The Write Stuff

Although it’s been said many times many ways (apologies to Mel Torme), most marketing content-related projects call for answers to at least a half-dozen questions.  And all members of the team should weigh-in.  As simplistic as they may appear, questions not unlike the ones below can reveal information that makes the difference between a worthwhile end product and an endless cycle of revisions and finger-pointing:

1.  Objective: What is the purpose of the proposed document and/or web content?

2.  Target: Who is the reader?

3.  Message(s): What are the key take-aways or leave-behind messages you want to create in the reader’s mind about your company and/or its offerings?

4.  Differentiation: What are the core, competitive differentiators of your offering(s) that you want this  particular content to convey?  How do they differ from competitive offerings and what is significant about this difference?

5.  Features/Benefits: Relative to the differentiation you describe above, specify the features that make it superior and explain the corresponding benefit(s) of each.  How to they “benefit” a buyer?

6. Substantion/proof points: What evidence or field results illustrate the validity of your claims (e.g., customer testimony, metrics, competitive superiority, etc.) ?

Is this exercise part of your own preparation today? What other questions would you ask?  What did we miss?

If you can’t get excited about what you’re selling, you cannot sell it

There’s nothing mysterious or magical about good writing for marketing and sales.  The bad news is that it’s hard work.  The good news is that just about anyone who is literate (and has the time) can do it — providing that what they write contains three essential ingredients:

1.  Above all, a product or service that delivers measurable value.

2. A passionate and palpable belief in the benefits your product or service delivers.

3. A no-less passionate belief in what you’re saying.

If this sounds like the secrets of successful selling, it’s because it is.  Writing for marketing and sales is nothing more or less than marketing and salesmanship in print. Or in pixels.  A sales professional who is less than excited about the product will never cut it.  Ditto for marketing people assigned to a product  in which they have no belief.  If you are genuinely excited about your offer and what it represents to customers, the excitement will shine through. It cannot help but breathe life into your words and inspire the interest of the people reading them.  And you can hold the exclamation points.

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What do customers want to know when they’re looking for solutions to problems that you purport to solve?

Whenever we’re assigned to write clients’ Web pages we follow best practices as we do for all content.  What ‘best practices’ call for in Web content is not so different from other forms but the Web does force the writer and editor to become a little more brutal.  Actually, it’s the audience that’s the force at work.

We like to say that customers aren’t interested in your product (or service), they’re interested in their problem. Specifically, visitors to your site aren’t interested in you so much as the need they’re trying to fill or the hard facts they’re trying to gather as the basis of filling that need.  And this tells you two things:

1.  To the extent that your product or service is too much in the face of the site visitor, you increase your chances of a quicker “bounce”, or departure of this visitor.

2.  Ditto above if your content is jargon-heavy with with acronyms or industry-speak.

Except for those pages or links that are specifically tailored for existing customers, or prospects who are well down the path to a decision, you want your Web content to widen the top of the funnel.  So, you’re going to score points to the degree you show an interest and expertise in the problems they have, not the fixes you offer.  Not yet, anyway.  With this in mind, product-focused content should be avoided.  Your ‘welcoming lobby’ should be a pressure-free zone to introduce the visitor to your business, same as your social-media strategy should be at all times.  It’s where you start to build trust.

As for the language you use, choose your words carefully.  Use only those words and expressions that you are certain your prospects use.   Search engines use signals throughout social media for ranking search  results.  This means that your Web site is only incidental to the wider territory your prospects cover every day and in which they interact with other prospects online.  Be sure to use the words and phrases they are looking for, not the flavor-of-the-month terminology you think is cool.

How do you gauge your content when it comes to driving traffic to your site?

We counted five metrics described today which are amazingly similar to the ones we consider key gauges on the web-content dashboard.  Because the world in which we now market and sell demands that we do those things that are necessary to be found online, the name of the game is to enable more and more of the people you’re interested in to find you there.  And, as study after study shows, the way you do this most cost effectively is to generate a steady stream of content intended to establish your credentials as a worthy exponent of whatever it is those people are looking for or researching.

1. To create smart, hard-working content, the kind that attracts real prospects and prompts them to take the specific actions you call for, you first have to identify the content that’s hardly working.  Expecting a different result from doing the sames thing(s) repeatedly may or may not be a definition of insanity but to us the definition of smart marketing content is anything that draws the right people to your site and entices them to take the action you want.  To begin creating it, it’s important to know about a landing page’s “bounce rate”: the amount, expressed as a percentage of the visitors who did not take the action you called for, or just abandoned your site after looking at that page.  Any landing page with a comparatively high number (compared to other landing pages) will tell you what is and is not working for you — and your visitors.

2. A landing page that gets people to do the thing(s) you want, such as request a whitepaper or e-book or provide their contacts (or all three) is said to have a high “conversion rate”.   Comparing the conversion rates among your pages is another way to weed out ineffective content or a weak call to action. Importance of landing pages is hard to overstate because this is usually the first impression you make on a visitor.  It is step one in a casual visitor’s  “conversion” to hot lead — and a sale.

3. Traffic sources reveal where your visitors are coming from when they first arrive. It’s top of the funnel where you can learn where people found out about you.  It’s the metric by which you judge your SEO efforts to see if your organic search volume increasing. “If you’ve been doing good social media promotion, then you should see a lot of referral traffic from social media sites and blogs”, says the Web consultancy Hubspot. “Every business will have their own mix of organic, referral and direct traffic, so it’s important to watch over time so that you can track how your various marketing channels are driving traffic to your website”.

4. From your site’s keywords you can determine which terms people use when they go to Google or Bing or wherever, and your site shows up.  Keywords tell you what terminology people use when they find you or when they’re researching your category. They also provide insight about the things people were thinking about when they discovered you. It’s obvious why your keyword strategy is, in a word, key.  But don’t forget to see if, and how much, traffic is being generated by words other than what you’ve been optimizing for. When you uncover them, start creating content around them.

5. Finally, there are the visitors, the actual number of unique individuals who have been to your site. An important read-out, yes, but not of primary importance. It is not a reflection of your site’s intrinsic strength of content.  Which is what you need most. You want your site to draw traffic on its own, by virtue of its content.  Some of your visitors may have influenced by off-line promotion or off-site campaigns.  Good, but not cost-effective. You want your web site to self-sustain. And this is exactly what great content enables.

The most powerful marketing content today, the content you should be striving to create, is the stuff that creates the right discussions in the right context among the right people.

If your content is all about your company, your brand and your products, you’re missing the point of what makes today’s marketing content more effective and memorable.  In other words, you’re not getting what you’re paying for.  If your outreach is basically driven by cultivating a few opinion leaders and staying in control of your message, you’re not making the most of the new landscape and the new tools available to you.  Worse, you’re likely losing ground to competitors who are.

To Bob Duffy, senior social-media strategist at Intel, it’s not about controlling the message so much as providing the context in which information is exchanged and interpreted.

Duffy told Social Media Explorer that brands, not unlike Intel, are doing a lot of what the traditional media (and industry analysts) have always done: publishing what they learn from developers, for example, revealing best practices and creating connections between different tech players. Like his counterparts at other technology brands today, Duffy is creating the context for important discussions in the industry that will ultimately pay off down the road for his employer.

The takeaway for today’s marketing pros? Reach out to anyone who could be part of your community and jump-start the discussions you want to be part of.  Discussions to which you can add value and build your reputation as somebody who’s worth engaging on a long-term basis.  Just keep in mind that you have to stick to the subject matter of the discussion and not be a shill for your brand.  Your community is street-wise.  It is more than capable of connecting the dots. Do as Duffy does: “We don’t try to control the conversation or message, we just want to provide the context.”

What are you doing as a marketer to instigate industry discussions and engage your communities?  What are you learning from, and sharing with, the people who matter to your brand?  What kinds of connections are you creating among them?  How are you measuring it?

Tom Pisello’s thoughts on content marketing and the “buyer’s journey” reminds us, again, that great customer knowledge is the cornerstone of great content for customers. Great content marketing, in other words.

There’s a specific category of content for suspects and prospects that call for careful sorting of the content to present to each at various points along their decision path.  It may not necessarily accelerate the buyer’s journey from kicking the tires to writing the check, but it ensures a better ROI for each individual piece of content. What you make available to each group can effectively nudge them along their way.

In a world where skepticism and frugality reign supreme, knowing which stage your prospect is in will determine whether your carefully crafted content is useful or irrelevant. It can make the difference between material the prospect considers valuable or useless.  As with most things in life, timing is everything.  Note that there is always overlap in groups such as those described below, but Pisello’s rule-of-thumb still applies:

1. Think of the first stage of the journey as the discovery period.  Here, buyers are in fact-gathering mode.  They may have made the decision to purchase something, but not necessarily your thing.  This is the group to which white papers, webcasts, events and diagnostic assessment tools are most useful.

2. In the consideration stage, the buyer is looking to justify the purchase.  This is the decision-making time when specific vendors are put on a short list and their offerings more closely scrutinized and screened.  In this phase the prospect (no longer a “suspect”) may be particularly influenced by your solution case studies, video testimonials and white papers that are less theoretical and more solution-minded.

3. Finally, it’s decision time when the buyer will be most influenced by content that demonstrates the rightness of your value proposition.  They want a compelling answer to the question, “Why is this the right decision for me?”  Any content that reveals ROI will be most appropriate at this stage: interactive business-case tools, feature-function comparisons, value-oriented white papers and total-cost-of-ownership comparison tools.

There are horses for courses.  And there is specific content for specific mindsets.  Do you have compelling marketing content that fits each phase of the buyer’s decision process?  How are you measuring its ROI?

We’re in violent agreement with the folks over at Beaupre bemoaning the dearth of dedicated content specialists (AKA writers and editors) among the ranks of so many PR firms.

To be clear, we at Write Angle have no ax to grind whatsoever when it comes to public-relations agencies.  Quite the contrary.  Some of us are former agency operatives, one even having spent decades in Silicon Valley on the client-side retaining the best in the business at places such as Apple and NetApp.  So we know, too, that great media-relations, the primary assignment of technology PR, is not the same thing as great writing.  Most firms, large or small, simply cannot afford to keep a separate stable of great writers.

Agencies earn their keep by their skills as interpreters and as relationship cultivators.  They’re paid to translate complicated concepts and information into irresistible ideas — nuggets of topical interest to the right reporters, bloggers and influencers with whom they have personal familiarity and cordial working relationships.  People who are adept at this aren’t necessarily as effective at long-form translation or turning these ideas into the lengthier prose that make prosaic media backgrounders, whitepapers and op-ed articles vivid, compelling reading. The problems crop up when the volume of work outstrips — or falls short of — the resources at hand.

The fact is that in hectic periods of “feast” the demand for press releases and web pages and content of all kinds can overwhelm a lean shop.  The other side of that coin are the leaner times when agencies, including those with no dedicated writers on staff, find themselves in the unhappy position of having to support idle overhead.  No matter what, clients will always expect quality deliverables on time and on budget at all times. The solution: dedicated, on-demand, outside writers whom the beleaguered agency would be proud to call its own. It turns out that such a service is just what the budget calls for in more ways than one, during times of feast or famine.

By now, the importance of creating your own content and publishing it online via all social channels should be pretty obvious, but in case you missed the latest metric on social-media marketing here it is: HubSpot just reported that nearly two out of every three social-media messages today is a link to published content.

In other words, people pointing out to personal friends and business associates the material published by someone else amounts to a substantial majority of the information flow in social media.  The implications for marketers have never been clearer or more urgent: brands, whether B2C or B2B, are as much in the content publishing (and distribution) business today as they are in the business that generates their revenue stream.  Indeed, the publishing element of their business has become central to growing this revenue because it drives the visitors to your site who generate the leads that convert to $ales.

Moreover, whether people are sharing links to your content or embedding it into social networks directly, an overwhelming 96% of the sharing that happens online is of content, not websites.  The take-away: creating fresh content that encourages sharing  amongst your prospects, customers, partners and market influencers, specifically the stuff that addresses issues of keenest interest and urgency to them, multiplies their interest in you.  You’re in the conversation, which is the precursor to being in consideration.

Superior marketers have come to understand that pushing content drives in-bound marketing.  Fresh content — the more frequently published the better — facilitates online “find-ability”.  It’s  not enough to update your site once a quarter and step back to await the deluge of visitors clicking through your multiple calls-to-action.  Plant your content seeds in social media and get it shared among the right people on an ongoing basis.

What is your content strategy today?  What are your content publishing tactics?  How often do you publish the content your prospects and customers can’t resist sharing?

In his book “Corner Office”, the New York Times’ Adam Bryant interviews a bunch of CEOs and describes how they got their jobs. One of the traits of a good CEO, he says, is understanding human psychology. Specifically, CEOs who do the best jobs are the ones able to mold stars into teams. First, you have to spot the difference between a star player and team player. Then you ensure that the stars are willing and able to put the team first. The ones who can’t must go.

These team dynamics apply to writing projects, too, especially the bigger ones that cross functional lines. Creating remarkable content for successful marketing and selling involves talented individuals, “stars”, working as a team. In the end, a superior creative product emerges not by committee but by collaboration. It’s tricky to negotiate the fine line that separates the two but this is precisely what needs to happen.

The best marketing content gains and holds attention then compels some form of action by the reader. So an effective piece of content is not unlike a powerful speech. Just as a good presenter visualizes talking to a single individual instead of roomful of them, talented writers imagine they are creating a message, a letter to someone they know, vividly describing something of specific interest to that reader and asking for a response. The typical problem with marketing content is its “committee” feel. Trying to speak to everyone, it addresses no one. How does your team overcome committee-speak? How do you encourage content creation that is collaborative?

Start-up companies are not alone in making the missteps we continually see from folks who run marketing and sales today. Too often, established brands fall into the same avoidable traps. The caveats as we see them:

1. Most conspicuous is the knee-jerk tendency to putting the 20-somethings in charge of social-media marketing strategy and tactics. “Hey, they’re the digital natives, they eat and breathe Facebook and Foursquare, let THEM drive this!” sounds like an epitaph on a departmental gravestone. Rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t put total greenhorns (read: an intern) in charge of sales support or customer service, do not anoint them keepers of in-bound marketing. It’s far too elemental to the revenue line and becoming more central all the time. Make the youngsters part of the team, not the captain.

2. Obsessing on competitors to the point of aping their every move. This isn’t competitive analysis it’s competitor envy. If every time someone sends you an “FYI” describing a piece of content created by a competitor you stop what you’re doing to automatically follow suit, your company is being led by that competitor’s tactics, not your own content strategy. Monitor competitive material closely, of course, but appraise it through the prism of your own objectives and customer requirements. What are the current needs and expectations of your own users? Where do you believe your market is headed? What is most central to your content strategy? The answers to these questions will best advance your mission.

3. Asking “how high?” every time an investor screams “Jump!” Satisfied customers make satisfied shareholders. Resist the temptation to force-fit every idea or suggestion put on the table by board members and investors. Acknowledge their interest with a customer-driven response but never forget that they are advisors, not cue cards.