produces a popular news and entertainment magazine, you will rely on quality online content to acquire new print subscribers.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s easy to see that the one thread that is common for all organizations is ‘Quality Content’. There is simply no substitute for it; and this content must be relevant for the times we live in.
Search Engine Friendliness
Quality content clearly comes first, but there are really a host of techniques that organizations can employ to attract attention from surfers. collegue
As a majority of people browsing for information online use search engines to find the information they need, it is an absolute must for your organization to ensure that your Web site is search engine friendly. Ranking high on search engines for specific keywords is an important component of your Web marketing strategy, as users do not typically go beyond the first two pages of search engine results.
Making your Web site search engine friendly requires a series of optimization techniques. This typically begins with the understanding that your Web site content has to have certain ‘keywords’ – which are the words, terms or phrases that surfers will enter into the little search boxes of search engines. You will also have to carefully create relevant meta tags (basically information about information) and title pages that will boost your search engine rankings. Pro-active methods such as submitting your Web site to search engines or directories, and placing your company’s articles on popular industry Web sites can also help your organization rise higher on search engine rankings.
Taking Advantage of Interactive Media
Generating quality content on a consistent basis is a huge challenge, and savvy organizations have rapidly discovered that generating content via user-driven mediums can be used to drive more traffic to Web sites.
Instead of restricting the content generation landscape to a few spokespersons from the company, organizations have adopted Web 2.0 tools and technologies to turn the model upside down. The immense adoption of mediums such as blogs and Wikis, point out to the popularity of such mediums. Corporate blogs are being used to build an informal dialogue with customers and even for testing new product ideas. Similarly, RSS feeds are making it possible to automatically push personalized Web site updates to consumers.
The biggest advantage of creating a medium such as a blog is that it allows readers to interact with your organization and, in turn, be ambassadors of your brand. Progressive companies have also realized the value of ‘viral’ marketing techniques – for example, a clever or unusual corporate video could be posted on a site like YouTube, allowing users to embed links to the video on their sites, blogs and so on. If the content is powerful enough, the word spreads – and fast!
When more users participate and generate content on their own, it helps in not only populating the Web site with fresh content, but also in building networks. These techniques can help your Web site attract far more traffic than can be generated using conventional mediums.
Banners and AdWords
Popular Web sites have extensive and proven reach. You can take advantage of this by placing advertising banners – typically for a reasonable cost – on such sites. These campaigns have an added dimension: the capability to target certain demographics and locations. If you know where your consumers are and when they’re most likely to be online, you can create fruitful campaigns and continuously refine them as well.
Lately, pay-per-click advertising is also becoming popular and you can use concepts such as Google AdWords to display your organization’s advertisement alongside search engine rankings when the user types a particular keyword in the search engine.
The Challenges of Keeping Pace in an Online World
Content is at the core of every e-marketing strategy, and it will always be the quality of content that will drive people to your Web site. While quality of content is given, some other characteristics are equally important.
From a branding perspective, content consistency or the ability of different campaigns or departments from your organization to talk the same language and deliver the same message is critical. A simple example could be of an advertisement talking about the release of a new product, and the Web site of the organization having no mention of the product – or having a bit of content on the product that is hard to find or navigate to.
For consistency, you need a system that has the ability to centralize content and deliver it to multiple information sources, everything from campaigns, direct e-mail newsletters and podcasts to advertisements, and each piece of content must deliver a single consistent message.
While one key characteristic of the Internet is speed, another equal characteristic is usability. A Web site must be visually appealing and simple to navigate and use. Parameters such as Web site design, landing pages and context-related content are absolutely critical for attracting visitors.
Measuring the Success of Your Online Initiatives
A competitive economy always demands more value for every dollar spent. While the opportunities that can be explored via an online medium are immense, so are the challenges.
As seen in most organizations, e-marketing strategies are disconnected from each other and exist as islands of information. So, you may have analytics software that gives you the details about the most popular sections in your Web site, a CRM application that creates a complete picture about your customer, and email marketing software that sends out customized mails to selected lists of people who have visited or downloaded content from your site. To top that, you have new mediums such as blogs and podcasts adding to the content mix. You may also have explored different mediums such as buying ad space on popular Web sites, or placing syndicated content such as white papers or Webcasts on specialized Web sites such as Bitpipe or Knowledgestorm.
Now, unless these different pieces of the content landscape are connected and integrated with each other, the ROI of such initiatives will remain unclear. For instance, can you tell if a particular white paper has contributed to a sale, or which particular campaign is helping you convert leads into wins?
To measure the success of an online strategy, you must have an integrated mechanism that enables your organization to track the success at a micro as well as at a macro level.
How Can a CMS help?
If quality of content, ease of publishing, and making your Web site search engine friendly are critical success factors, then a Content Management System (CMS) scores on all counts. A CMS is a tool that eases the creation, maintenance and management of a Web site.
Listed below are a few factors that show how a CMS can help you build a good quality Web site, while ensuring that your Internet audience keeps on growing
• Boosting Search Engine Rankings
If the world of meta tags, anchor text, and keyword density make you feel that search engine optimization (SEO) is rocket science, a CMS can demystify SEO techniques and give business owners the power to fully make their Web sites search engine friendly. A CMS can also help non-technical people create page titles, URLs and meta tags while also suggesting keywords that would make sense to spiders crawling the Web site.
• Creating a Good Navigation Structure
Just as human beings like being given directions, search engine spiders too are fond of Web sites that have good structure and make finding content an easy task. A CMS can automatically create navigation paths, helping search engines go deep into Web sites to find and index relevant content. The more Web pages search engines find, the greater are the chances of the Web site being ranked higher.
A CMS can also enable organizations to maintain W3C compliance for enabling a good structure for their Web sites. The W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium and provides the guidelines by which Web sites and Web pages should be structured and created. Compliance helps insure that your Web site functions the same when accessed from any browser or device. It also ensures that proper use of standards which in turn, helps search engines interpret content easily. Further, CMS help create a comprehensive sitemap which ensures that search engines can follow and index each link.
• Improving the Speed and Ease of Publishing Content
Organizations can accelerate their speed of publishing content by giving subject matter experts tools that simple, and intuitive to use. And when you have good quality content being updated regularly, it is a matter of time before the Internet audience takes note of your organization’s efforts.
• Improved Web site Searchability
Since a Web site CMS manages all content consistently, built-in search engines make finding content on a Web site fast and easy.
• Improved Measurability
When you integrate the CMS with your CRM or Sales Force applications, the chances of success increase exponentially. For example, detailed information about the surfing habits of your buyers, or preferences selected during choosing newsletters, can be used by the CRM system to deliver targeted, customized offers to prospective customers.
Similarly, integration between the CMS and email marketing software can allow marketers to create campaigns using the CMS, and launch them using the email marketing software. Registrations, enquiries and user feedback can be automatically captured, and analyzed further using an analytics tool.
As you can see, this gives marketers a closed-loop lead generation tool – tracking buyer habits from surfing by using Web analytics tools, providing one view of the customer through the CRM, and then capturing the feedback and improving it further by analyzing the results of the campaign. Besides the ability to track the leads to the sales, an integrated system gives organizations the ability to track effectiveness of campaigns, with an accurate analysis of data for predicting current and future market trends. These statistics can be used by organizations to enhance their e-marketing strategies, and fine tune the methods to attract the users they want.
The Hosted Advantage
If you opt for a CMS delivered using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, the benefits get amplified. You have no hassles of managing hardware or purchasing software – all you do is rent the software from the service provider. As a customer, you just pay a fixed subscription fee on a monthly or quarterly basis and leave the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor.
Organizations also save costs as they do not have to budget for a developer who tweaks the HTML code, or a Webmaster who actually takes care of hosting. Some SaaS players even provide a dedicated account manager with an escalation path for support. By using a SaaS model, organizations can also cut down on their risk and choose different functionalities as they grow.
Further, as billing is on a monthly or quarterly basis, costs are spread across the lifetime of a product’s usage. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional software model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption is totally on the customer.
For more info: http://www.crownpeak.com
http://www.crownpeak.com
Article Source: Developing Your Audience with a Content Management System
