You can’t go live yet, not with the content in this state. And while the client has told you they’ll handle content in house …
They don’t.
Content isn’t in most people’s job descriptions. They get caught up in their business as usual. So, despite their best intentions, they end up diverted. The result: new content is rushed, if it’s written at all.
For your agency, this could mean:
- Delayed launch: the content’s not ready, so the site can’t go live. This can affect your financial bottom line. It certainly affects your ability to use a live site as a case study to win more work.
- Compromised brand: the client asks you to just lift and shift the old content. The content doesn’t deliver on the promise of the design. It’s like the client buying a brand new house — then filling it with furniture they had back in that share house at Uni.
- Compromised experience: the site is supposed to help people do things. Apply. Buy. Research. To do all of those things, they need information. And that information lives in the content. Without getting the content right, your client is no closer to helping users achieve their goals than they were when they started.
A professional content partner helps you solve those problems.
1 Delayed launch
A content partner reduces the risk of delays, so the site is more likely to launch on time.
When you bring in a content consultancy on a project, you’ve got our full attention. Unlike a client’s in-house staff, we’re not going to get sidetracked by competing priorities. You’ll always have dedicated resources on your project.
We’re experts at more than words — we know how to get content done on time. A content partner is a specialised project manager as much as they’re a team of writers. That means having the workflows, guidelines and experience to shepherd content through from briefing to publishing.
We also know that with complex digital projects, it’s not enough to have writing talent — you need a way of harnessing that talent, drawing out the client’s own subject matter expertise and coordinating all those elements to meet project milestones.
In theory, you could hire one gun to do it all for you. That person — if they’re available — is going to be very expensive and come with overheads. And they’re still only one person. Content projects are typically stop-go; periods of limited activity and then, when it’s on, it’s really on — the work is more than one person could handle. A content partner removes that risk of bottlenecks by standing up a team, and allocating the resources needed across your project.
2 Compromised brand
A content partner understands how content supports a brand. You want a site that your agency can be proud of. One that expresses a strong vision, from first impressions right through to the words on the page.
We can translate your design vision into a vision for the content. We take bureaucratic, irrelevant and out-of-date information and transform it into something clear and compelling. When we’re overhauling content, we look at:
- readability: untangling wordy sentences to just get to the point
- empathy: adjusting tone based on how the reader may be feeling at that moment.
The result is content that speaks directly to the audience, and conveys a clear promise of value. Content that increases trust.
3 Compromised experience
An expert content partner knows how to make the content dovetail with your interaction design, for a complete experience.
A good content partner is interested and experienced in both microcopy — how to word that call-to-action —and long-form copy such as rewriting entire policy pages. And we’re just as interested in the systems and processes needed to make it happen.
There are three areas where we can add value to your website project:
- We understand content and fill the knowledge gap. Our experience tells us that most clients don’t fully understand what content they have, what state it’s in, and what needs to be done. We give you (and the client) educated insights and grounds for scoping out the content effort required.
- We set a content vision and priorities. For most large sites, the amount of content that needs to be developed massively outstrips budget and time. We help you decide where to focus.
- We collaborate with your design team. Designers love having something to work with, and our content model — a simple guide to the content elements for each content type — gives them that starting point. As the design progresses, we switch to advising and reviewing. And then we are ready to supply content for your prototype.
We know this approach works. On one site we recently worked on, we saw a 300% increase in engagement. A huge part of which was people spending more time reading the content.
Start a content conversation
We enjoy talking to people about how we can help them and their team. Contact us for a quick consult, to book a training session or to explore how we can support you across an entire website project.
