Archives

© 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.

No matter how well crafted your white paper, case study, or product brief may be, an uninspired headline will doom it to obscurity.  Not to mention squandering your time and money as a publisher.  Readers won’t waste their time on content that doesn’t compel them.  This means an inspiring, irresistible headline is Job One.

Good headlines do more than grab attention

Thinking like a headline writer at the outset is key to whether or not your content is ever read.  It’s essential to strike an emotional appeal tailored to your readers’ personal interests — theirs, not yours.  Great headlines get audiences to click through.  You’ve got one shot at stopping a reader in their tracks.  So make the most of your opportunity.

Subheads and graphics pull the reader through

Engaging your readers at each level of the story with crisp subheads is valuable for two reasons.  First, it helps you organize your material into easily digestible chunks.  Second, it enables the reader to better retain your message.
Clear, lively infographics highlight and underscore complex data for better reader comprehension. And they attract “skimmers” who need visual prompts before scrutinizing material.

Then tell them what you told them

Like a dominant chord in a blues song, readers want resolution.  So give it to them with a crisp summary statement that reiterates your earlier refrain.  After all, if you’ve gotten them this far they’re likely to investigate further.

How do you know the right readers are paying attention to your content?  If you’re in doubt, what are you doing about it? How do you define the difference between content that is adequate and stuff that’s a must-read? How are you ensuring that you publish more of the latter?

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.

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.