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It’s an interesting question we were asked to address in developing a recent white paper on behalf of our client AppSense .

While first-generation solutions to the BYOD problem have focused on locking down personal and corporate-owned devices, it’s become increasingly clear that IT departments have been mostly unprepared for the explosion of mobile computing and the avalanche of apps coinciding with the mobile revolution.

Recent studies estimate that 200 million workers are using mobile apps for business today. This strongly suggests that the consumer mobile experience has paved the way for the mobile workforce not only to expect, but demand access to data and apps from anywhere.

What does this all mean in the grand scheme of things?  Forward-looking organizations are moving from a lock-down approach to providing users access to apps and data they demand and require, anytime and anywhere.

AppSense dubs this new approach “BYOX” –  providing security and control anywhere they’re needed, regardless of device, without adversely affecting the user experience.

Check out our “nine big ideas” that will be instrumental in driving the next generation of mobility management solutions.

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.

© 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.

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.

It’s been almost ten years since our partner organization, Chasm Group, crafted the message (content) handbook for Citrix.

As a so-called living document the handbook has been through a number of revisions during this time, most often during  launches of major strategic initiatives. But its form and purpose remain the same: to help everyone associated with the brand clearly understand and consistently articulate who the company is, what it is they do and the value this delivers to customers.

Structure of the Citrix messaging bible is classic. It’s a useful model for many brands. It begins with a simple overview and setting of the context in a crisp executive-summary format.  In two pages, it describes what’s happening to the company message, including a very brief recapitulation of what’s gone before, and what’s taking place now–and why this is important.  Two sections that follow explain the basic messaging principles and the brand values, or promises implied by the product offerings.  The remainder of the handbook amounts to a detailed guide within the guide: it explains how to put to the message to work in live situations with customers and prospects, including real case examples and specific use-case benefits.  These tools include everything from the elevator pitch for each product through the detailed product benefits right up to what must be eliminated from current messaging and customer conversations.

In the same vein, our client McAfee carefully fortifies its messaging guides with a style-guide plus a yearly writers workshop that presents “how-to” guidelines and reminders about the form and spirit of McAfee content.  Here, content creators from one end of the company to the other are reminded that over-promising or breaking faith with the brand is a slippery slope. Protection of the brand, what it is and is not, should always be the primary mission of the content creator.

While a messaging handbook should not be confused with a style guide, the objectives of these workhorse documents share much in common.  They encourage and promote consistency of the brand.  They are key tools in amplifying and strengthening all company messages and marketing content.  They enable creation of the fingerprint or ID of the company.  No mystery why you rarely hear the complaint that “our message is too confused” or “We’re just not getting our message across” from organizations that make the effort to formalize such guidelines and insist on adherence to them.

How do you ensure content efficacy and consistency? How does your team work to encourage fidelity to your brand?  What else can you be doing?

On the heels of Walter Isaacson’s officially approved bio of Steve Jobs comes Adam Lashinsky’s unauthorized take on Apple — including the unsettling extremes to which the company goes to keep a lid product announcements.

While Apple has always been a great role model for product marketers, the lessons proffered here should have come with a disclaimer. Something to the effect that “Your results may vary because Steve doesn’t run your outfit”.

Still, the way we see it, the spirit of these lessons is practical to creation of marketing content. No disclaimers necessary.  You can apply them immediately.

Apple is, and always has been, all about the way it dramatizes and communicates its brand. Specifically, the engaging craftsmanship of the content it presents to the marketplace in everything from its TV commercials to its product packaging. We can all take lessons:

1. Great content comes first. Long before the lines form outside its stores and well after, Apple floods the zone with its message. And study after study shows conclusive evidence that in today’s Web 2.0 world, where the buying process begins with search, those brands with superior content published most frequently are the first found and the most followed. Content drives interest, conversions, leads and financial success.

2. Publish and promote. The fact that you don’t have the budget for TV on Oscar night or the NCAA Tournament should not prevent you from creating content tailored to the interests and aspirations of your buyer.  Content that you make easily accessible and widely visible. Toward this end, make it standard procedure to re-purpose everything you generate: turn customer stories into press releases, competitive analyses into guest-articles (or blog posts) that describe industry trends, application notes into case studies.  Make all of it social on the sites where they share professional tips with peers and learn about best practices. Understand how you can make your solutions more relevant to what’s trending in your buyer’s communities.

3. Telling trumps selling. Too much marketing content screams “You gotta get this!” when it should inspire “This, I must have.” Just as the most successful B2B salespeople are seen as problem-solvers, make your content resonate with the kinds of issues and questions that beset your customers — real users.  People want to be informed, educated and engaged, not sold to. There is a fine line here but it’s distinct.  Assuming a third-party POV and advocating on your buyer’s behalf puts you in the right frame of mind. Avoid implying that you have all the answers, just the eagerness to look for them.

4.  One company, one voice. Everything you create should look and sound like it came from no other brand but yours.  In a me-too, look-alike online world of generic templates and “replicants”, strive to stand out by being out-standing.  You might fall short of “insanely great” but you can and should establish a tone that’s yours, based on the problem you solve and the way only you can solve it.  Apple mastered this technique early on and elevated it to a high art form in recent years. The “whole” of great marketing content always exceeds the sum of its parts.

5. People don’t read white papers and case studies. They read what interests them.  Strive to create the kind of content you want to see from your own vendors.  You’re writing to someone, not at them.  Just as a personal letter (remember those?) will always be opened first, so too is content that’s made more personal through examples of real-world applications.

6. Sometimes, less is more. Apple’s reputation for rejecting proposals for new products is a good model for all marketing initiatives, including new product material, literature and collateral.  The first question to ask is if this new idea can be integrated into an existing document or web page to make them more compelling and valuable.

7. Value expertise. Apple hires the best in their fields then laser-focuses them on their assigned tasks.  Third-party writing services create content for a living.  They have to do a better job.

8. Own your message. Crafting, controlling and repeating the message is “classic Apple”, Lashinsky says.  There’s a B2B PR lesson here.

9. Calculate the worth of the first impression you want to make. While we won’t pretend that Apple’s “spending whatever it takes” is consistent with your marketing budget realities, don’t lose sight of another reality: that your content is the first impression you make on prospective customers.  Apple hasn’t always had its Fort Knox-like resources. Each of its very first computers contained, at great cost to the company, added weight to make them seem more substantial. Whatever it is, if it bears your logo it becomes who you are. How important is it to your shareholders for their company to make a good impression on an important prospect?

10. Be known for “remarkable” content. Jobs’ boast of “insanely great” was, of course, aspirational but so is a lot of Web 2.0 parlance.  The lesson here: if you want more leads of higher quality you must attract more visitors who fit a target profile that will remain dynamic.  In other words: a moving target.  This target is attracted by content created to be compelling, engaging and always relevant.

New study on web sites reveals what engages and retains the visitors you want

Results of a study on web sites made recently by an independent group on behalf of Facebook are now in — and they re-confirm what we preach repeatedly here: that sites having content which visitors can most easily identify with, and relate to on a personal level, are the most effective in engaging those visitors, holding their attention, achieving their recall and motivating them to return.

In other words, the mission we all want our sites to accomplish.

We’re delighted that these findings are so consistent with our own religious belief that marketing content of all kinds, online or off, must speak clearly and directly to the real-world issues of customer problems, ambitions and aspirations.  And it must be carefully framed in customer terminology–their vernacular, not yours–spotlighting the problems and challenges that real customers grapple with in their world every day.  This means taking your content a step beyond product descriptions, case studies, whitepapers and technical briefs that dissect the problems besetting the kind of customers you’re pursuing — and letting buyers describe exactly how your offering delivered real, measurable solutions in the circumstances your visitors (readers) can easily identify with.  The more personal and identifiable your content is, the more engaging and harder working your site can be.

In an era of incredible info overload, AKA “big data”, it’s encouraging to see research findings confirm that some content really does find its way into human memory.  The caveat: to know all you must about whom you’re targeting to the point that the topics you select and the way you present them are memorable. Another word for personal.

Are you satisfied with your site analytics and metrics today?  Your conversion rate?  How do you keep your content consistent with customer preferences and interest?  How can you make it more personal?

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 penning one word of marketing material.  A half-century later, we can’t argue.

The time-honored approach paid off again this week in the splashy debut of our client Sumo Logic, a next-generation log management and analytics service competing in the red hot Big Data revolution.  What we generated on their behalf, starting from scratch, amounted to a full menu of short- and long-form content, from web copy to FAQs, datasheets, use cases, case studies and whitepapers.

Sumo Logic made its directive crystal clear: develop compelling content that drives web traffic and craft a story that positions the company as highly differentiated, innovative and above all else, relevant and believable.   To the client’s credit, they demanded high-value content that stands up to the pushing, shoving and “prove it” probes from devil’s advocates: customers, media and analysts alike.

So what’s the key lesson learned? It begins with gathering as much relevant secondary and background material as possible.  Then comes a layer of deep sourcing sessions or interviews with all the key people. Kudos to our client for their enthusiastic collaboration providing direct and extensive access to the CEO, CTO, co-founder and director of biz dev, and the executive sales liaison. It’s here where we extract the primary material.  In these sessions we want to come away with the “ore” that can be processed into high-grade ingots:  the specific, real-world examples of customer struggles and challenges.  We probe for as many viable use-cases as possible.

What we’ve learned over the years is that the stronger the reader identification with these use cases, the deeper the impression and the more compelling the read. Only when we’ve extracted all relevant details do we prepare a tight outline as the storyboard or blueprint of the final product. Each piece — web pages, case studies, whitepapers and more — is a specific chapter in the company story.

The Sumo Logic intro reminded us, again, how perspiration trumps inspiration when it comes to crafting really great marketing content. Content drives marketing and sales today as in no other time.  And somewhere, Jerry D. is smiling.

What’s your content-development process?  How do your mobilize for intros and product launches?

The good folks over at Marketo published some stunning numbers this week that should be a wake-up call for anybody running marketing today.  Boiled down, the findings revealed that most marketing leaders have little or no confidence in their ability to drive revenue. Nine out of ten senior marketers surveyed “do not feel confident in their ability to impact the sales forecast of their programs”.  And 20 percent of them don’t measure what they do at all.

Isn’t driving sales one of the fundamental purposes of the marketing function? There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for closing deals and making the quarterly numbers.  But this much is known for certain about today’s in-bound marketing world: those companies who keep their web site content fresher and publish it more frequently draw the most sales-validated leads.  They consistently realize the highest conversion rates and apply measurement tools to clearly demonstrate the results of programs that contribute to bottom line revenue.  Can’t blame them.

Yes, Marketo is in the business of measurement software, but the connection of quality traffic volume to SEO rankings is driven by nothing more or less than the content sought by customers constantly on the lookout for fresh information relative to their specific needs.  Recognizing these needs and publishing relevant and engaging content is what separates the “10-percenters” who are successfully driving revenue generation from the other 90 percent who aren’t.  Those in the tip-of-the-pyramid ten percent club have figured out the correlation between publishing engaging content with regularity and making it count on the bottom line.

Are you in the 10-percent? What are you doing to stay there, or get there?  How do you keep your marketing content fresh and relevant?

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?