Get caught up in your content, not your system

Content will always be king

Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of clients who come to us with a clear vision of the platform they want their site to use (I wish I had shares in WordPress!), but have given little, if any, thought to their content.

Gone are the days where you could write a few words, add some product shots, whack them on your website, and hit ‘publish’. It may have been enough once upon a time, but now, more than ever, content truly is king.

And not just any content; we’re talking content with a purpose – a call to action. Even your ‘About Us’ page should tell people all about you, and then suggest they give you a call – or whatever call to action suits you – to learn more.

Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.
– Leo Burnett

A lot of people can get so caught up in getting everything else done, that the content is almost an afterthought, to be dropped in at the end of the process. Inevitably, in those situations, we’ll see content being loaded at the last minute, and we’ll think of a more effective way to portray what our client is trying to say. And then one of two things happens: either it’s too late to shape the content in its most effective light, or we’re rushing around madly fixing issues that haven’t been thought of until right before go-live. Either way, it’s not conducive to anyone’s best work.

On the other hand, when our clients supply their content up-front, we can strategise how best to portray what they’re trying to say, and we can have our copywriter look it over and really optimise those messages.

Take our own website at Mettro, for instance: Gill and I sat down and wrote that copy. We like to think of ourselves as quite good writers. We wrote it, edited it, and thought it sounded pretty good. Then we asked our copywriter to look it over. It was only when she tweaked it to capture our personality and inject that into the copy that we realised our writing was too formal and mechanical. She helped bring out who we really are and how we operate.

In a competitive online market, details like that can mean the difference between winning business or being passed over for another firm. Showing who you are provides a connection with like-minded people – and those are the people we all want to work with most, right?