Building your Theme Pool for Web Content

A swim in the pool is refreshing, but what if the pool is full of those critters called themes? Imagine a technology vendor that wants to win new customers by adding more “informational content” to its website. What themes should the new content emphasize? Or, to take one step back, which themes are candidates for emphasis?

The potential pool of candidate themes is large and deep, in part because the pool is fed by at least four major sources.

  • SEO themes: These are the themes or, more precisely, the keywords that the vendor believes its target market is most likely to search on, when gathering information related to the vendor’s products.
  • Editorial themes: those themes that the vendor believes will readers will most value. Ideas for these themes may come from an editorial staff, Web traffic analysts looking at what has worked well previously, or market research asking readers which topics and format would interest them.
  • Branding themes: those themes that the vendor believes will most drive readers to value the vendor’s products over the products of competitors. This list of themes will most likely come from the list used by the vendor’s marketers to construct its advertising and public-research communications. This list, in turn, may have come from a combination of market research and strategic-positioning decisions. Of course, if too much of the new informational content centers on these branding themes, the reader will see the content as mere marketing. But informational content still creates many opportunities for the vendor to convey branding themes.
  • Sales-conversion themes: those themes that the vendor believes will drive readers to take action, or be receptive to action from the vendor, that will in turn lead the readers toward becoming customers. Although some may think that “information content” is detached from the sales-conversion process, the right informational content can prepare the customer to seriously consider the vendor’s offerings.

Ready to jump out of the pool yet? Or maybe you have found a method to determine which themes to emphasize when.

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