The Write Stuff

Props to the academics at Edit911, the guys who were instrumental in editing our book a few years years ago, for inspiring today’s post. You can read the full Monty here. Below, our expurgated version.

I. Use shorter sentences. Your readers will not only thank you, they’ll be much more likely to read you.

II. Read it aloud. If it doesn’t sound right, it’s wrong. If it sounds good, it reads well.

III. Give it to someone else to read. Preferably someone known for their candor. This is the essence of test-marketing.

IV. Outline your thoughts. This ensures a beginning, a middle and an end. It also guards against repetition and rambling.

V. In lengthier pieces, use subheads. Another way to ensure that you follow your outline.

VI. Make your main idea your compass or “true north”. If you need reminding, put it on the corner of each page as you write.

VII. Think of possible objections. If you’ve ever taken a class in debate, this is like the exercise of arguing both sides of an issue. Anticipating objections enable you to build in persuasive counter-arguments. You want your opinion to make a difference in someone’s thinking, not just make your point.

VIII. Know your audience. Never stop asking and reminding yourself exactly who your readers are as you write to them.

IX. Use spell check and grammar check. They are heavenly tools.

X. If there is one thing worse than underestimating (insulting) your reader’s intelligence, it’s overestimating their knowledge of your subject. It’s no coincidence that the best writing happens to be the clearest and simplest.

Case studies work. They sell. They drive people to your site. They enable you to be found online. They create interest, qualify leads, refresh content, build brand, and drive down the cost of sales.

There’s a catch, however: There are case studies and then there are self-serving, self-congratulatory loads of dreck that masquerade as “case studies”. What distinguishes the former from the latter? Clear descriptions of three things:

1. The most valuable benefit of the product or service being featured. This assumes that you understand what it is about the product that would arouse the attention (read: make somebody reach for their checkbook) of a user/customer/consumer. In other words, you know what your target customer holds dear. What they value most.

2. What it took the user in the case to adopt your product. What did he have to unplug? Undo? Buy extra? Learn? Re-learn? What was your product’s (or service’s) adoption cost?

3. The price. At very least, some order of magnitude of what your stuff costs relative to alternatives.

Those three elements constitute your value proposition. A value proposition is not an elevator pitch. It’s a quantifiable entity. And any case study that doesn’t communicate it is not worth the pixels on the screen. Your value prop is compelling only to the extent that the size of #1 (above) exceeds the sum of #2 plus #3.

Note: we understand the sensitivity of putting price information into case studies given the realities of negotiation. Just never lose sight of the fact that price is central to the customer’s definition of a value proposition. And this is only definition that counts.

Brian Solis thinks deep thoughts about the way people find and consume content today. Any and all content.

We can’t point to any companies hiring, in his words, the “new CEOs–chief editorial officers…journalists, editors, and freelancers (that) transform (company) media-rooms and blogs into veritable newsrooms”.

But, hey, if it generates leads, grows revenue and cuts the cost of selling we’re all for it.

Your company may not be looking for a chief editorial officer just yet but you don’t really need one to create the kind of content that draws the right audience, creates the right impression about your offerings and, above all, compels the right action by the people you want to act. Just remember the basic ingredients: what it is that makes one company’s material superior to others’ in the eyes and minds of buyers. Superior, or so-called “remarkable” content, contains four basic qualities:

1. It’s relevant. It delivers immediate gratification. Here’s where and why you really need to know your audience, users, and prospects because you must anticipate their desires, needs and interests. What do they have a burning interest to know? What do THEY NEED to know about your solution? This is all about what they want to know, not what you want to tell them. All that matters is what they are trying to find out. It’s on you to know what this is.

2. It’s unique. At least it’s unique to you and your brand. This means your voice, your take, your analysis and your interpretations that are uniquely your own. (Simple example: quotes in a press release should be written as if you’re being quoted in a face-to-face conversation with a customer, not like a letter from one lawyer to another. This is what is meant by authenticity.) Think of this attribute as the opposite of a “me, too” product feature. Why should someone care about (read) your stuff if they can get the same stuff just about anywhere else? Hint: if they can, they will. This is self-defeating, to put it politely.

3. It’s appealing. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing in way that reflects professionalism and expertise. Yours! Typography, videography, photographic quality, etc., must be redolent of high-production value. If it has your name on it, you want it packaged accordingly. It’s no coincidence that sticky content is content elegantly presented.

4. It’s engaging. We’re talking language here. The use of words. Just as most of us tend to skip disclaimers, legalese, terms-and-conditions and package-inserts, passive writing is the written equivalent of tryptophan. Engage the reader the way you wish to be engaged: with vivid word pictures that make the topic come alive with real-life anecdotes to substantiate your claim that you understand their world because you live there, too. Never forget that your readers will judge your products and services through your content.

Google just made a rare post to their Webmaster Central Blog. You can check it out here.

And, to ensure that the quality of everything you publish would pass Google muster as described above, here are some observations of our own:

What makes one piece of content superior to another today, especially when it comes to getting found online? According to Google, it’s nothing more or less than the quality that compels a reader to bookmark it, share it or recommend it. This means that social signals come into play to a great degree, as in social media.

Here are the questions you need to ask about everything you present to customers and prospects to ensure that your offerings are not only easy to find, but presented in the right context and contain the earmarks of authority they deserve. Note that this is what we at WriteAngle do routinely on your behalf:

1. What makes the information you’re presenting trustworthy and why would a reader recognize it as such?

2. What makes you confident that the material reflects expertise in the subject matter? Put another way, why are you confident that it would not be dismissed as shallow or thinly-veiled promotional fluff?

3. Again, in the case of website content, would you be comfortable sharing confidential information (contact, credit card, etc.)?

4. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

5. What have you done to differentiate your content from that associated with “content farms” (e.g., are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines)?

6. Does the material provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?

7. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

8. Why do you assume your existing customers would feel compelled to share it with their peers and associates?

These questions are our interpretations of the points Google raises in its post. We point them out because they substantiate and reaffirm our insistence that your content be well-written and obtainable exclusively from you. Your content must be your content.

Note also that Google intends to make hundreds of search-engine improvements in 2011 — more reasons to plan for identifiers that make your content unique and high-quality. These should include social-sharing buttons to prompt users to pass it along.

The prestigious TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design) came into being 27 years ago but took two decades before it achieved its current prominence. TED began posting its videos online in 2006. Instantly, what was once an little-known gathering of elites found a worldwide audience/community of more than 100 million participants.

The move to an open-media channel enabled TED to grow in a way that would have been impossible any other way, according to conference producer June Cohen.

After releasing content for free, which flouted every precept of luxury-brand marketing, TED events began selling-out faster at a higher price. What began as an altruistic effort to spread ideas had the salubrious effect of rocket-fueling the business of the conference.

So how can you apply this approach to your business? You can start simply by enabling all of your content — videos, podcasts, audio, photographic, you-name-it –- to be embedded. This encourages rapid spread. Whatever you put on your website, be sure to put on a branded YouTube channel, embeddable players and downloads.

Four things to remember:

– Enable your customers and prospects to learn from you, no matter where they are and how they access information.

– Don’t be afraid of losing control. As a business, consider all the ways that enable others to build on your content and ideas.

– Mobile content, which means small screens, is critical today so you must consider it from the beginning. For example, use tight, closeup shots because they will be viewed on smartphones.

– Start Strong: Don’t dilute your content with introductions. Get straight to the meat.

– Appeal to viewer emotions and a sense of noble purpose. Give people something to share that can put them in good stead with their friends/associates and contacts.

No matter what business you’re in, if you have a website you’re in the publishing business, too. And you need to keep what you publish fresh and new. Maybe not on a daily basis, but often enough to attract the right visitors. Which is what fresh content does. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Update content continually. Stale websites get pushed down in searches. The ones whose pages feature fresh material, images, links and keywords zip upwards.

2. You can’t blog too frequently. Not only is it an automatic content refresher, it personalizes your brand with personal outreach to customers and prospects.

3. Link back to your own site. Good way to increase traffic is to add in a few links back to your own pages within the text of every new page you create. Descriptive keywords draw search-engines crawlers. It’s another reason why blogs drive (attract) traffic.

4. Use video and images. Because their volume is so small compared to the text that’s out there, they are especially attractive to search-engine spiders.

5. Constantly track and analyze. Alexa and Google Analytics are simple to use and deliver invaluable information about your search standings and web traffic. Best of all, they’re free. Use them.

Keep in mind it’s not about quantity but quality. You want to see a growing number of the right kind of people. What are you doing to grow the right traffic on your site?

It’s satisfying to see principles that we’ve touted for years enjoy more traction and visibility in today’s Sales 2.0 world. The concept of revenue-minded marketing is a prime example. A post today in a Marketo’s blog calls out the new focus on sales and marketing alignment intended to maximize each function’s specific skills and what they do best. In fact, the software vendor urges marketers to be more “revenue focused”. Amen, indeed.

The message to marketers? It’s never been enough to only be good at “messaging”. To be a sales-minded marketer, your content must be informed by sales-mindedness. Familiarity with the world your customers live in. Being conversant in their daily issues. At the very least, all terminology of campaigns and product materials must reflect the language of customers and prospects. Ditto for website copy, collateral, and anything else seen by customers, users and prospects.

Tools such as those available from vendors like Marketo and Eloqua among other things enable predicting future revenue based on present efforts. When investments in marketing generate revenue, and everyone can see and measure the cause-and-effect, you make course corrections faster. You can better allocate your budget. Added bonus: making your budget case for a bigger investment will not fall on deaf ears of management. And then you’re free to focus on even more revenue-minded marketing content.

Good marketing and branding have always been about creating word-of-mouth, stories, and legend. Today with word-of-mouth spread so quickly and easily it’s more powerful than ever. Companies with the marketing gene, like Apple, have elevated WOM to an art form. The trick is, there has to “there” there. Your brand’s underlying value proposition, especially in B2B marketing, has to consist of a product benefit greater than the sum of the product’s adoption cost plus its price. The bigger the delta, the more compelling the value proposition.

Still, just as every generation wants to believe that it invented sex, new marketers assume that a brand “identity” or brand promise is something you can go out and buy and put on like trendy shoes. They soon discover that their brand is not their shoes. It’s their feet. It’s not the belt, it’s the waistline. It’s not what you put on your head, it’s what’s inside.

A brand’s value proposition isn’t a pitch, it is whatever is most relevant and compelling to a buyer. Think of a brand as a product’s or a company’s character. It has to stand for something. Which means that it cannot stand for everything. If it tries to, it will stand for nothing. This is part of the reason why great, leading brands, not unlike great people, are rare. There’s a natural inclination of the heart to be liked. To be everybody’s everything so as not to offend or alienate anybody. Your brand must stand for something…or nothing at all. What does your brand stand for? How do you know? How you convey it?

Testing and measuring the content you put online is faster and easier than ever today.  And budget-friendlier.  Which headline will draw a bigger response?  Which approach will visitors prefer?  Which offer?  Which tone?  Here are 20 tips on how to perform basic A/B testing:

1.  Don’t test a page you already suspect is weak.  Test something you believe is doing a good job.  You may be surprised.

2.  Use an overlay page (one that shows up when a respondent does something) when the visitor chooses the leave an “offer” page.  The overlay should remind the visitor of something that will entice them not to leave and get them to think “What the hell, I’ll fill out the form”.

3.  Get up and stand away from your screen. Take a look at your page(s) from five or six feet away.  What jumps out?  What attracts the eye?

4.  Make the “Download Now” words big and clear.

5.  Use separate buttons for different demographics or different categories of customer.

6.  The word “enterprise” is stronger than “corporate”.  People don’t think of themselves as corporate.  They identify with working in an enterprise.  Don’t you?

7.  Begin your order forms on the page that first mentions them.  Don’t make visitors go somewhere else.

8.  Use images of people, not products.

9.  Test all images of people for positive responses.

10. Don’t spend money on testing.  There are plenty of free tools out there.

11.  If you hire a vendor, remember that the best ones will guarantee results.

12. Your test should run three weeks (15 business days).

13. Measure all ongoing traffic simultaneously.

14. Start by testing something small.  A page, a portion of a page, a few lines, a small campaign.

15. Seek to drive down your cost-per-visitor and your cost-per-conversion.

16. Determine your most important metrics as dictated by your business model, business plan, sales and marketing objectives.  Your particular business mission.

17. Test pages that are politically “neutral”, at least at first, before you test your boss’s pet page to show how lame it actually is.

18. Work closely with your IT people.  Make sure that something you set up to test doesn’t bring down your site or cause a sudden, prolonged downturn in traffic.  Make sure there is a quick fix at hand.

19. Test early and often.  Google does (and they’re pretty smart).

20. Test one or two things at a time.

What are you doing to ensure you’re content is the best it can be?

Nobody outside your company, except the analysts who follow you, wants to read about your product’s “success story”. What they want to read is a story about a customer, just like them, who had success. The fact that it was your product they had success with is incidental, not central, to the story.

Knowing this difference and how to craft a case study around it makes all the difference. If you want the case study you are paying good money to produce to have impact, be read, be referenced and shared, mention your product only in passing. Write about the customer’s experience: the problem, the hassles, getting the solution up and running and the happily-ever-after: how the solution solved the problem, cut costs and/or buffed revenue. In other words, write something that readers can identify and empathize with. Write to and for them. Anything less is prescription-free Ambien.