Bringing Sexy Back to Government Content for the Web

In B2B and B2C marketing circles, content marketing is a very sexy, very now topic of discussion. In fact, entire conferences are cropping up to celebrate, educate and share techniques to make the most of strategic content marketing. But is government keeping up with the latest best practices of appealing, informative, interesting and sharable content?

Web content can be difficult to write even for niche marketing and communications professionals with one targeted audience. Writing content that is government-endorsed means that it must be politically correct, accurate, and usually vetted by more than one other person. Content writers for local, state and federal organizations also face the challenge of writing for more than one audience at a time. While the general audience may be easy to identify (voters, residents of a certain area, or business owners in your town, for example), web content on government sites often needs to be readable and interesting to a wide array of demographics.

Last May, I attended a conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota that was focused entirely on content strategy. There were sessions for all different types of organizations–healthcare, non-profit, government, higher ed, tech companies and others–and that conference has spun out several more targeted events this year for specialized industries (maybe in 2015, they’ll add one for government!).

One woman I spoke with at Confab led a session on the content strategy consulting work that she had done for healthcare organizations. After the session, I found out that Ahava got her start with web content during the six years she spent working as a communications strategist with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Having worked with dozens of companies and organizations since then, Ahava Liebtag is a bona fide content strategy guru.

As a content marketer in the content management and content strategy business (full disclosure: the company I work for creates and sells content management software and content marketing software), I found Ahava to have a wealth of knowledge about the struggles that content writers and content strategists face in every industry. For example, it’s not easy to get your entire team on board with writing content. It can be challenging to find your voice and get an entire group of people to use the same voice. Writing web content that is both appropriate and engaging can be very difficult. And maintaining an editorial calendar with a variety of different types of contributors could drive a communications strategist bananas.

That’s why I asked Ahava to present a webinar on the content strategy challenges that every organization faces at one time or another and provide solutions for overcoming those hurdles. Join us Wednesday, March 26th at 2PM Eastern Time for a webinar on how to bring sexy back to your web content–or at least a little intrigue and interest!