There are now an almost unimaginable number of tools available that can aid with every marketing discipline in our on-going search for increased ROI.  Content is still king, but improved targeting can help land the big spending whales!  Once the creative has been honed, an ill-targeted campaign can still upset the coronation.  But what message does an error-ridden campaign deliver? 

The quest for a deeper relationship with customers is constant, it is therefore important not to waste the effort that has gone into the creative and targeting with poor delivery.  This doesn’t just refer to a campaign delivered across the wrong channels; a digital campaign that doesn’t follow brand guidelines and isn’t properly accessible to all prospects or customers is more damaging.  The former is wasteful and impacts ROI, but the latter is like airing your dirty washing in public.  That can impact your brand reputation and credibility.

94% of people have experienced substandard content*

*Poor loading, broken links, missing images etc.

If we are ready to accept automated software for targeting and other aspects of the marketing process, it seems ludicrous to ignore technology that can ensure the quality of the visitor’s experience.  Yes, it is another technology to adopt, but is there a product or brand that doesn’t benefit from giving a prospect or customer confidence?  The customer’s experience is key to this, and this comes from the message the brand delivers to them and how it is delivered.

A major organisation can produce thousands of pieces of digital content a month across digital touch points that can include mobile, social and email.  Multiple team members all too easily place new pages, posts and tweets via CMS, blogging management platforms, social media or other third party social tools.  As a CMO or Head of Digital Content, how do you ensure that all of the output you oversee is compliant with brand, industry and territory requirements?

This is something that is either ignored, you do you best to take care of in draft form or is handled via a specialist application.  If you work for a sizeable organisation and it isn’t the latter, you don’t really have a viable solution in place.  As a result, the digital experience of your prospects and customers could at best be diminished, but more likely won’t be compliant at a company, industry or territory level. 

The automated solution

The application referred to goes under a number of names: digital quality assurance, web governance software, automated digital governance software, or even an amalgamated variant of these.  Typically a first generation technology of this type can help to:

• Improve SEO
• Identify broken links
• Highlight spelling mistakes
• Monitor uptime

Today’s technology is emerging from the third generation, where advice is offered direct from your CMS, and crucially prioritises the most important (biggest gain) corrections or improvements. A customisable experience, that takes into account not only your own brand guidelines but also those for the industries and countries in which you operate. 

Prioritising content issues and assigning them to the relevant team member is already having a huge impact on digital governance, but this is just the tip of the iceberg as corrective activity continues to improve user experience, optimisation and compliance. Content can now be corrected at the time of creation with tools such as SMART Content™ from Sitemorse, and this is evolving into a 4th generation technology that will deliver autonomous correction.

Even something as simple as an incorrect telephone number could prove a huge waste of resources to correct manually, assuming every instance of its use could be found, whilst this is the perfect task for automation.  If you consider the sheer scale of content output even a mid-sized organisation can produce in a year, seemingly simple issues of this type can mount up and be added to with further unchecked content.  For an organisation that is serious about building and protecting its brand, it really is simply a case of when you will you adopt quality assurance technology to assist you.

If you are taking your first steps into this arena, try Snapshot from Sitemorse.  It takes less than a minute to setup and will allow you to examine any page whenever you want.  Email Sitemorse to request Snapshot.