​Planning the year for your corporate website

 By  Louise Heurlin

With so many things going on in the everyday life of your core business, it might be a struggle to get the right content in place on your corporate website. However, it is highly important to communicate your key corporate messages on time, making sure that they are relevant to all your stakeholders.

One thing is for sure, the more effort you put into the planning stage, the more relevant, engaging and insightful your content will be. Starting with the key events of the year, we recommend creating an editorial calendar to map out your content cycle throughout the year.

How to get started with your editorial calendar:

• Mark the dates of your financial report releases, investors presentations and other key company events of the year.
• Define aims for each piece of content and decide what, where and when you will post content, making sure to have a clear answer for why this is so.
• Track all your ideas – it might be a good idea to have an archive on hand to pick and choose from in case you’re out of inspiration!
• Keep in mind that content is more than just text copy for the website.

What to include in your editorial calendar:

• Titles and keywords: Focus on the goal of the content and ensure you’re considering things from an SEO perspective.
• Dates: Set clear deadlines and milestones throughout the year.
• Producer: Make sure to appoint one producer per content piece. For big events, it might be a good idea to coordinate more than one collaborator. Assign them to different tasks depending on interest and experience.
• Target audience: Clearly define the target audience for each content piece. It will not only make it easier to create accurate communication, but might also boost user research and inspire readers to dig deeper into the topic.
• Media types and channels: Make a careful choice and pick the most relevant way to forward your corporate messages.

When should the information be published? View and audit, then rewrite, remove and customise your existing content

Scheduling your editorial work based on the key events of your company does not only make the planning easier, but also makes it possible to measure how your existing content is actually performing. Using a proactive approach for your content activity leaves more time for reflection on your aims, as well as time to follow up on the effects.

Do a review and audit the existing content to assess its performance and relevance. Then remove, rewrite and customise the content to increase its impact and ensure that the timing is just right.

What information goes where? Present information in different ways to serve all your stakeholders

In our Capital Market Report 2018 we have investigated what information should go where according to the capital market audience.

The results highlight the need to present information in different ways in order to serve all stakeholders. Use the content produced for your important key events and make sure to highlight the most important messages on the website.

Are you interested in more deep insights into corporate stakeholders’ content needs and demands? Read through our Webranking Reports: Web Management Report 2018, Capital Market Report 2018 and Careers Report 2018.

Provide understanding, better context and add value with video

Copy in all its glory, marketers and communications managers have seriously begun to understand the importance of video and use the format in order to achieve their business goals. A new survey from Hubspot reveals that:

• 76 percent of marketers say that video increases sales.
• 47 percent state that video reduces support issues.
• 76 percent report that video increases traffic to the website.

As we've discussed in our Web Management Report 2018, video is a powerful tool when it comes to explaining and getting a message through by creating a more interactive connection with viewers.

Although capital market stakeholders generally don’t crave video, especially when they feel the content in them is too PR-oriented, they will still watch videos on corporate websites within their professional capacity. They are most keen on watching videos of investor presentations, the CEO talking about the company or presentations of the company and business activities. This might be something to keep in mind when planning content activities, for instance on report release days, financial reporting events or reporting from product and services launches.

Mark in your editorial calendar the events where it might be more appropriate to communicate important corporate messages in a video format. Keep in mind that it might take more time to produce a video than creating other types of content, so don't forget to plan appropriately.