Tags – Impact of Poorly Managed Content
If you’re running a business, it’s important to have a content management strategy in place.
After all, they do say “content is king”.
For this reason, you must have a proper plan in place for creating, publishing and managing your content – if you don’t have a plan, or if your plan isn’t working, it can have a negative impact on your business.
This is a real shame, especially when you’ve spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money in creating the content – but without proper management, this can get lost in the shadows.
And this is what most businesses do not understand: yes creating good content is important, but equally, it needs to be managed well.
In this blog, we will discuss the symptoms of poor content management and how it affects your business.
How Does Poor Content Management Come About?
Generally speaking, businesses manage their content:
- In house
- Outsourcing it to an agency
- Hiring freelancers
With the second and third option, problems arise when it’s difficult to scale up the existing content initiatives, mainly because the associated costs would increase too.
However, even with teams in house, most employees do not have enough time to do all of the creating, managing, updating and marketing content.
And with the number one priority being creating content, the other factors usually take a back seat.
Regretfully, most businesses do not realise their content is being poorly managed.
Here are some of the symptoms of poor content management:
Your Audience Cannot Quickly Find Relevant Information
First things first, take a look at your website analytics and identify your user’s behaviour:
- What keywords are they using that direct them to your site
- What are they searching for within your website?
- Are they getting the results they want?
- How long does it take them to find the information they are looking for?
The average user has an attention span of eight seconds, so if they can’t find the information they want quickly and easily, they will click away.
If this is happening frequently, it’s a sign that your content is not being managed properly.
You’re Not Publishing Enough Content
This symptom goes hand in hand with the previous one – if you’re not publishing enough content, you can’t expect to rank high in search engine results pages.
In order for people to find your site, you need to be publishing fresh, relevant content on a regular basis; this means at least once a week, if not more.
You’re Not Updating Your Older Content
If you’re not updating your older content, it will quickly become out of date and irrelevant.
As we mentioned earlier, the average user has an attention span of eight seconds, so if your content is not fresh and up to date, they will quickly move on.
That said, it’s a good idea to build a system where you define an expiry date for each piece that is published, then go back to update this when the time comes – including statistics involved, reference links etc.
And, even if you believe a piece of content is evergreen, still set an “expiry date” and revisit to ensure the content still holds true, which will help to ensure your brand maintains consistency in all communications.
Your Content Is Not Engaging
If people are not engaging with your content, it’s a sign that it’s not interesting or relevant enough.
In order for people to take action – whether that’s buying a product or subscribing to your email list – you must provide something of value.
At the same time, nothing will ring alarm bells more than a business that doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Generally speaking, your prospects will already have a degree of knowledge relating to your business and industry (they just require content to further develop this), which means rather than regurgitating old information (or worse, the wrong information).
So, use your resources effectively and harness essential insights then transform this into easy, digestible and educational content.
First Order Effects
Writing and publishing bad content will negatively impact your brand, even if you are seeing some kind of increase in traffic.
For instance:
- Damage to Reputation: when someone reads a copy that is empty or poorly researched, they frequently look to the author to determine who’s responsible. It’ll take a hit to your reputation when your brand is associated with this, and you don’t want to be known as the business that creates shoddy content.
- SEO Issues: When it comes to evaluating trustworthiness and future rankings, Google’s search ranking algorithm is extremely sensitive to content quality; that is, if you’re concerned about SEO, low-quality material will do more harm than good.
- ROI Issues: even if the content produced is bad, it still requires time, money and effort to create it. Ultimately, “bad” content pieces are going to ruin your return on investment.
Second Order Effects
Not only can bad content negatively impact your brand, but also affect the entire industry
For instance:
- Consumer Trust: consumers already are hesitant to trust brands, and the more the internet is flooded with bad content, the more consumer trust will fall – especially if it’s only engineered for marketing purposes
- Content Pollution: the more bad content that is published, the harder it is for good content to stand out and receive the attention it deserves
The Bottom Line
Content management is an important part of any business, yet it’s often overlooked.
If you’re experiencing any of the symptoms we’ve mentioned above, it’s time to take action and put a content management system in place.
On the whole, there are some aspects you can check:
- Research: are all your claims backed with evidence? Have you cited reputable sources?
- Purpose: are you genuinely trying to help people by providing valuable information? Or are you just interested in optimising for a specific keyword?
- Punctuation and Grammar: your finished content piece needs to be flawless and free from mistakes that will make you look like an amateur
- Feedback: run surveys to collect feedback on how your readers feel when seeing your content
By auditing your current content marketing strategy, you can re-prioritise the quality of your content and this will help you to improve your online visibility, attract more customers and ultimately boost your bottom line.
If you’re not sure how to get started with content management, we can help. We offer a range of services, including content strategy, copywriting, social media management and more. Get in touch today to find out how we can help you to take your business to the next level.
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