Old news: the organisation in hibernation
How often do you visit a website, click on ‘news’ or ‘blog’ and wonder why there hasn’t been an article or post for months or years? It’s common place. Any organisation with a news section on their website, started out believing that telling people what they’re doing is important. But then somewhere along the way the motivation to share news dwindled. Why, and what can be done to get news about your achievements flowing again?
Marketing direction
Is it clear what your organisation should be talking about? Do you know who you're talking to? If you’ve got your marketing strategy nailed down, you’ll have a roadmap for who your content is for and what matters to them. Most organisations will want to share a mix of content, covering customer feedback, staff success, product or service innovation … the volume and breadth depends on your organisation and sector. A stagnant news feed can be a sign of a confused marketing strategy. If this is your issue, pause from the ‘doing’ and take a step back to consider your strategy. Alternatively it might be crystal clear what you should be saying, just tricky for the content creator to access the relevant information.
Internal information sharing
Often the person responsible for writing the news content is a curator of information, rather than the font of all knowledge. An active news feed relies on excellent internal communication and information sharing across teams. Encourage your content creator to extract ideas and information from people, by regularly talking to others across the organisation. Build systems where information can be shared, for example diary dates for key events, a shared drive for photographs, a good internal filing system for case studies and documents. New products, new staff, site visits, customer testimonials – all great content but useless if the content creator doesn’t know about it, or isn’t given time to write about it.
Writing takes time
Creating news posts can be time consuming and in organisations with one marketing person, is often a job that falls off the list. This is another reason to be more strategic about your approach. You can plan content in advance, if you have budget, an external person (like me!) can help you to map out news posts and show you how to reversion content you already have. You might also appreciate someone you can give the bare bones, or bullet points to, that can write the posts for you. An expert marketing content creator can easily make a nugget of something interesting into a post, and help raise the quality of your outputs.
Post perfection
Leaders seeking perfection from blog posts is another barrier for lots of content creators. Are you working in a culture of multiple sign-offs for a news article or post? Yes, it’s important to be accurate but debating each word with a manager soon gets demoralising and will quickly impact your team’s motivation. Try to set a clear ambition for the type of content that’s desirable, and then build a culture where news can flow from your organisation. easily.
If you’ve got a news section then use it! Your posts don’t have to be long but they do have to be regular. You can decide what ‘regular’ means for you, and I can help you plan appropriate content. Get in touch if you’d like to get your blogs moving again.
If you’ve no intention of keeping your news up-to-date, then consider switching that section off!