February 8, 2017

Keeping Up in the Digital Age: the Importance of Fresh Content

What makes a brand’s digital presence effective? While design and content quality play significant roles, they alone won’t ensure success—consistently fresh content is just as important. Putting substantial effort into carefully crafting a blog post might result in one particularly successful or popular piece, but it won’t skyrocket your blog or your brand to stardom.

In today’s digital age, where consumers and clients expect instantaneous updates and round-the-clock coverage, your brand’s online presence requires constant attention and upkeep. It’s important to maintain an active persona on your various digital and social media channels for a number of reasons:

• Fresh content gives your audience a way to engage with your brand.
• Digital channels that aren’t updated feel stale and outdated, and can make prospective clients think your firm is careless.
• A consistent online presence makes clients and consumers feel like they have a relationship with your brand, which earns you brand loyalty.

The pressure to provide new content daily is overwhelming, and the goal of perfecting your online presence seems daunting. But by approaching the task strategically, you can maintain a consistent and active web presence.

1. Develop an evergreen structure for blog and social media posts to streamline your content creation process. By having a guideline or template for each kind of post, you’ll be able to quickly and efficiently produce new content with minimal effort.

2. Don’t spend an excessive amount of time writing a blog post. Every brand has a different tone, but many blogs are most successful when written in a more approachable and casual style. Save your scholarly articles for a different platform—your blog should feel genuine, and should showcase your interests and views. Let the words flow when you’re sitting down to write a blog, then edit later. This will give the post a more personal feel.

3. Save ideas you have for tweets or other social media posts as drafts. That way, if the idea isn’t fully formed or perfected, you can fix it later when inspiration hits. Plus, you’ll always have backup content for the days when you’ve got writer’s block or your schedule doesn’t allow for brainstorming new posts.

4. Determine which outlets are most effective or useful for your brand, and focus on those. If your tweets garner more traffic or audience interaction than your Facebook posts, put more effort into developing clever tweets. This doesn’t mean you should never use Facebook, it just allows you to prioritize and leverage platforms to ensure success.

Staying active in the digital sphere doesn’t have to be a chore. Streamline your content to-do list and you’ll soon reap the benefits of a consistently on-brand web presence.