I had a great lunch the other day with a friend from a different side of the digital industry. He’s a general strategist, focusing on an industry sector, but providing a broad range of solutions to that sector. And we got to talking about an issue that I see pretty often: How do you diagnose a content problem?
What I told him is this:
While occasionally content problems are obvious from the beginning, normally what happens is you begin to analyze a business problem and get pretty far down the road before you realize there’s actually a content solution.
Sometimes content problems are easy to spot. These are things like:
- Typos on the home page
- Approval workflows to make you tear your hair out
- Weekend calls from the C-suite about why you’re featuring X on the home page
- Multi-day, week or month processes to update basic information
They’re not always easy to fix, but most folks will agree that content problems like those look and feel like content problems.
But what about these trickier scenarios?
- Online shopping cart abandonment
- Profitability issues
- Failure to close sales — online or off
- Customer churn
Those multi-system, multi-department challenges often are even difficult to spot, never mind diagnose and improve. How do you know if you’re really dealing with a content problem?
We’ve found it’s helpful to break a problem down into the smallest possible pieces. Sometimes, you have all the information you need, once you look at it step-by-step. But failing to attract repeat business from existing customers might be more complicated; you may need to conduct surveys, customer interviews, or seek other additional data to identify your challenges.
Perhaps you don’t have a challenge at all; perhaps what you have is an opportunity. If your sales process is working well according to industry standards, but you haven’t analyzed it step by step, you’ve probably still got more profit in there if you figure out how to get to it. Probably the appropriately targeted customer communication is a good idea….
Have you analyzed your business processes, looking for hidden gold? If you’d like help walking through what’s working, what’s not, and where a better content strategy can help, contact us and we’ll be glad to help.