Having built, trained and set up hundreds of clients with our marketing platform, you can imagine we have seen a lot of customers dealing with how best to use their new sites.   I have seen it many times, our clients need to be self-sufficient with their websites and have some successes before they sign on with our ongoing Newsroom services.  I respect that, and with our starter packs we do all that we can to provide them with the tools, training and documentation they need to be successful.

One of the tools we provide is posting guidelines, based upon each type of content our clients post (from general blog posts to portfolio items or events).  This is designed to help them get the most out of each piece of content they produce.   Over the next few weeks we will be going in depth into each area of our guidelines.

• Introduction – Initial Planning Documentation
• Keywords
• Posting Frequency
• Promotional Channels
• Post Title
• Content Body
• SEO Plug-ins + Special Fields
• Categories
• Have a Tagging Strategy
• Authors / Contributors
• Editorial Guidelines
• Wrap Up

Just start your marketing plan today: Download the Web Planning Kit!

Before we begin: Initial Planning Documentation

Organization: Most of our customers know what they want to achieve, they know their audience and have ideas on how to market to them online.  The problems come with trying to make it happen.  It seems trying to get a Web development shop to build them the proper site can be painful. Most development shops will look to you to tell them what to do.  You need to be clear about your objectives for your new program or you can get sucked into a time waster that doesn’t help your bottom line.

They say that 50 percent of online programs succeed, but 95 percent of those without a plan fail.  Here are the basic elements which, if you document in your plan, will improve your success rate and decrease the time it takes to get up to speed:

1. Campaign Directives: Know the Market + Segments you will be targeting, the messages you want them to receive, the actions you want them to take and how you will measure those actions.
2. Marketing Mix: The promotional channels you have available to you to communicate with your target market segment(s).
3. Editorial Calendar: A schedule of meaningful updates to your site/email/social media network. Think of it as your company’s programming schedule.  The editorial calendar can serve as your team’s to do list moving forward.
4. Rules of Engagement / Listening Program: This is two-way communication. Who in your business will handle sales or customer support communications?  What channels and topics should be followed to protect your brand, convert users and provide the best content?

Next week we will do a deep dive on keywords. Happy blogging.   Remember we are here to help when you are ready.