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© Benjamin Haas

As writers of content for marketing, we at Write Angle work for companies of all stripe from nascent start-ups to large publicly-held brands. How to best measure the effectiveness of this or that content invariably comes up along the way and there’s never a shortage of opinions on how to do it. Which is the most important metric — click-through, volume of readers, new site visitors, orders, revenue?  We put this question to the Linked In community recently, asking  1) what measurement methodologies do you find to be the most effective and 2) how do you rank order your content assets from most to least effective and why?

We were prompted by Contently who passed along the work by Ascend2 and Research Partners: http://contently.com/strategist/2015/04/27/the-most-effective-and-difficult-types-content-marketing-in-one-chart/ Their research examines the relative effectiveness of articles/case studies, videos, infographics, research/white papers, webinars/online events, eNewsletters, photos/illustration and news releases.

We would now like to know what you think of these findings. Yes, it’s using an awfully broad approach to determining meaningful findings. Still it raises some fundamental questions about content categories and their respective “effectiveness”, presumably in triggering new site visitors, generating new sales leads, increasing conversion rates and driving revenue.

How do do you measure the value of the content your team creates?

© Iqoncept

How would you like to boost the perception of your B2B brand as one of your industry’s thought leaders, grow your blog readership over 2000% and develop relationships with the who’s-who of your business — all in less than a year?

This is exactly what Drillinginfo (DI) did. Today, DI, a SaaS vendor serving a sector not exactly synonymous with trendy social media, is positioned as a premier source of information in the oil and gas industry. And its forays into social media began only last September.

It’s been a given that a B2B brand’s social efforts are a long-term slog, so DI’s results merit a closer look. In fact, this report suggests that the company’s approach amounts to a study in best-practices that might be replicated in any industry, especially when it comes to blogging. To our way of thinking, these practical steps are actionable for any B2B blog:

1. Get your employees to contribute ideas and content.
2. Set an editorial calendar — don’t assign topics, assign people and let them write about industry-relevant subjects that they’re interested in.
3. Involve them in brainstorming topics and angles relevant to your products and customers.
4. Involve your contributors so they feel ownership. Teach them “blog-consciousess” by explaining what blog-friendly writing and content are all about.
5. Push content out to your email lists and social accounts (Linked In, FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).
6. In your email to blog subscribers, include the full blog post, but include a custom call-to-action for readers to go to your website and make comments.
7. Compile interest-groups on Linked In (and elsewhere) of relevance to your industry and post your content there. Caveat: be absolutely certain that what you’re sharing is of genuinely useful value. If it isn’t, it’s spam.
8. Find out who the influencers are in your industry and publish your own Top 20, 50 or 100 list(s).
9. Set a big goal for your blog: Aspire to thought leadership.

What are you doing to promote your blog?

© Sailorman 2

1.  Shove a datasheet into a prospect’s face right after you introduce yourself.

When a qualified prospect on a fact-finding mission enters your tradeshow booth, you introduce yourself and inquire about their business and their familiarity with you (read: you qualify them). What you do not do is dive right into a spec-sheet monologue. It’s the same with content. Just as your marketing material should be calibrated (and designated) according to the prospect’s stage-of-purchase, it must be sequenced accordingly.  In the same way, the best “family” of content begins at the primary level and gradually moves up to more advanced material.  Caveat: don’t always assume that a relatively well informed prospect won’t find use for introductory materials. Savvy shoppers will contrast and compare competitors every step of the way and cross-check competing claims. Hint: vendors showing the most proof-points with the most relevance to the reader usually win.

2.  Emphasize your features and benefits rather than their problems and issues.

A variant of #1 above, it’s no secret that content with user themes earn the most favor with users. But you must go further. Don’t talk about your offering per se so much as the solution it represents to problems vexing the customer. There are nuances to being perceived by a customer as “one of us”, rather than being seen as just another vendor.  You want them to receive you as a partner rather than a supplier. Your content will either validate one perception, or the other.

3.  Assume they believe you have no competition

If you think this is a no-brainer, then why is so much vapid marketing content floating around? The first step in breaking away from the pack is to acknowledge that it’s there. Customers understand you only in terms that they’ve already come to understand–by virtue of what they’ve learned and continue to find out about alternative offerings.  Besides, if you’re the only solution, how can a viable market exist? The worst impression you can create is that you don’t know your competitors as well as your prospects do.

4.  Presume everything you slap a logo on makes it inherently “must-see TV”

Happens all the time to product managers who look at a user through the lens of their product when they should be looking at their product through the eyes of the user. It’s no coincidence that so many marketers of this persuasion tend to be hyper-competitive, obsessing on how the competition is marketing, what it’s saying, doing and achieving. Make your customers’ issues your issues and your content will naturally reflect a customer-centered POV.

5.  Believe that everything is as good, or as bad, as Sales says it is.

Snarky, maybe, but this old saying has been around too long to dismiss it out of hand. Your sales force is inherently focused on the deals and crises of the moment. This means perceptions can become quickly and easily distorted in the heat of the transaction process. It’s only human to project what we want to see and hear from our prospects and customers, rather than take a breath, stand back and understand a situation for what it really is. Look at large pattern of data points, not just the ones you’re infatuated with, or most alarmed by, at any moment. Which, after all, is fundamental to the marketing mission and the marketing content it depends on.

So what are your content-marketing practices?  How do you ensure a customer-and-market focus?

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.

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.