Bad content is not your problem - here’s why

For many organisations, a website redevelopment project is a chance to make things better. On the current website, information is difficult to find, hard to understand and doesn’t leave anyone feeling very proud to work there.

Aha, you realise, the content isn’t organised in the right way – it’s scattered across several places. People can find and do certain things, but it’s all roads to nowhere that don’t connect. What you need is a content restructure project, right?.

You might even know from looking at analytics, that people visit one page, or 2, or 3 and then – nothing. Those users just disappear, never to be seen again. Not on your website at least. What you need is a content design project, right?

Both these ideas are probably correct. So maybe you create the new website with this in mind. 

Your content team works really hard. They add some more plain English. They cut some unnecessary words or out of date pages.

They create new articles, news items, blog posts and add audio, video, widgets, even virtual reality environments and maybe a chatbot or two for good measure.

There are now lots of things on your website, some of them shiny, to tempt users, and maybe even a side order of  comms and marketing to increase your traffic and engagement.

Hey presto! Your new website is now maybe 5% better than the old one. Maybe even 10%.

Was that 10% improvement worth all the time and money? 

The content is not the real problem

You know your content/web/comms team is good. You know they care about the website. You know they did their best.So how did this happen? And how could you change that 10% improvement into 60%, or even 80%?

Without talking to you it’s hard to know for sure, but generally the problem isn’t your content. Or rather, bad content is the result, not the cause.

Where does the problem really start? At its heart it’s usually a governance problem.

Why you should care

As users, the web allows us to connect with people and organisations about the most important things in our lives. 

As organisations, if we want to be the place those users choose to find out about, talk about and make decisions about these important things, we need to make the experience (what we call the ‘user experience’ or UX) as easy and intuitive as possible.

You need to give your users what they need to complete their goals so that you can meet your business goals.

It’s not just that without content you don’t have a website. It’s that, if you don’t have great content that meets users’ needs, you basically have a website with a bunch of random words, pictures, audio, video and any other fancy technological gizmos you’ve invested in. But for users it’s a waste of their time and, unless there’s no other choice, they’ll quickly go elsewhere. If there’s no other choice they’ll call you up. Either way, at that point your website has failed.

Back your content team

Your content is the way people get their first (and often every) impression of you.That’s true whether they interact with your business or not.  So creating the right content in the right way is the most important thing your organisation can do, besides the actual product or service you provide. 

This means that in the digital age, if you want to succeed as a business, you must give your content team the power they need to do what they do.

80% of meeting user needs is about creating a governance structure that allows your content team to do what they do best and get great content live. The other 20% is content design . 

Whatever you’re trying to achieve – delivering value, having an impact, producing ‘tangible’ results – without a supportive environment for your content team you will end up with bad content, frustrated users, and unhappy teams. And you will not achieve your goals.

Great content design is only possible when you create and maintain the environment in which your content is created and published.

Find out more

Want to know more? From user needs to getting the right people in place, to workflow and governance, talk to us and buy Lead with Content.