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Archive for July, 2012

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Content Creators

 


 

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.

The Facts About FAQs

 

“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?

What makes a web site cool?

 

John Coltrane portrait by Anonymous - Graphics by Jon Phillips. From OCAL 0.18 release.

John Coltrane.  Way cool.

 

Write Angle is a firm believer that B2B marketers can learn from their B2C colleagues when it comes to crafting cool(er) web sites.  So we’re pleased to see that HubSpot’s recognition of what makes a web site cool, or how a site gets form and function right, is so pertinent and relevant to B2B purposes.

Our point?  Write Angle recently produced a good portion of the content for the web sites of security vendors RedSeal and Vidder, and Sumo Logic, an analytics solution for big data.  These sites share key aspects of form and function — with each other and with the B2C sites praised by HubSpot.  Each has an aesthetically pleasing appearance and delivers a useful customer experience.  Users are engaged without being distracted, navigation is straightforward and each call-to-action is simple and clear.

We’re not saying that all consumer web designers are more highly evolved.  We’re just reminding B2B marketers who oversee or wield influence on their sites that there’s no excuse for a web presence that isn’t everything that it should be.  You don’t have to mimic Patagonia, Ford , Sony or Apple, or any of the sites that won love from Hubspot, but you could do worse than follow their lead when it comes to how to get the right action from the right visitors. Just ask RedSeal, Sumo Logic or Vidder.   The prime guideline is to give your visitors the same experience they would have if they’d dropped in on you in person. Be simple, clear and direct.

So how do you ensure that your site is getting form and function right? Are you as simple, clear and direct online as you are in person?