Archives

In Part I of Write Angle’s blog on “How to Repurpose Your Case Studies”, we pointed out how to repackage standalone stories in new assets.

Today, let’s look at how we helped Pure Storage extend the reach of a strategic case study featuring North York General Hospital.

As we all know, attention spans are being collapsed by the overwhelming amount of information we’re asked to sift through daily. Recognizing this, it’s often helpful to produce a “case study lite” version of material that truncates long-form content into a more digestible format.

The perfect vehicle for doing so is the corporate blog. In the case of the North York General Hospital story, the content was repurposed as a Q&A titled “Achieving Better Patient Outcomes With All-Flash Storage“.

Recasting and condensing content from the original case study into a conversational “give and take” accomplishes several things. One, it provides time-constrained readers a glimpse into a vendor solution directly through the lens of the customer. Two, it broadens the reach of the story by serving as an additional mechanism for attracting net-new (in this case, healthcare-centric) site visitors. And three, it provides yet another opportunity to leverage the story via social media outlets.

The takeaway? Make your assets work hard across multiple dimensions for maximum impact.

Here at Write Angle, one of our long-held assertions is that technology marketers live in a publish-or-perish world.

Simply put, if you’re not producing thought leadership or educational content that can be repurposed on a regular basis, you can’t drive or shape industry dialog. And without a steady cadence of fresh assets that map to buyer personas at specific stages of the purchasing lifecycle, you’re stuck playing catch-up with competitors. Worst case, you run the risk of being rendered derivative, irrelevant or invisible.

Turns out that one of the most marketing-relevant solutions to what we jokingly refer to as “content interruptus” is the venerable (and often overlooked) content calendar, AKA editorial calendar.

If you’re like most clients, you have good intentions to develop one, but never get around to it. Even the more disciplined marketing departments that make the effort frequently fail to use it to best advantage. 

One of the challenges is how easy this tool is to ignore. Editorial calendars are just so 20th century, right? This is an unfortunate rap because the goal of attracting, converting and retaining customers makes a content calendar indispensable. It’s also ideally suited for modern tools associated with social media platforms. Think Kapost, Central Desktop and Contently, among many others out there today.

What it should do

Think of the content calendar as a GPS that maps all your content assets to your prospect “food chain” with guidance on how best to reach them in terms of timing and channels.
 
Say you’re making a blog post on a segment included in an eBook you just published. You may want to use multiple channels to re-purpose this material via email (auto-responder) or sites as varied as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Tagging the material (AKA meta data) with identifiers that label your target’s persona category (awareness, consideration or decision) helps you track the effectiveness of each asset. Same for SEO keywords and content type such as white papers, video or case studies.

Accountability is key. At the risk of stating the obvious, each asset should have a designated owner responsible for production and delivery. Your content calendar should also specify the asset channel: e.g. eBook, blog, buyer’s guide, solution brief, use cases, etc. And, since a calendar is a management tool, factor in workflow processes no matter how seemingly mundane: think proofreading, editing, legal review cycles. Equally important, honor deadlines for creating and publishing your assets. While slippages are a fact of life, don’t make them a habit. 
 

Setting it up

Here’s a 10-step approach to setting up an effective content calendar:

1. Content headline
2. Content type
3. Buyer persona
4. Call to action
5. Owner
6. Final review deadline
7. Publishing channel(s)
8. Publish date
9. Status
10. Metrics (page views, downloads, comments)

Refresh Your Calendar
 
It’s important to stay vigilant when updating your content calendar, especially if you generate one on a quarterly basis. Given the rapid rate of change in virtually every technology industry today, you don’t want to be caught flat-footed with dated material. Publishing yesterday’s news can seriously de-position an organization’s value proposition.

Like most entrepreneurs, our team’s concept of time is slightly warped.  Maybe it’s due to living a life of deadlines.  Or perhaps it’s the relentless immersion in so many different avenues of technology on behalf of our clients.  Being perpetually busy makes time fly.  So it’s hard to believe that Write Angle has just completed its fourth year in business

And what a great ride it’s been so far.  We’ve had the good fortune to work with extraordinarily interesting clients across a broad spectrum of technologies.  From our first gig with Endplay, a leading provider of content management, engagement and monetization solutions to our multi-year relationship with Paxata, a red-hot provider of adaptive data preparation solutions, we’ve benefited from a steady stream of word-of-mouth referrals.  To our way of thinking, that’s the ultimate compliment of our body of work.

Of course, things don’t happen in a vacuum.  Kudos are due to some very influential and talented people in our industry.  And that includes a shout out to Tom Hogan and Carol Broadbent at Crowded Ocean who have been kind enough to refer us to amazing clients like Sumo Logic and the Exploratorium.  A shout-out, too, to Cari Jaquet who has engaged Write Angle not once but twice as VP of Marketing with SenSage and Paxata.

So what are Write Angle clients looking for help with?  It runs the gamut.  We are developing everything from case studies to white papers, ghost written thought leadership pieces, solution briefs, web copy, blogs, data sheets and press releases.

What makes life interesting is the variety of projects, clients and technologies we tackle.  From venture-funded startups like Cloudscaling (developer of OpenStack-powered hybrid clouds and recently acquired by EMC) to stalwarts like McAfee, we have to stay current on the blinding rate of change impacting multiple industries.  One day we may be knocking out a detailed data sheet on BYOX solutions.  And the next day we’re editing an eBook providing CEOs with guidance on corporate transformation.

When it comes to our work, we prefer to let our clients do the talking:

“Finding versatile writers that deliver compelling white papers, informative case studies and web copy that hits the mark is hard to find–if not impossible–in this market. We’ve come to rely on Write Angle–and Peter Davé’s quality, speed and smarts–to work with our most demanding startup clients.” [Tom Hogan, managing partner with Crowded Ocean]

“A good editor can make a world of difference in improving the clarity, organization and impact of an eBook. I was fortunate to work with Peter Davé who did a superb job of tightening the narrative, reordering content and strengthening the voice of my new eBook, The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Transformation and Renewal. His writing skills and editorial direction are second to none.” [Beatriz Infante, CEO and Managing Member, BusinessExcelleration]

“Finding great writers who can produce compelling white papers, case studies, web content and solutions briefs – especially for complex technology like machine data analytics – is always a challenge. Fortunately, we engaged Write Angle’s content creation services. And the results have been stellar.” [Puneet Pandit, CEO, Glassbeam]

And finally:

“We engaged Write Angle and Peter Davé to develop a wide range of assets ranging from an extensive array of new web copy to highly strategic use cases. Write Angle proved to be integral to our marketing communications efforts that played a key role in influencing our recent acquisition by EMC. Peter’s writing style is energetic and engaging. Equally important, his storytelling skills adeptly deliver technical depth while making a strong business case. Peter has my highest recommendation as a top notch writing resource.” [Teri Elniski, VP of  Marketing, CloudScaling].

Thanks to all for making our first four years a success.  We’re looking forward to our next chapter.

© Mhristov

If you market and sell to IT buyers or do marketing and PR for an IT brand, you should know about Spiceworks.

Why? It’s an online community of two-million information-technology professionals who share views on their industry, technology and vendors just like you. Think of it as the Yammer, Yelp or TripAdvisor for the IT crowd. In other words, what HR.com and GlassDoor have become for the human-resources profession, Spiceworks is for IT.

Think “product reviews” in this context and you realize the implications for IT marketing and public relations.  According to Paul Gillin, who visited the site’s reviews section recently, it’s not a pretty picture. Few vendors draw raves. And few brands bother to weigh-in or even know about it. How ironic that such a resource, whose existence owes to technology, exists in a blind-spot for so many technology marketers.

The same crowdsource forces at work in today’s consumer markets like Amazon Reviews are coming into their own in the B2B world, too. Industrial brands late to this party are paying the price in missed opportunities. Our rule of thumb is simple: whenever there is a discussion underway online about your company or product, you need to be in the middle of it. Not to dominate the conversation but to share your point of view — and understand the issues being raised. It’s just good business.

Truth be told, as ubiquitous and commonplace as social media is today it remains a question mark in B2B C-suites and boardrooms. Even in the face of the U.S. government’s approbation of crowd-sourced reviews (see saferproducts.gov). In Gillin’s view, there‘s validity in what many senior managers believe about manipulation of online reviews and polls.  But this is irrelevant. The genie is out of the bottle. Ongoing engagement with customers and commentators online, is now currency of the B2B realm.

How does your brand engage with online opinion-sharing? Do you have a “crisis” plan or have one in the works?  What’s been your experience?

“Content” is a perishable.  Blame those pesky algorithms.

We live in content-marketing world. And at Write Angle we counsel clients to be wary. Why? Because marketers live in a part of this world characterized by the cat-and-mouse of search practitioners vs.search algorithms — and the creative tension it causes between SEO gurus and content writers. Just throwing “content” out there isn’t enough. It has to be be right stuff at the right time.  And it must stay fresh.

The surefire way to prosper in this world is to create and publish material that earns you a consistent place in search rankings. Today, this means the top three-to-five.  Easy to say, tough to do.  And this is where we come in because organic search is the baseline tactic for the written content of marketing campaigns.

New research from Chitika , according to Danny Flamberg of Booster Rocket, based on 300 million search impressions last May, “indicates that winning and losing at natural search is clear; you either win big or die quickly. If you don’t place among the top 3–5 positions on the search engine results page you get none of the benefits of your investment. It’s win big or go home”. (Download the complete report here.)

Boiling down the findings: you get 33% of the traffic if Google ranks you number one. Come in second and you get about half of that. Third place earns you about half again (11%). This, BTW, is the response rate of old-time direct mail!

In other words, if you don’t make page one (92% of all traffic) the maximum access you can hope to achieve is about 8% of  total search-driven traffic.

“For most marketers, rankings drive traffic; that’s the payoff,” Flamberg says. “There’s not much value in bragging rights to a position that doesn’t pay off in site traffic…it doesn’t pay to be number two.”

As content-driven rankings are key to brand awareness and lead generation, you need to put your brand’s best foot forward with refreshed content — the kind that’s regularly adjusted to changing algorithms.

Is your content driving the traffic you want? Do you keep it fresh?  Is it the right stuff at the right time?

© Photoexplo…

No matter how you define “big data”, the market category is scorching hot.  How hot?  Accel Partners has just launched a new $100 million fund dedicated to funding so-called big data companies.

With its “Big Data Fund 2”, Accel is betting a hefty sum on organizations developing big data solutions.  Their rationale for another infusion of capital in this space?   Quoting Shlomo Kramer, CEO of Imperva and a new advisor to Accel’s big data group, “The enterprise world has already embraced the concept of Big Data and is starting to leverage insights derived from data to solve security and other business problems in ways previously unthinkable.”

Having written extensively about Big Data on behalf of clients including Sumo Logic and Glassbeam,  it’s clear to us at Write Angle that companies vying for market leadership will have a harder and harder time differentiating themselves.  Consider the findings of CB Insights who is tracking this space closely.  According to their big data report, funding for these companies rocketed from 55 deals in 2008 to 164 in 2012.  Over a five-year span, the total sits at 523 deals.

Does this signal market saturation?  Too early to tell, probably. But the takeaway is unmistakable. The dogfight in the big data space will create a deafening amount of noise. And the companies with the best chance of survival will be those that can articulate a compelling, well-differentiated and highly defensible value proposition that will stand the test of time.  And that means content creation efforts needed to tell a compelling story, one with rock-solid business use cases, are nothing less than essential.

© 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?

So now that you’ve written that white paper, what do you do with it — do you put it up on your site and make it immediately available with one click?  Or do you put it behind a wall (AKA “gate”) and ask for the requester’s contact information?  “Gated” or walled-off content asks for various levels of contact information from the requester. It enables you to build a database. But does this hinder your efforts to build a large audience quickly?  Turns out there are no clear-cut rules for free-form vs. gated.  You’ll have to decide the relative merits of the tradeoff.  To our way of thinking, it boils down to this:  if you’re an early stage outfit, you likely want to build an audience. This means you want to make your content easily available.  Anything that slows down the acquisition of your material impedes this process.  If, on the other hand, you’re at the point in your audience volume where you want to start filtering out the tire-kickers and place greater focus on sales-ready leads, a gate that extracts some profile or contact information is appropriate.

Still, we concur with Dayna Rothmanof marketing software developer Marketo, who says that you have to formulate your own policy. “You have to find your own balance to meet your own audience and lead goals”.  This is why Write Angle  advises against putting your early-stage content in front of a gate.  In the early going, it’s more important to have a wide funnel.   As the brand is being built, then you can start making decisions about adding the filters.  If you need a rule, consider the one offered by CMO.com:  If you are out to position your company or brand as a thought leader, offering insights into the issues and challenges of the day, then free-form (un-gated) is the way to go. If you are more interested in driving leads to conversion quickly, then gating the content makes more sense.

1. Trying to sell instead of tell.
The focus on Steve Jobs this past week reminded us of how fanatical the guy is about good, clean, corporate writing, the kind that never “sells” technology.  Instead, he insists on the kind that tells how the product would help the reader reach a goal.  Emphasis on the reader. And the reader’s goal or problem.

2. Complicating the message.
Jobs has a one-sentence description — or vision — for every product he has ever introduced.  Incredibly, every single piece of written content, in all marketing material, revolves around this simple sentence.  Study after study shows that people think in “chunks” and remember no more than three or four characteristics of anything.  That’s why the best content contains no more than three, core leave-behinds.  Your reader is busier and more easily distracted than ever. Make it easy on them.  Think about the most effective content you’ve read.  Chances are, the writer kept it pretty simple.  It’s why you remember it.  After all, no less a mind than DaVinci said that simplicity was the ultimate sophistication.

3. Failing to stay on message.
Begin with a clear expression — the single sentence — of what your content must convey.  Then think of it in three parts and sketch an outline of the “sum” of the parts: What? So what? And now what?  In other words, consistent with the core sentence, describe the problem being experienced by the customer/reader, (2) all the dimensions of why this is a significant issue at this moment and (3) what needs to happen for resolution of the issue (solution to the problem).

4.  Ignoring (boring) the reader.
If you’re not energized to the point of passion about your subject matter, don’t expect your reader to take up the slack.   Look at what you’re writing through the reader’s eyes. To what would you favorably respond?  Studies show that readers favor a graphic presentation of complex data, thus the popularity and more frequent use of infographics. What would make you keep reading? In your experience, which styles of content convey the most information most forcefully and memorably? Most important, what would make you want to know more about what the vendor has to say about this issue and what they have in the way of solutions?

What does your team do to optimize the readability and simplicity of your written content — including those white papers?  BTW, for an animated video of Jobs’ career, check this out: /08/26/ste…

This just in from the research folks at HubSpot: the most valuable form of marketing content today is, in the opinion of marketers (who are measured by the quality of their content as never before), their blog.

And it’s true for B2B and B2C marketing.  Respondents in B2B marketing who were asked to rank various forms of content for value to their marketing objectives named blogs number one (39%), followed closely by webinars and virtual events (38%), white papers (31%), videos (23%), data-driven research reports (20%), user-created content (17%), white papers sponsored by vendors (10%) and podcasts (6%).

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the in-bound marketing world of Web 2.0.  Publishing a business blog offers the chance for marketers to keep content fresh, topical, personal and relevant the way no other form of content can.  And more is better, the way no other form can be.  The fresher and more frequent your online content, the greater your chances of being found online.

What form of content is most valuable to achieving your marketing objectives?  Is your blog as active as you suspect it should be? How do you stack up competitively in terms of posting?  What do your customers tell you?