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Case studies, white papers, solutions briefs, web content and blogging aren’t ends in themselves but the means to productive ends: more site visits, inquiries, trials, orders and revenue.  To help prepare you for the new year,  we’ve compiled a Top Ten list of representative tips for results-driven writing that we published here in 2011.  We hope they can contribute to your marketing mission as much they have stood the test of time in our own practice.  And here’s to a happy, prosperous New Year from Write Angle!

1.  More site traffic might make you feel good, but upping the number of visitors who actually make decisions about purchases is the metric the CEO will look for.  Here are five ways to make web content attract the right visitors to your site.

2.  There are a lot of wrong ways to produce content and the snake oil of SEO is more widespread than ever today. Beware. Here are some guidelines intended to help you avoid the three biggest mistakes in content marketing.

3.  If your case studies aren’t lead generators, is the time you’re taking to produce them really worth it?  Make the most of your time by applying these three things that make your case studies drive quality leads.

4.  Ninjas, gurus and wizards belong in video games, not on your content team.  The Web site metrics your content must drive are achievable by regular folks doing the right things.

5.  Making the most of your resources will be no less important in the coming year, if not more so. To create quality content on time and on budget, it’s incumbent upon the internal team to know how to get the most out of your writing consultants.

6.  “Ready, fire, aim” has never been a winning sequence when it comes to marketing and selling.  Carefully consider and answer our five questions to ask BEFORE embarking on a content-creation effort.

7.  Too many marketers undertake a writing project with an objective of getting it approved rather than making it effective. The objective of any content is to be consumed.  It must be read and passed along.  At Write Angle, we call it market-alism: how to write copy that customers want to read.

8.  It’s essential to see the world through customers’ eyes and to not look at customers through the lens of your offerings. Here’s an insider’s guide to outside-in writing.

9.  You want readers to heed your calls to action. To do so, those readers must relate to the story you tell. So it’s no mystery that citing examples that speak to customers makes your content hard to ignore.

10. McAfee, a brand that aims to protect itself as zealously as it strives to safeguard its customers’ digital assets, shares our views on why guarding the brand is Job One for technology writers.

What are your New Year’s resolutions on improving your marketing content?  What did you learn in 2011 that you intend to practice in 2012?

Our flagship client McAfee invited us to participate in an exclusive writing workshop yesterday designed to better communicate the company’s brand promise. The practical tips and guidelines imparted during this exceptional session inform good writing for any technology brand.

When it comes to effective brand communication, McAfee gets it.  And it’s gratifying  to learn that we, as a writing service, share the same philosophy when it comes to creating content that engages readers and gets them to take action.

It begins with the “brand”, which means that it all starts with an understanding that your first responsibility as a content-generator is fidelity to the brand you’re writing about. To stay true to whatever it is that your client’s brand is promising to its buyers is your first obligation. To bend the rules is to break that faith. To over-promise and under-deliver is the death knell for any brand, all the more if you compete in a technology category where your product’s performance is so important.  As the chief steward or keeper of the brand promise, the writer has nothing less than a fiduciary responsibility to keep asking the right questions designed to keep the content honest – and by extension, trustworthy.  This may not always make you a favorite in product-management quarters, but anything less does a disservice to the brand over the long haul.

As it often turns out, it’s the folks inside the company who inadvertently put the bending pressure on the content they’re trying to create for this or that project. They want to stretch the truth. They want to make bolder claims. They want to disparage the competition.  They want to do those things that put the brand promise at risk. Quality control in these instances has multiple meanings and it’s the writers who must wear the QC mantle. It’s not about just ensuring readability and correct grammar, but strict fidelity to the voice of the brand.  At Write Angle, we “QC” the content by commencing every project with a set of questions that begin by simply asking for the project’s primary purpose and conclude with a request for the three, key takeaways the project team wants to imprint on their reader.  For what it’s worth, it’s all pretty consistent with the McAfee approach.  How does your process compare?

• What’s the thesis of the document being considered and why should the reader care? State why this is topical at the moment and give an example.
• Describe the competitive environment.  Specify the trends influencing buyers. Describe a few user problems (the more compelling the better) that set the stage for our offering(s).
• What core positioning statement do we want woven throughout the copy and how can we make it as relevant as possible to the reader?
• What do we need to say about our technology to clearly mark competitive advantage and its place at the cutting edge of the category?
• How can we substantiate our claims, e.g., where’s the beef of verifiable metrics?
• What other prestige brands are involved with us as allies and partners?
• What are the three absolute, gotta-have impressions we want to leave on the reader?



It’s a given that domain expertise is required to create content that’s technically accurate. What makes the content compelling and gets readers to click-through, call, request a demo or take the next steps toward a purchase or trial is the ability to tell a great story. And a key component of any white paper, solution brief, application note or case study calls for representative, real-world examples that get the reader to think, “Hey, that’s me.”

Today’s information-overloaded customers are as short on time as they are on attention.

In a matter of seconds you must convey that your product or service is tailor made to solve immediately recognizable problems.

This means spotlighting real-world examples just as prominently as the features and corresponding benefits of your product. Technical “tutorials” mean little to a customer/reader without a clear, concise description of the real-world benefits your technology delivers.

Consider a security company whose technology detects anomalous conditions from log files.  Readers need context to better understand what this means.  By adding key examples of anomalous conditions, such as “knowing what systems were accessed by an unauthorized user, what data they touched and where they sent it”, provides readers with an immediately identifiable problem they are on the hook to address.  By putting your domain expertise in context, you stand a much better chance of resonating with your readers.

In the case of the security company cited above, use cases can take on immediacy and drama when compelling examples are woven into the narrative.  Take technologies designed for intrusion detection and Advanced Persistent Threats.  Plugging in a real world example to orient readers to a specific problem is a magnet for further investigation:  “Being alerted to a user who typically logs into one or two corporate systems between the hours of 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Monday through Friday and suddenly attempts to log into multiple systems at odd hours of the day, including weekends, is a strong indication of a potentially hacked or compromised account.” Suddenly, your benefit — the critical role your product played in determining the violation and making the process so much simpler and faster for security teams – now takes on a new, compelling dimension.

Always be articulating or alluding to the tangible benefit of your offering with examples that speak directly to your buyer. Your domain expertise is essential.  You can make it pay off even more by showing your equally expert appreciation of the practical problem your customer is trying to solve.

What’s your view of domain-expertise as criteria for content creators? How do you do “reality-checks” on your content?  How do you select writers? On a 10-point scale, how do your rate your content for customer-relevance?

Understanding your audience/readership is central to the success of any commercial publication.  Ever hear of a thriving news organization oblivious to what its audience of readers or viewers want?  In the same vein, marketers tone-deaf to the proclivities of their own market, the content that customers will pay attention to, are short-lived.  In marketing today, more than ever, quality content is defined as the kind of material to which your buyer relates and identifies with:

1.  It’s about them, not you.

2.  It describes their situations, not yours.

3.  It makes them, not your brand, most prominent in the story.

4.  It’s eminently readable and compelling: the terminology is theirs, the style is engaging, the language vivid.

5.  It informs, educates, provokes thought–and it inspires sharing.

The above, by the way, could describe the best and most shared content on the web, on any given day.  Which is exactly what we mean by the term market-alism.

What are you doing to instill these practices in your own content: web copy, white papers, case studies, etc.?   How does your team ensure that your “out-bound” efforts maximize “in-bound” inquiries and high conversions?

For many years we’ve flogged the notion of the outside-in perspective and its importance to successful marketing. Essentially, putting yourself in the shoes of your customer, or the people you want as customers.  This “customer advocate” point of view is nothing new. It’s been around for as long as people have been buying and selling.

When it comes to creating the kind of content that gets people to do the things you want them to do, the point is this:  you have to talk to those people–not at them. To do this, you have to look at your subject matter through their eyes. From their POV.  Then you have to speak their language in their terminology — and sound like one of them.

This is where so much internally-produced marketing material falls short and how it devolves into fluff, assuming that people will resonate to what you think they should. It inevitably slips into company advocacy when it should be advocating on behalf of the reader.

You have to make a conscious, continuous effort to remain in their shoes.  From the inception of your concept right through final editing and delivery.  This requires fortitude and attitude.

Self-advocacy is an easy trap to fall into.  No matter how astute your marketing team may be, and we work for some of the best, when you’ve spent so much time and energy focused on your product, technology, competitors and company issues, it’s natural for your perspective to become distorted and biased towards what you’re selling. Unfortunately, this bias shows up in the way you describe it: in your terms, not the buyer’s.

Just remember: people have no intrinsic interest in what you sell. No knock on them, but the fact is that they are self-absorbed and self-interested when they’re in the discovery phase of the purchasing decision. As they should be.  So, your appeal will resonate with them only to the extent they instantly recognize–and feel–your awareness of whatever it is that interests them at that moment. This means their problem, their fears, ambitions, numbers, performance review and competitors.

If this sounds like it should be the template of your next piece of content and the platform of your message strategy, it’s because it should.  Take it from longstanding customer advocates.

It’s become a cliche in marketing to say that a case study is supposed to be more about about your user, not about you.  Still, reading a lot of case studies will convince you that a relatively few vendors have gotten this message.

Case studies are valuable selling tools because buyers rely on them in the purchasing process, specifically in the discovery phase of research.  What do they look for?  They want to know how people like them solved problems like the ones they want to solve.  They want to read about those people and those problems much more than read praises for any particular solutions.

Here’s a suggestion to keep your case studies honest. Review some recent samples and screen them for mentions of your company name vs. how many times the customer or user’s name was cited.  Just do a simple “Search in Document” if you’re using Word, for example.  Our own experience suggests that your user’s name should appear at least 50% more than yours.  If your name is cited 10 times, for example, the name of the user in the case should come up 15 times.  If you show up 20 times in the case, your customer should be referenced 30, and so on.  This rule-of-thumb does two things: it forces the writer to focus on the main character of the story, namely, the user.  This, in turn, makes the case study spotlight the benefits to the user in the eyes of the reader. It also makes for far more compelling reading.

How do your cases measure up?  How do you ensure that they are less about your solution and more about the problem you solved and the benefits you delivered?

We read last weekend’s NYT piece on computer-generated news stories with great interest (and we will quickly add that, no, this post is not being written by a machine).  The story reminded us of something we used to hear NetApp chairman Dan Warmenhoven say repeatedly to anyone who listened.  According to Warmenhoven, writing the plan isn’t so much about the the plan you end up with.  Rather, it’s largely about the process you go through to produce the plan.  What you think about, discover, debunk or become aware of as part of the diligence of the planning process can often force you re-think your strategy, tactics and even some of the fundamentals of your whole business.  This can make a huge difference.

Our experience with the process of writing white papers, case studies, speeches, or even blog posts is absolutely consistent with Warmenhoven’s observation.  The ideas and insights that can, and often do, bubble up during interviews — not to mention the reflection that happens during the editing process — provide the driving force a team may need to re-think its assumptions.  They can drive improvements to your strategy and a sharpening of tactics.  They can fortify a connection with a customer or a partner, especially during preparation of a case study.  We think of these things as being the equivalent of the “hallway conversations” you miss when your interactions are strictly via email, teleconference or webinar.   While we won’t  minimize the power and significance of machine intelligence, sometimes an “end product” includes what’s learned during production. Ask Dan Warmenhoven.

Do you see the content-generation process as way to make observations about your business or product strategy?  Do you look at producing case studies and white papers as a chance to broaden relationships with customers?

Nobody’s ever been bored into reading something.

People love good stories.  After all, it’s part of what makes us human.  And no matter if it’s a technology white paper, a product brief, a speech or a Op-Ed submission to technical journal, readers are people first. They want to be engaged on their terms, not the author’s or the vendor’s.

It’s incumbent upon the content creator to engage the consumer/reader.  No matter how compelling you believe your material is, don’t assume you have a reflexively engaged audience.  It’s not up to the reader to find a way to stay interested.  So, how to do this in an age of short time and shorter attention?

Right from the start, at the concept-stage of your project, it’s fundamental to get inside the head of the individual you envision on the receiving end.  Think about yourself as a reader or a member of an audience. What is it that grasps and holds your attention?  Of course, the subject matter has to be relevant to an issue or problem you might be dealing with at the moment but if what you read is fluff that evaporates before the end of each sentence, or so opaque and dense with jargon that you have to re-read each paragraph, chances are you’ll put it aside.  Even if it’s clearly worded, a tract that reads more like a textbook is unlikely to inspire the calls-to-action envisioned by the author.

By storytelling, we don’t mean anything touchy-feely or non-analytical.  The watchword here is “anecdotal”.  Incorporating real-life vignettes or business anecdotes gives authenticity, immediacy and texture to your content.  The reader can identify with it. We won’t argue that the objectivity of numbers and statistics don’t inject strength into any argument but the objectivity of the numbers weakens them as a communication device.  And make no mistake, you’re trying to communicate — images and ideas and opinions. You need to motivate a prospect.  Reassure a customer or partner. Capture their interest and, ideally, their imagination.  Get them to think in a new ways about familiar things.  And get them to want to read your content when you have something else to tell them.  Your objective is not just to get your content approved for publishing.  It’s to get read.

We’re in violent agreement with the folks over at Beaupre bemoaning the dearth of dedicated content specialists (AKA writers and editors) among the ranks of so many PR firms.

To be clear, we at Write Angle have no ax to grind whatsoever when it comes to public-relations agencies.  Quite the contrary.  Some of us are former agency operatives, one even having spent decades in Silicon Valley on the client-side retaining the best in the business at places such as Apple and NetApp.  So we know, too, that great media-relations, the primary assignment of technology PR, is not the same thing as great writing.  Most firms, large or small, simply cannot afford to keep a separate stable of great writers.

Agencies earn their keep by their skills as interpreters and as relationship cultivators.  They’re paid to translate complicated concepts and information into irresistible ideas — nuggets of topical interest to the right reporters, bloggers and influencers with whom they have personal familiarity and cordial working relationships.  People who are adept at this aren’t necessarily as effective at long-form translation or turning these ideas into the lengthier prose that make prosaic media backgrounders, whitepapers and op-ed articles vivid, compelling reading. The problems crop up when the volume of work outstrips — or falls short of — the resources at hand.

The fact is that in hectic periods of “feast” the demand for press releases and web pages and content of all kinds can overwhelm a lean shop.  The other side of that coin are the leaner times when agencies, including those with no dedicated writers on staff, find themselves in the unhappy position of having to support idle overhead.  No matter what, clients will always expect quality deliverables on time and on budget at all times. The solution: dedicated, on-demand, outside writers whom the beleaguered agency would be proud to call its own. It turns out that such a service is just what the budget calls for in more ways than one, during times of feast or famine.

Case studies work. They sell. They drive people to your site. They enable you to be found online. They create interest, qualify leads, refresh content, build brand, and drive down the cost of sales.

There’s a catch, however: There are case studies and then there are self-serving, self-congratulatory loads of dreck that masquerade as “case studies”. What distinguishes the former from the latter? Clear descriptions of three things:

1. The most valuable benefit of the product or service being featured. This assumes that you understand what it is about the product that would arouse the attention (read: make somebody reach for their checkbook) of a user/customer/consumer. In other words, you know what your target customer holds dear. What they value most.

2. What it took the user in the case to adopt your product. What did he have to unplug? Undo? Buy extra? Learn? Re-learn? What was your product’s (or service’s) adoption cost?

3. The price. At very least, some order of magnitude of what your stuff costs relative to alternatives.

Those three elements constitute your value proposition. A value proposition is not an elevator pitch. It’s a quantifiable entity. And any case study that doesn’t communicate it is not worth the pixels on the screen. Your value prop is compelling only to the extent that the size of #1 (above) exceeds the sum of #2 plus #3.

Note: we understand the sensitivity of putting price information into case studies given the realities of negotiation. Just never lose sight of the fact that price is central to the customer’s definition of a value proposition. And this is only definition that counts.