Building your consumer base is about more than a website. You’ve carefully crafted your content based on your target audience. But how can you get it before the people who would be most interested in it?
In the past that has meant SEO (search engine optimization) where you use a few key words and clever content to get Google, Bing, or any other search engine, to place your content into relevant results. It’s awesome. It’s organic. You sit back and let your consumers come to you.
But with the explosion of social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest it has changed how people consume data that interests them. Websites are no longer the only way to find information.
You’ve spent time on your content. Let’s get it to the masses!
An Information Hub
One of the best things about Drupal is it’s so much more than a website. It is a framework with nearly limitless possibilities to improve the workflow of your business. Let it be the hub where all of your content lives. It can still provide the interface for traditional content consumption but it can also do so much more.
Perhaps you have an e-commerce store. Drupal can do all of the expected functionality that you’d get with any e-commerce solution. But its real power comes in its ability to take those products and present them in customized ways.
But how are people going to know about all of that great content? That new product that is going to revolutionize the world? Watch that amazing video of your company’s latest invention?
Consumed by Many
With Drupal as your data hub, it takes the pain out of third-party service integration. If it has an API, you can bet Drupal can connect with it.
You could create a new video and have it post to your Facebook page, Twitter account, even pin it to Pinterest. Do you have a podcast? Upload your audio or video and watch as its syndicated to iTunes and served via Amazon S3 for lightning fast downloads from their Cloudfront service. Post your newest video directly to YouTube and display it on whatever service or services you want.
Apps love content too. Add custom news feeds to your app that pull directly from your website. No more manual posting of data into multiple places. No more time wasted in scheduling out the publication of your content once it’s ready to go live.
But don’t forget other websites. While these new technologies are exciting, websites have their place as well. And this platform agnostic approach can interact with any site that accepts news feeds or has an API that allows content creation. That means Wordpress, Joomla, and even other custom solutions.
It’s still your content and you can place it virtually anywhere.
Publishing Workflow
With this amazing automation brings the ability to schedule your content and let Drupal take care of getting it into the platforms that fit your company’s vision.
Many people have weekly or monthly release schedules such as a Wednesday podcast or morning summary report mass email. But this doesn’t mean the content has to be created on the day of the release. Scheduled content allows you to build a release plan as far in advance as you’d like. But what if you miss a deadline? No problem. The flexibility to trigger the same automated processes can be built in. No more fighting with rigid automation systems!
As your business grows and changes, the platforms available will also grow and change. But this is no problem with a custom automated solution on Drupal. Consider each integration to be a spoke from the hub that is your website. Add another service with a new API integration alongside or within your current workflow. Remove one that is no longer necessary or required with the click of a button without affecting your current solutions.
All of this is possible when you use a framework instead of a flat, traditional website.
Go Custom, or Go Home
Traditional blogging platforms can provide many of these integrations through add-ons. But they often lack the ability to customize how the data that is syndicated is formatted. You get what you get. And since open source software is available to the masses, it creates an opportunity to rise above the noise with well-design, well-thought-out content delivery.
Creating a custom solution allows you to determine every part of that syndicated data so you can always look your best. And while the options of the add-ons available for each framework varies, it is inevitable that you hit up against a setting or feature that you’ll have to “learn to live with” but that you don’t love. This can be solved via a system tailored to your needs, one with your publishing workflow.
Get the most out of your content with smart, savvy syndication.