The seven levers of online content strategy
What are the ‘4Ps’ of online content strategy?
At this point we’d switch from our customer focus to look at what we can directly control in order to influence our defined audience in the way we want.
The seven online content levers
We think there are seven content levers we can pull to ensure that we meet our objectives for online marketing. Not as snappy as ‘the 4Ps’, we admit; do tell us if you’ve got any ideas for turning these into a memorable acronym—or if you think there are different levers to consider:
| Accessibility | How do we help our targets to discover, find, arrive at our site/ online content? Includes: traffic generation; SEO; on-page strategy; site optimisation for mobile devices. |
| Messaging and tone | How do we address our targets (content and style) to make them feel and act in the appropriate way? |
| Navigation | How do we give our targets a clear path to where they want (and we want them) to go? Bearing in mind that they may arrive at different places. |
| Content refresh | How often does this content (and this and this…) need to be updated to keep the experience fresh and relevant for our targets? |
| Look and feel | What design principles will attract our targets and how do we ensure that design and navigation/usability work together? |
| Shareability | How do we encourage and facilitate visitors to share our content (or share their own or other content with other visitors, as appropriate)? |
| Interactivity | How do we encourage and facilitate targets to interact with our content, other visitors and us? |
Context is king
As with the 4Ps, clearly these need to be considered together and applied to meet a well-articulated objective. Not ‘what should our site’s navigation do?’ as an isolated question but—if we go back to our software company example—’how can we organise the navigation so that it presents small business managers with a clear, relevant path through their buying cycle to the placement of an order for our product?’
Of course determining the right answers—or answers that work (there’s no one right answer)—might be very challenging. And complicated by the fact that in practice you’re likely to have multiple target audiences and multiple objectives. But that’s always the challenge for marketing—in this respect online is no different from offline.
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