Content Matters - Five Ways to Keep Content Fresh

It all seems so simple, doesn't it? The key to developing a website is to develop quality content that meets your customers' needs. But, for many organizations, it's easier said than done.

Time is always an issue. Content development and knowledge sharing doesn't usually offer an immediate return on investment that's tangible. It can help with a number of business-building efforts, including brand awareness, search engine optimization, and enhancing your customers' trust in your expertise.

For many companies, especially those with smaller marketing and communications departments, those efforts fall behind other tasks in the priority chain.

Corporate blogging is often the thing that suffers the most. Many people want to blog; even more think they can do it. But once the rubber hits the road and after the initial adrenaline of launching a blog wears off, the reality of content creation can smack you in the face.

So how do you fix these problems? Here are five suggestions:

The Pros and Cons of Content Calendars

There are those who advocate the idea of scheduling out posts, Tweets, and other social media updates well in advance. Beyond the obvious dangers that can come from posting something that, in combination with an unplanned event, can be seen as offensive, there's the issue of staleness.

Now, topic calendars are a great way to plan your foci and develop content. Whether it's topic based on monthly designations (heart month, black history, etc...) or anticipated product launches, you can lay the groundwork for steady, regular content with a little planning. Try to avoid writing them too far in advance, simply because they then devolve quickly into non-descript, uniform news alert-style pieces. Allowing for some room to react to the times, or insert contemporary referencing, helps make your content relevant and fresh.

Let Your 'Customers' Tell Your Story

For many organizations, it's tough to think of worthy topics on a regular basis. How do we tell people who and what we are without boring them? Sometimes it's best to let the people you help turn around and help you.

Digital Echidna is proud to support Growing Chefs! and this evolving program is currently running a summer camp program, through the London Children's Museum. So they could post a release or write a singular blog post – but instead, they got creative and have established a blog that talks about what the Growing Chefs' kids have done each day.

More than anything else, this venture affords the people who have supported the program – or may be interested in supporting it in the future – a window into what the program actually does. Combined with social media posts including photos, the organization is using its activities to drive its content.

Ask Questions. Answer Them

Every blog you write should be more than just a vanity project. It should bring your customers true value and, hopefully, provide them with a solution to their problems. One of the best sources of blog posts is the questions you receive from your customers.

Sure, you may have an FAQ, which is a great resource, but why not expand each of those answers into a full post – if possible? Why not ask your customer service team what kind of questions it gets on a regular basis and turn those into blog posts providing the answers? Or why not just come out and ask? Use your social networks to query your customer base and find out what it wants to know about you.

You get to showcase your brand expertise and proactively answer questions that many of your customers may already have.

Share the Wealth

No matter what size of team you have, you can share the blogging wealth and bring new perspectives to your blog. Establish an editorial calendar of sorts and ensure that each department in your organization provides a post on a rotation. If you have 12 departments, then that's one blog post a year.

The fear of writing is often greater than the actual effort that goes into it. So, as a content producer, you can help overcome that obstacle by putting yourself out as a resource: either interviewing key personnel on a topic or simply offering to write/edit any bullet points the department may have into a shareable format.

The advantage of this is that you bring new and fresh perspectives to the blog. You also benefit from the ability to share specialized expertise in a way that will resonate. And it's a great way to recognize the members of your team for the quality work that they do.

Reuse and Recycle

Do you have a great blog from two years ago that's collecting dust in your archives? Are there topics you shy away from because "we've already done something on that"? Chances are you're dealing with a new set of readers/customers who likely aren't as familiar with your back catalogue as you are.

I'm not saying simply repost old pieces as new – though there's nothing wrong with using your social networks to answer new queries with older pieces (in fact, if you can show that you were aware of an answered an issue in the past that's pressing today, it just reinforces your expertise). Instead, take those old topics and freshen them up with new information, modern analyses, and statistics.

Though people often throw statements like "simply create quality content" around like it's no effort at all, the reality is that for many companies it's a challenge. Time, resources, conflicting priorities, and quality are all real issues at play. But there are ways to mitigate those challenges and provide your customers with something of real value.

So how do you create your content? Any tips you'd like to add to the list?