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There is no linear relationship between volume of outbound messages and the elusive thing that CEB terms “share of wallet”. Interaction that may seem reasonable and even informative to some buyers will be irksome to others. Takeaway: instead of hammering all prospects and customers alike with endless messages intended to get their attention, carefully consider if the content of your message promises value to your prospects’ research in your category — or just adds to their overload.

The trick is to know exactly what your existing buyers perceived in your value proposition that was consistent with their idea of value. This enables you to flavor future content with the most relevant, like-minded ideas. It’s reality-based marketing, not mythology.

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.

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.

“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?

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?

We love this description of outdated web-site content: “Archipelagos”. This should resonate with a lot of B2B marketing people.  Islands disconnected from larger land masses. If you’re like everybody else, you probably have some of your own. Call them orphans, legacies, or whatever, they amount to low-return assets begging to be re-purposed, updated, and/or overhauled. Or just trashed. They are not working as hard as they should — certainly not as hard as you. They need tending.

The operative phrase here is “low-return”. Content, after all, is an asset of value.  You want your visitors exposed to valuable, useful, high-return stuff on your web site. Everything should scream out to customers that you’re a hot company worthy of their attention and interest.  And nothing says “ordinary” faster than dated material. Or, worse, irrelevant content.  Ironically, very often a lot of these vintage pieces — case studies, podcasts, videos, white papers, et. al, — lend themselves quite well to spiffing up. The bones of a once-hot case study may well inspire a whole new generation of them. Same for videos or white papers. The key here is to stay current.  And to remember the three categories of B2B visitors: those who are in basic research mode, those who are narrowing the vendor selection and those who are on the verge of awarding a contract. Have relevant content at the ready for each stage and each state of mind.  And never forget that by the time people call you for a meeting, they’re probably 80% down the selection road already.  Something to think about.

How often do you clear the cobwebs on your site? What’s your process for ensuring your stuff is relevant to what your visitors are search for right now?

Phil Roybal, VP marketing at CollegeOnTrack (not a client), executed just about everything the right way on his web site, right out of the start-up blocks. As a form-and-content template for consideration by other raw start-ups, it’s as good as any we’ve seen. To us, it’s recommended viewing for early-stage companies in any category. CollegeOnTrack is a software package that simplifies the application process for jittery students and their anxious parents.  Roybal, a former marketing exec at Apple, understood the need to keep the story on the web site simple because simplicity is what his product is all about.  The demo video on the home page, for example, is a classic how-to explanation of the company and their offerings.  The rest of the site features relevant, sticky content dealing with issues that matter most to students juggling applications, essays and appraisals of this or that school.

While CollegeOnTrack can be justifiably proud of its life-simplifying software, as most parents of a college students past and present can attest, the focus of the site reflects the world as seen through the eyes of students, parents and counselors. In other words,  Roybal’s customers.  This outside-in perspective can be easily blurred during the content creation process.  CollegeOnTrack proves that this doesn’t have to be the case.  As far as his web traffic goes, Roybal admits that while it could always be better, conversions are tracking the plan.  “We had a great trade show this month and look forward to next month’s event,” he said.  Just as high school students and parents have been looking forward to seeing what’s in their snail-mailboxes lately.

What’s your method for ensuring your web content reflects the POV of the visitors you want to attract? How often do you refresh  site content? What’s your most recent rate of conversion and how is it trending?

We do a lot of work for IT security clients. And the numbers we hear numb the brain. Security researcher Ponemon Institute LLC, (not a client) says that almost nine out of ten U.S. companies have suffered at least one security breach.  Many don’t even know if or when they’ve been hit.  The cost to businesses of exposing data like Social Security and credit-card numbers climbed seven percent between 2010 and 2011 to an average of more than $7 million per incident, according to a study of victim companies.  The most expensive attack of 2010 cost an unidentified company $35.3 million, an increase of 15 percent from the costliest breach a year earlier.  It was so bad the name of the company remains confidential so as not to alarm customers. While government agencies must be notified, attacks on and losses by many large corporations are never publicly revealed.  Costs rise as more states pass laws requiring companies to disclose whenever customers’ personal information is exposed. As of 2011, 46 U.S. states passed such measures, with varying definitions of a breach, deadlines for notifying customers and punishments for failing to comply.  Still, the attacks and the cost of fending them off grow unabated. What’s going on here?

Happily for our clients, business is brisk. Still, one of them admits that the seemingly low return on corporate America’s security dollar is being seen with growing frustration and alarm at the board level.  “Companies who question their return on the millions of dollars they’ve invested in IT defenses have every right to be angry,” he said. Of course, our clients have a vested interest in encouraging the upgrade of aging defenses so easily overcome by cyber-criminals today.

We can’t help noticing the irony here. Computer security is a multi-billion industry employing some of the most brilliant technologists on the planet.  They labor hard to stay a step ahead of the bad guys who, just like terrorists, only have to be successful once, while techno-sleuths and defenders must succeed 100% of the time.  Yet, as found by Verizon and reported yesterday in Network World , in 97% of breaches last year, attackers used remarkably simple methods to break in.  In other words, many organizations are overlooking basic precautions even as their security systems grow more complex. In four out of five attacks on businesses last year, bad guys preyed on so-called victims of opportunity.  Like muggers who look for an unsuspecting or distracted target in crimes of opportunity, cyber-attackers scan for companies who may not be properly utilizing the defenses they have or whose passwords fail the tough-to-guess test.

To us in the business of marketing some truly amazing preventive technology, Verizon’s findings are a real eye-opener.  Here’s hoping they can open more corporate-security eyes as well.  The chain around the company’s digital assets is only as strong as the weakest link.  And the bad guys know how to find it.