Optimizing your brand’s digital-storytelling prowess
Today, technology and social media continue to change the way people consume news and information. With the rise of online misinformation and a growing distrust in legacy news organizations, the landscape for how to get your story out is daunting.
The good news: Owned media channels provide a powerful way to share your organization’s story in a format and cadence that you control.
What are owned channels?
Owned media channels are the digital platforms owned and managed by your brand, empowering you to control the narrative. Your website, email campaigns and social media profiles are all examples of owned media. These channels present a tremendous opportunity to tell your story in your distinct brand voice and organically invite user engagement. When cultivated well, they allow you to reach a wide audience and give you the opportunity to win over new fans, donors, partners and followers.
Web, email and social are the front door to your organization
Your brand’s website and social media profiles are the digital front door to your organization. Your digital communications footprint is as crucial as how your building looks, your customer service and your print materials.
In today’s digital world, ministries and organizations that invest in the digital experience will far outpace those who do not. To stay competitive, the user experience , clarity of message, calls to action and search engine optimization (SEO) across your website must be excellent. Anyone visiting your website or social profiles should easily be able to find:
- A concise brand story—a brief summary of who you are, what you do and why.
- Information relevant to your audience’s needs and desires.
- How to get involved and take the next step with your organization.
- Your organization’s latest news and accolades.
- Resources for media (e.g., media kit, logo files, approved images for download, contact information).
Because you have complete ownership over the content available on your website, email and social media profiles, you can easily fix the problem if you’re currently missing the mark on any of the above.
How to optimize your website and social media profiles to maximize your brand story
While owning these channels gives easy access to optimizing and updating them, it often requires a thoughtful, focused investment of time and energy. If you are wondering where to start, the following recommendations can help improve your organization’s website performance, user experience and reach:
- Start by auditing Auditing is a crucial first step to better understanding the effectiveness of your current digital assets. When you understand the health of your owned channels, you can begin planning a path forward. Guardian regularly conducts analyses of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats on websites, search presence and social media profiles for ministries and organizations. These audits help give direction that propels brands further in the digital world. There are a variety of digital audits that we recommend for organizations, including: Technical site health audit—Beyond the frontend experience (what you see as a site visitor), there are many factors on the backend of a website that affect user experience and site performance. Assessing toxic backlinks, redirects, error pages, HTML structure, title tags, meta descriptions, broken images and broken links allows you to determine your website’s health score and determine how user-friendly it is.
- Search landscape audit—Start with a baseline understanding of your brand’s organic search rankings and paid search performance for both branded and non-branded terms. Understand which keywords are driving traffic to your website and how you’re ranking in search results. With this knowledge, you can identify keywords that can be strategically integrated across your site to improve your search performance.
- Digital content audit—Take an assessment of all digital content across your organization’s website and email campaigns. Seeing the full scope of content across all digital platforms will help power a long-term SEO and digital content strategy. Identify which pieces of content can be archived and which can be optimized to streamline your website experience and email journey.
- Social media audit—Before refreshing your strategy, dive into social media insights to learn what is working successfully and what can be improved upon across your channels. Review best practices for each social channel to determine opportunities for growth across your profiles.
- Refine your brand story Before you implement any optimizations or recommendations discovered during the auditing phase, pause to refine the story you are telling. Consistently communicating who you are, what you do and why is a critical factor in telling a succinct, integrated brand story.
- Implement optimizations across all channels Across your website, social media channels, email campaigns and search landscape, roll out the proposed optimizations. Update content with your refined brand story and implement organic search best practices. Rework the structure of your website as needed and ensure that key information for donors, consumers and news media is clearly accessible. Provide a meaningful user journey with more intuitive calls to action. Set social media channel strategies and create clear pathways to engage followers. Create opportunities to authentically engage with users. These are just snapshots of optimizations that your organization might need to effectively reach a wider audience.
- Measure performance and repeat Peter Drucker is attributed as saying “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Continue to monitor performance over time, gleaning insights for further optimizations and enhancements.
As you consider your owned media channels and how to maximize them, reach out. We can conduct a quick audit to determine where your opportunities for improvement are.
