If you are reading this article, it means you made the decision to have 1sixty8 provide ongoing, custom content for your website. Thank you. It is our strong belief that ongoing, relevant content is vital to the long-term success of a specialty retailer like yours. This article aims to get you up to speed on what to expect during your initial content meeting with one of our content managers.
1. Time and Space
The first, and most important, item is to dedicate time and space for a conversation where you won’t be interrupted or distracted. While our procedures make it relatively easy for you to submit the information we need, you do want to understand all the products we offer, their costs and what we will need from you. Dedicating uninterrupted time for your initial meeting with us will improve the quality of communication between us, and ultimately give you a better finished product on your website.
2. Laptop or Desktop Computer
Second, you want to be in front of a computer. We strongly suggest not using a phone or tablet, since some of the things we will ask you to do work much better on a laptop or desktop computer.
3. Paper and Pen
Third, you want a pad of paper or a journal to take notes and keep track of questions you may have for us.
4. Visit Website
Fourth, please visit the client side of our site before our meeting. We suggest allowing 20 to 30 minutes so you can look at the different products we currently offer. The web address is clients.1sixty8.com. It will ask for a password, which you will get from your project manager.
Once you are there, click on the “Our Products” tab at the top. This will open a page that has tiles of all our current products. We suggest clicking on each tile. You will see a description of each product, some advantages and disadvantages, a beginning cost, and a few examples of the product itself. Please click on a couple of the examples so you can familiarize yourself with the product.
5. Take Notes
Fifth, take notes of any questions or comments you have once you start looking over the products. This will help your content manager better understand your goals for your ongoing content.
6. Meeting
Sixth is the actual meeting. Depending on your monthly budget, the meeting will take anywhere from one to two hours. During that time, we will go over the products in more detail and show you the forms you will use to submit the content itself. You can see any of them under the “Forms” tab at the top of the page, directly to the left of the Our Products tab you clicked earlier. Each of our products, other than Resource Library, has a form you will submit every time a piece of content has to be created and published.
7. Content Planning
Seventh, we will plan out anywhere from two to three months of content that fits your agreed-upon budget.
Once that content has been agreed upon, your content manager will do a Basecamp discussion that recaps the phone conversation. It will spell out what was discussed, as well as the content itself that will be published in a particular month. Once you get the e-mail about the Basecamp discussion, any follow-up discussion about this phone call happens in that particular thread.
8. Basecamp Introduction
Eighth, you will be assigned what Basecamp calls a “To-Do,” which is a reminder to submit the proper form for agreed-upon content. It will have a due date that you and the content manager agree on. The day that the content is due, you will get an e-mail reminder. After you submit the form, please go to Basecamp and mark that particular To-Do as completed. That alerts your content manager that you completed the task.
It is very important that content be submitted by the due dates so we can ensure it gets published in the proper month. Since we publish a lot of custom content every month, it is important to submit the forms in advance so we can plan to go live on your site in a logical, consistent fashion.
That’s it – you made it. Welcome aboard!
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