20 Jun Why You Need a Complete Digital Publishing Toolkit
If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you produce content for the web. You might work for an agency or on the client side. You might be a writer, SEO or marketing manager. But no matter where you work or what you call yourself, if you work in digital media, you rely on a complex system with many interlocking parts.
For your work to be successful, every part of this system must function well. That’s why you need a complete digital publishing toolkit. I’m not talking about the software you use or the workflow you follow. I’m talking instead about the fundamental activities you and your team need to engage in to be successful — strategy, SEO, writing and analytics.
Strategy
Some people make their content look effortless. These geniuses toss off letter-perfect copy, flawlessly aligned with their brands and audience segments. But we all know these people aren’t just winging it. Brilliant content results from careful strategy.
But what is strategy, then, and what role does it play in our success? Strategy in the broadest sense is an expression of company objectives, of the methods an organization employs to create goods and services. Marketing strategy is how we align our work with company objectives. It’s also how we help bring those goods and services to market and create wealth that benefits everyone — not only business owners, but society at large.
I like the model Moz provides in the Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing. Chapter 2: Content Strategy discusses the role of vision, which we might call the why of strategy. Vision is aspirational. It’s the loftiest explanation of what we hope a marketing campaign will achieve. We use it to explain our work to clients and senior executives. We also use it to inspire creative teams.
I also like to think of vision as the wellspring of creativity. It’s the underlying spirit of a strategy, which informs SEO, writing, design and analytics.
But at its core, strategy is a highly rational and calculated way of achieving our business goals. We create strategy to segment audiences, set goals, build trust and align marketing campaigns with brand personality. We create strategies to fill the gaps revealed by a content audit. We create strategy to achieve numerical objectives. Without strategy, there is no effective content.
Marketers are fond of quoting Sun Tzu, who allegedly said, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” The quote is probably apocryphal. But the first half of this quotation is also worth noting: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.”
We’ll consider tactics as we unpack the rest of our toolkit.
SEO
SEO matters. While quality content is essential, the way we build and optimize our clients’ websites helps them rank in search results and reach their audiences. It also has a strong impact on their visitors’ ability to find and enjoy content. Marketing is a competitive sport, and we need to seize every possible advantage.
SEO begins with writing, because many aspects of SEO — from keyword planning to on-page optimization — are inseparable from the work we do at our keyboards. Choosing keywords is an early stage of composition. HTML headings create a page outline. Categories create a table of contents for the site as a whole. Tags create a site index.
But SEO goes far beyond writing in its efforts to improve the performance of content. We designate canonical content, add 301 redirects and fix crawl errors to improve indexability. We optimize page loads and make our sites responsive to improve mobile UX. We implement Twitter cards and Facebook Open Graph Protocol to facilitate social sharing. These actions give our websites a competitive edge.
SEO even extends off-site in the effort to improve rank. We seek out backlinks to send those all-important popularity signals to Google. We post video content on YouTube or comment on other writers’ blogs, all in an effort to create a web of links leading to our sites.
We do all these things, and more, to help our sites rank and please visitors. It’s how we add value. SEO is an essential part of the value mix.
There’s a fairly steep learning curve to SEO, but some excellent resources are available. The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO is a great place to get started. Once you cover the basics, I suggest you browse the Moz SEO Learning Center to gain some in-depth knowledge.
The Yoast blog also has terrific stuff on a variety of SEO topics. And for you propeller heads, I recommend the work of Ian Lurie of Portent — in particular, his Technical SEO Best Practices ebook and its companion piece, the Ultimate Guide to Page Speed.
Enjoy the reading, and happy optimizing.
Writing
Writing, of course, lies at the heart of digital publishing. It’s the reason we practice it in the first place.
The Internet is primarily a textual medium. The stuff we marketers call content is overwhelmingly text-heavy. Headings, lede, body text and call to action — all of these things depend on the written word. Without writing, there would be nothing for SEOs to optimize.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’d bet our reliance on text has something to do with the way our brains work. Marketing goals such as brand awareness, engagement, thought leadership, lead generation, and the building of relationships and trust are essentially verbal goals. Of course, graphics and design are essential to creating a positive UX. But there is no way to achieve marketing goals without the written word, and the quality of the writing is essential.
So, what distinguishes good writing from bad? We can all cite the tenets of good writing —and indeed, Neil Patel has written the definitive guide. These principles are definitely worth keeping in mind. By all means, write a great headline, focus on the customer, prove your authority, create a sense of urgency and write a strong call to action. While you’re at it, use the active voice, make your copy sticky and tell a story to get your point across.
But these things are only gambits. The most important thing we can do is to write something worth reading — to inform our readers, entertain them, and build the relationships and trust that will steer them towards our clients when they are ready to do business.
Analytics
Finally, we come to analytics, the art and science of measurement. But why do we need analytics? With so much data available on visitors, page views, acquisition and conversions, what can these metrics tell us?
Simply put, we need analytics to tell us who our customers are, how they find us, which content they prefer (or avoid), which touchpoints are effective, whether Open Sans or Roboto is a better display font for your brand, whether the green button or the orange one converts better, and so on.
The SiteEdge team gives an overview of web analytics in Web Analytics And Why They Matter. They note the important metrics like sales and conversions, clicks and page views. They suggest we use web analytics to tailor our website’s content and optimize it for the leads we want to attract.
The SiteEdge team also touches on other analytics we should monitor. Social media analytics let us monitor engagement. Mobile analytics alert us to behaviour differences between your mobile and desktop visitors. Conversion analytics give us insight into which visitors are converting — and why.
At HubSpot, Pamela Vaughan takes a deep dive into conversion in Why You Need Marketing Analytics, Not Web Analytics. Pamela and HubSpot concentrate on marketing analytics as a way to measure business metrics like traffic, leads and sales, as opposed to technical metrics that focus on page and site performance. HubSpot urges us to take a cross-channel view, merging data from email campaigns, social media and even offline events to do a comparative analysis of the ROI yields of each channel.
Pamela also argues for a people-centric view of marketing data rather than a web-centric one. She believes we should examine individual buyer journeys to learn how people find their way down the funnel, not which web artifacts led them there. That’s an incredibly granular way to nurture individual buyers. She also calls for an integration of analytics and CRM applications, a position that certainly fits HubSpot’s business model.
Do you still want to know why we need analytics? We need data to be sure we’re meeting business objectives. We need data to avoid endless rounds of conjecture and unwinnable arguments. We need data to demonstrate our value to clients and executives. We need analytics to become better marketers.
Conclusion
Digital publishing is a complex activity, with many different parts needed to make a smoothly functioning whole. To serve our clients best, we need to bring a complete toolkit to work.
Marketers, what’s in your digital publishing toolkit? How do you make it all work together?
About The Author
Andy Kubrin is a Calgary-based digital publisher and the founder of Speak Business Communication and member of the Calgary Marketing Association. He has a passion for “getting it right” in digital publishing, combining excellence in strategy, SEO, writing and analytics. Andy holds a Communication Management Professional certificate from the International Association of Business Communicators. He enjoys cycling when the weather gives us a break.