Distracted by all the social media buzz, it’s easy for a company to lose sight of the fact that their website remains the mother ship of brand expression and commerce. The standard marketing approach – particularly among B2B firms – is to create a brochureware-esque “Who We Are / What We Do / Why You Should Select Us” web presence, which forever serves as a handy repository for press releases, case studies, white papers and other expressions of thought leadership. For many firms, “build it once & fill it with stuff” is considered effective website management.
What often happens – soon after LAUNCH COMPANY WEBSITE is crossed off the corporate to-do list – is that companies don’t apply the same standards of excellence or levels of scrutiny to the content generated post-launch that were applied during development of the website’s original core content. For a host of political and practical reasons, inappropriate and ineffective web content gets posted; sorely outdated content is granted lifetime tenure; and assorted layers of information…in WORD documents, PDFs, YouTube videos, podcasts, webinars…all obscure the company’s core messages and brand positioning goals. With apologies to poet Robert Browning, when it comes to website content, less is absolutely more.
If the brand police were to issue citations for website content-related abuse, some of the most common violations might include: Continue reading