I spend most of my time talking with existing and prospective Interwoven customers about their web marketing strategy. Here are three of the more common content challenges I’ve heard when talking with web marketers:

1) Content drives business- but it’s still difficult to manage.

Most companies recognize the value of content but yet they still don’t manage it well.  Time after time I hear the same stories from the web marketing teams I meet with…

“My interactive agency charges us tens of thousands of dollars to build a single landing page”
“I pay someone $500 every time I find a spelling error on my site”
“Changing the page layout on my site requires a developer but they are too busy to help”
“We can’t find our product images so we have to go out and do another photo-shoot”
“We can’t manage our own content well, now we’re being asked to manage user generated content”
“Managing our English site is challenging enough but we’ve been asked to globalize”

Managing content used to be easy when the role of content was primarily informational.  The ubiquitous ”brochureware” website of the early part of the decade didn’t require much more than publishing a few press releases and minor content updates every month.  As the role of the website has evolved from being informational to being persuasive, web marketers are taking more direct responsibility-including publishing landing pages and microsites, using rich media, and launching customer communities based on user generated content.

The solution to managing content is of course a content management system.  A modern content management system should allow web marketers to manage the entire web experience- content, landing pages, microsites, rich media, and user generated content.

2) Customers expect a personalized experience- but most websites are “one sized fits all”.

Customers expect the sites they visit to provide a meaningful, relevant experience.  You can’t just throw up a home page that lists all of your products and services and expect your customer to sift through the noise.  Instead, you need to understand your site visitors and target something personally meaningful to them.  There are lots of ways to try and understand the site visitor intent.  Here are some of the common content targeting techniques I’ve seen:

- Search Keyword targeting.  Targeting content by search keyword is an easy but unfortunately underutilized technique for delivering a relevant site experience.  Use the search keywords to determine the appropriate content to deliver.  Echo
- Geo IP targeting.  Target different content to people based on their location.  I live in New England where sadly we’re starting to see freezing temperatures every night.  A clothing retailer would be wise to show me a promotion for a winter coat while my co-workers in sunny San Jose, CA might be more interested in a promotion for warmer clothing.
-Clickstream targeting.  Looking at where the site visitor goes on your site can tell you a lot about their interest.  A site visitor that immediately navigates from the home page to a particular product or product category should probably see a relevant promotion for that product/category next time they visit the site.
- Daypart targeting.  You can infer a lot about site visitor behavior based on the time of day/time of year.  For example, a site visitor looking for an airline ticket before 6pm is likely a business traveler where schedule, not price, is the most important factor.

When all else fails, ask to visitor to self segment.  Let them tell you exactly why they are on the site and then delivery a meaningful site experience accordingly- if they are there to research, show them targeting content; if they are there to comparison shop, show them feature/function bullets; if they are there to buy, take them through a well designed buy flow.

Regardless of how you target, you can’t expect your customers to seek out and find the right content- you’ve got to deliver it to them.  Sites like amazon.com have changed the game.

3) Conversion rates hover around 2% and customer acquisition costs are rising- but companies continue to speculate on how to design a site to maximize conversion.

This is my personal pet peeve.  Every time I speak with web marketers they complain about increased customer acquisition costs and declining conversion rates.  Most web marketers focus on the acquisition side… “We’ll just hire more SEO consultants” or “We’ll just buy more keywords”.  Frankly, I think web marketers should focus on the conversion side as it’s much easier to control.  SEO is a moving target and paid search costs aren’t going down. Why not focus on something you can’t directly influence?  The key to conversion is shifting the marketing culture from a culture of speculation to a culture of testing.  Conversion rates are poor because web marketers speculate on how to best design a conversion experience.  I’ve sat in many a design committee meeting where major design decisions are made by the HiPPO.  What’s a HiPPO you ask?  It’s the HIghest Paid Persons Opinion (HiPPO)- a term I believe was originally coined in this context by Avinash Kaushik.  Instead of guessing why not just test?  Testing lets you define experiments to uncover the best combination of copy, images, page layout, call-to-action, etc. to drive conversion. Most companies see amazing increases in conversion rates through testing.

Implementing a multivariable testing program and eliminating speculation (and the HiPPO) is the best way to make sure you’re achieving the highest possible conversion rates on your site.