The Write Stuff

iStockphoto, scanrail

Communicating what makes you different in the Big Data analytics market has never been more important than right now. The sheer number of exhibitors staking a claim in the Big Data bonanza at the Strata Conference underscores how quickly competition is emerging in this market.

 This week’s conference showcased a veritable Who’s Who in the industry today, including one of our clients, Glassbeam.  Distinguishing itself among the throng of Big Data players, Glassbeam develops big data applications that help companies improve their business and IT operations by intelligently extracting strategic and tactical insights from huge amounts of multi-structured machine data by way of pre-packaged applications.

 To communicate this market position, we helped Glassbeam by preparing fresh web content, creating a product-management solutions brief, a white paper on multi-structured data and a strategic case study featuring Aruba Networks.

 As the competitive landscape become further cluttered with more vendors, claims and counterclaims, credible content  that sets a vendor apart from the crowd will only grow in importance.

© Edbockstoc

Chances are your mom was a tough customer with a sophisticated BS-detection system.  Especially when it came to shopping and sifting through manufacturers’ claims. Today’s mothers, if we are to believe the studies, are every bit as shrewd.  Difference today is that mom knows her way around the Web and how to find exactly what she wants. Hint: she goes far beyond the brand’s website to find “the friendly neighbor over the virtual fence” who can share the inside scoop on how different products compare.

In other words, today’s moms’ behavior in their marketplace is identical to that of the hardest-nosed prospects in yours. So what lessons can you as a B2B marketer draw from the most successful consumer brands when it comes to building credibility among their most skeptical customers — those prove-it-to-me moms who guard their family’s budgets with a fist as tight as any corporate controller’s?

1. Redouble your efforts to make everything you present specifically relevant and timely to the target. Successful brands understand that today’s e-customers turn first to experts and respected peers, never the brand spokespersons.  And just as moms go right to the blogosphere for tips and guidance, B2B buyers increasingly go straight to the alpha opinion leaders in their categories.

2. Try harder to instigate only those discussions about your industry and technology that the opinion makers and thought leaders want to have. This is a subtle shift from a time, not so long ago, when marketing departments and their various agencies would look for issues that a company might be able to “own”.  The trick today is to pinpoint specific hot buttons drawing the most buzz and then to weigh in with your perspective based on the experiences of your users. If your brand message is delivered in harmony with the hottest issues, over time, you enjoy the halo effect. This inspires direct conversations with more of the hottest prospects and the trials that convert to sales.  From there the credibility spreads and accelerates.

3. Constantly test your material.  A/B testing among various customer segments can reveal surprising data about user sentiments and product usage. Expose different messages that emphasize a different spin and compare the responses in terms of the activity they draw.  Then craft the next wave of content accordingly. Your mom would be proud.

And good riddance

It’s not often that you sit through a webinar and come away with some real insights.  Fortunately, today’s webinar conducted by Mintigo on improved lead generation through “Content Intelligence” delivered — and hit on some important truisms facing marketers.

As a company that espouses the “power of relevant marketing”, Mintigo struck a chord.  Zeroing in on the content marketing deluge – i.e. “crap” – that is drowning customers and prospects, the Mintigo folks got to the heart of the matter: effective content cannot just entertain and inform, it must contain material that “authentically matters to the people you’re trying to reach”.

So how do you make this determination? It boils down to segmenting your content based on your prospects’ identifiable traits and self-proclaimed areas of interest.   “Content Intelligence” uses more personalized and relevant communication to clusters of targeted prospects based on big data analysis of multiple sources (think websites visited, news preferences, blogs read, social postings and more).  By extracting the needs and interests of prospects, you can segment them into interest groups, clusters and personas.

Make no mistake, this is hard work.  And Mintigo is the first to say so despite the fact they offer up what they declare to be the world’s first Customer Search Engine that automates a lot of the heavy lifting involved.

One of the key challenges of content marketing boils down to producing enough fresh content – and figuring out what topics to communicate – to continually engage targeted prospects with information that is highly relevant in order to trigger more click-throughs.  And this means that engaging the right content development shop to help fulfill this need is becoming one of the most strategic decisions facing marketing departments today.  The days of “spray and pray” marketing are history.  Welcome to the era of content intelligence.

© Alexeys

You’ll notice that there’s no shortage of “best practices” tips online today. And the guidelines for how to write/create content for websites that real people (as opposed to web-crawlers) actually read is no exception: today on Google there were nearly 78 million results. So, why are we weighing-in?  To briefly enunciate our philosophy: when it comes to what should go up your site, there is a deceptively simple tried-and-true golden rule. Less is More.

“Deceptively simple” because anyone charged with web content knows the burden on the gatekeepers who do the vetting.

The point is, whatever makes your cut must be better than ever. More compelling, more readable, more useful and stickier. Because your visitors insist. The most recent studies reveal a sharp decrease in the amount of time spent by website visitors.  It’s now less than half a minute. Not a lot of time to drone on about your product-as-hero. Or wax eloquent about your leadership and heritage. With this kind of attention deficit, everything a visiting skim-reader sees must be ultra high-return. It must instantly attract, impress and hook.

With this in mind and with so much recycled stuff out there, here is our condensed list of must-do’s as commonly practiced by the best-seller vendors:

1.  Know your reader. Exactly the same as the ancient marketing tenet of “knowing your customer” to the greatest extent possible. What do your buyers want to know about your value proposition? What were they really buying when they cut a check? Why do they turn away from one thing and lean toward another? What are those things? We are constantly amazed at how many marketers are still in the dark when it comes to reader familiarity.  It all begins right here.

2.  Put yourself where they are. See #1 above. Chances are you lean toward video and everything visual when it comes to learning and gathering information. Ditto your prospects. The national and regional news sites figured this out long ago.  Try to find one today worth its pixels that has no video or streaming on their home page, or every section  That intriguing screen capture with the arrow inviting the click is irresistible.  Use video to showcase brief product descriptions, short clips of your people sharing insights, and/or a customer or two (or five) endorsing you with a brief problem/solution testimonial. Caveat:  ALL video has the shortest shelf life of anything on your site. You have to be committed to this. Which reminds us to tell you to…

3.  Think like a baker. It’s all about freshness.  You don’t see the same, stale stuff in the pastry case while your barrista is putting the cap on your low-fat mocha every morning.  Maybe not exactly the same thing but the underlying principle is, absolutely. You make your site a destination for a larger audience when you respect the value those folks put on fresh (AKA new) information, tidbits, tips, and news they can use: precisely what people are looking for and the best way for you to rise through the rankings. Last but not least: give something away, like a free sample at a bakery.

4.  Write in chunks.  There’s a bit of controversy today about “linear” writing styles vs. the “chunky” approaches.  Linear = feature stories, magazine articles, novels.  Chunky = headline news, wire-service dispatches and police blotters.  Which category do you think a stressed-out, short-attention span customer falls into?  Chunking does three things to improve your site content: more efficient conveyance of information, helps readers speed things up to find what they’re looking for, and it presents page-to-page information more consistently which makes your site easier to navigate

5.  Ask for the order.  More honored in the breach than in the observance. What do you want your reader to do, think, say to peers, or act upon? Your call to action is right up there with your contact page as the key element(s) of your site.  Make it clear, compelling and memorable.  Above all, make it brief.

© Clivia

There is no linear relationship between volume of outbound messages and the elusive thing that CEB terms “share of wallet”. Interaction that may seem reasonable and even informative to some buyers will be irksome to others. Takeaway: instead of hammering all prospects and customers alike with endless messages intended to get their attention, carefully consider if the content of your message promises value to your prospects’ research in your category — or just adds to their overload.

The trick is to know exactly what your existing buyers perceived in your value proposition that was consistent with their idea of value. This enables you to flavor future content with the most relevant, like-minded ideas. It’s reality-based marketing, not mythology.

So now that you’ve written that white paper, what do you do with it — do you put it up on your site and make it immediately available with one click?  Or do you put it behind a wall (AKA “gate”) and ask for the requester’s contact information?  “Gated” or walled-off content asks for various levels of contact information from the requester. It enables you to build a database. But does this hinder your efforts to build a large audience quickly?  Turns out there are no clear-cut rules for free-form vs. gated.  You’ll have to decide the relative merits of the tradeoff.  To our way of thinking, it boils down to this:  if you’re an early stage outfit, you likely want to build an audience. This means you want to make your content easily available.  Anything that slows down the acquisition of your material impedes this process.  If, on the other hand, you’re at the point in your audience volume where you want to start filtering out the tire-kickers and place greater focus on sales-ready leads, a gate that extracts some profile or contact information is appropriate.

Still, we concur with Dayna Rothmanof marketing software developer Marketo, who says that you have to formulate your own policy. “You have to find your own balance to meet your own audience and lead goals”.  This is why Write Angle  advises against putting your early-stage content in front of a gate.  In the early going, it’s more important to have a wide funnel.   As the brand is being built, then you can start making decisions about adding the filters.  If you need a rule, consider the one offered by CMO.com:  If you are out to position your company or brand as a thought leader, offering insights into the issues and challenges of the day, then free-form (un-gated) is the way to go. If you are more interested in driving leads to conversion quickly, then gating the content makes more sense.

We’re frequently asked about the kinds of content an early-stage venture must feature on its web site.  To some clients, our answer is initially seen as counter-intuitive.  The tendency among many new ventures is to declare a value proposition that stretches the realm of credibility.  And that flies in the face of a PR 101 axiom:  the bolder your claims about your value proposition, the more remarkable and bulletproof your substantiation must be.

In a world full of spin, it might seem counter-intuitive to throttle back on boldness.  A couple of caveats are in order.  First, we no longer live in the anything-goes era of the Nineties.  The pendulum has swung from “hype it” to “prove it”.  Be mindful of presenting content that contains overblown promises that can’t be supported with incontrovertible proof.  As an early-stage venture, dings in your credibility can kill market momentum.  Fill your evidence-pipeline well ahead of your coming-out party.

Our advice: Stress-test your content for the following:

1. Does it pass the “too-good-to-be-true” sniff test?
2. Who can vouch for your claims beyond your CEO or CMO?
3. Do you have customers who can articulate your value proposition?
4. Do you have any metrics, ROI, or quantifiable evidence of your competitive superiority?
   

Sound fundamentals are mandatory.  Be certain of yours.

In tribute to the late Steven Covey (above), author of the wildly successful “Seven Habits” franchise, Write Angle offers the following tips to writers and developers of all marketing content, especially those in technology categories:

1.  Start all projects with your customer in mind. All marketing begins with a customer, not a product.  This simple but often forgotten principle is the soul of the content that gets the most reads, clicks and conversions.  Who are the people you’re trying to reach?  What are the first and foremost concerns of the user?  How does your material address these issues?

2.  Stay true to one, clear objective. Begin all projects by asking the question “Why are we initiating this effort?  How will it educate our user and further our business agenda at this moment?

3.  Keep your main thing the MAIN THING. If you’re describing the way a manufacturer uses your product analytics to get a better read on how their customers are using specific products, stick to that topic. Don’t wander off talking about your other offerings’ cool features that deliver unrelated benefits.

4.  Avoid hyper-competitiveness. Don’t emulate the attitude of the big vendors who’ve never encountered a competitor they didn’t want to vaporize.  Keep your content focused on what you do for your users, not what your competitors don’t do for theirs.  There’s a broader lesson here for marketing.  Silicon Valley is strewn with the remains of failed brands that took their eye off the marketplace because they were so obsessed with their competition. Remember Auspex?  It died of NetApp envy.

5.  Remember that in a short-attention-span world, brevity is the soul of readability.  Nobody reads PDFs longer than six pages, max.  And this number is shrinking.  In the name of brevity, we’ll leave it at that.

6.  Remain a student of your business . And your technology. It’s a cliche, but the fact is that the pace of change today is blinding fast. Ensure that all marketing content reflects the freshness, relevancy and currency of today’s marketplace issues.

7. Don’t go off half-cocked. Jerry Della Femina, legendary ad executive from the “Mad Men” era, insisted his copywriters gather seven times the amount of source information needed on any subject prior to writing a single sentence.  While some may balk at this kind of preparation as overkill, the point is to become as prepped and familiar with the subject matter as the deadline allows. To our way of thinking, more is better.

“So let me ask you, is this new product of yours the greatest thing out there right now, or WHAT?!”

Recently, a senior editor of a well-known computer journal that will remain nameless was reading an FAQ about a product introduced several weeks ago. “These questions remind me of a Merv Griffin interview,” she said, referring to the late TV talk-show host notorious for flattering his guests.

Her frustration was triggered by softball questions and self-serving answers, in a briefing document that’s supposed to provide hard-hitting market education at a glance.  While seemingly obvious, the mission of a well-crafted FAQ is to provide clear and legitimate answers to frequently asked questions – posed by real world prospects, customers, investors and market analysts.

The unhappy fact about FAQs is how easily they can lose impact as educational tools as they circulate through the editing mill of marketing departments.  One way to mitigate the problem is to bring your best salespeople into the loop.  Tell them to be brutal.  Tell them to include the questions “frequently asked” by their toughest customer(s).   And it doesn’t hurt to get field input on the answers, either, even though an FAQ crafted for analysts and media should never be mistaken for sales literature.

A product introduction is always an opportunity to re-introduce your brand and your company.  Take the high ground and reaffirm your leadership by posing questions that reflect current user problems and issues.  Customers are cynical by nature.  So don’t insult them with watered down FAQ’s poorly disguised as marketing puff.

Is your marketing and PR content candid about real customer issues?  Are your FAQs clear about how your solution cuts to the heart of user problems?  How do you ensure that your questions are more like Sixty Minutes, and less like the old Merv Griffin Show?