It's time to renovate the press section
One of the most significant areas to prioritise an overhaul is Belgian press sections (sometimes found under 'newsroom' or 'media'), as these need to serve various stakeholders but particularly business journalists, who are always in need of rapid access to media information and assets. When comparing the 18 largest companies in Belgium with the largest companies from across 14 ranked European countries, Belgium's press sections rank bottom of the pile, as they provide just 30% of the content most important for this part of the website.
A major contributory factor to this unwanted accolade is that Belgian press release archives are missing the mark for stakeholders in several ways. For starters, only two thirds of the 18 ranked companies actually have one, which is by far the lowest rate in Europe. This also flies to the contrary of our research, as 95% of respondents to our latest Capital Market survey consider the press archive an important communication channel on a corporate website. In addition:
- Only 17% of Belgian press archives have filter functions for dividing releases by month or quarter
- Only 11% of Belgian press archives have a search function that returns relevant results
Making the press release archives as easy to use as possible is highly desired among stakeholders who lack the time to manually trawl for information, and both search and filter functionalities offer useful shortcuts to save this effort.
Image libraries are key for business journalists
89% of all business journalists we spoke to for this year's Capital Market survey noted the importance of companies having a well-stocked image library available either on their corporate websites or clearly linked to an external hosting service. These assets need to be easy to find and available in different resolutions, suitable for printing, downloading and digital use. Images should cover different aspects of your business, from logotypes to products and services. If they can't be found, then journalists may need to get in contact to procure them, which suits no one as it slows them down while also creating work for your communications team. Despite this, Belgian companies again score the lowest in Europe for their image libraries, with just 22% having any images available at all.
The best press section in Belgium belongs to UCB, who score 4.8 out of the 8 points available for this Webranking category. The main strengths of their section are the press archive, where releases can be filtered by date and category to hasten the search for relevant results, and the image library, which contains photos of UCB's locations and executives, as well as company logo images.