The answer is when it’s a lead generating machine!
That’s the key message from Mike and Chris at Newfangled during their live webcast at last night’s Bristol Content Group meeting.
Sonja Jefferson hosts the webcast
The girls at Valuable Content arranged for a live cast with these two luminaries of our trade to share a bit of love around the room and give us an insight into their crystal ball of ideas.
I won’t go into a breakdown of every element of their work and talk here, you can see it for yourself in the web cast below.
Or go and read the gospel in their own words in their blog. They have also kindly, for us put their ideas and strategies in a number of books so do as I have done and download their book “A website that works”.
The takeaways for me were as follows;
Start with the position for the business and figure out how to represent this in the digital world. Don’t do this lightly, you will find it really hard to change this in the future so take as long as you possibly can to decide upon what makes you truly unique within a global marketplace and then understand how to represent this via content on your site.
Your next job is to attract, inform and engage with visitors to the site. Every part of the site needs to fulfil these tasks in various ways, in fact the more the merrier. Does a blog post offer the visitor the option of finding out more about the brand and lead to the opportunity to purchase? It should do! In their words, “every page on your site is a potential homepage so give it the treatment”. This doesn’t mean stylishly that every page should look the same, just that you need to present the opportunity to engage with you further.
Chris, a designer by trade, then made it clear that there are certain rules that you can follow in terms of layout and volume of content. This is all about making your site work for you. As a business development manager this is where my interest really kicked in.
The magic ratio of 3000 contacts communicated with a month, 3000 new words of content per month will deliver traffic. Times the volume of traffic by 0.3 and you get leads. Leads are what your site should really be all about, if you aren’t returning leads then you need to change what you’re doing.
The final piece of the puzzle is building the site on a resourceful CMS and combining it with a powerful CRM and automated marketing engine. Interestingly the guys didn’t recommend using a one system fits all approach rather that dedicated systems do their respective jobs really well and don’t have the development resources to do others equally as well.
Their method was aimed at agencies as that is who they generally work with; however the lessons are clear for all businesses. As warm and cuddly as a brand might want to appear, they are after all in business and that the nature of the world is to sell your respected product or service.
