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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?

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 live in an era of screen extremes. Our TVs have never been so gargantuan while we’re consuming more content than ever on screens we hold in one hand.

“If I had more time I’d have written a shorter letter” is an apt description of the quandary in which many content generators find themselves today.  Smaller screens, smaller form factors and resistance to scrolling has made the creation of content that compels reader action a thornier challenge.  You have to grab attention faster, hold it tighter and compel action more irresistibly today in the at-a-glance state of mind that characterizes your busy, distracted target audience.

Making fewer words say more is the order of the day. This calls for instincts and aptitude long associated with creators of billboard copy and “transit ads” — what you see on (and in) buses and the roofs of some taxis.  This is where messages have always had the toughest job.  They had to say it all in a very few words, almost instantaneously.  The lesson here is to pay attention to the really great billboards out there.  The ones that convey so much in so little verbiage.  They’re useful models not only for informing your mobile web pages but inspiring all your marketing content.  No matter where it lives.  To get your content consumed, you have to hook the consumer.  And there’s never been so much bait in the water.  Exercise: go through your web site and try reducing it by half.

Were you able to do it? What did you delete?  Is it more readable, more informative, more compelling?  What can you do to stay short(er) and sweet(er) online today?

Patrick May’s take on techie-speak yesterday was yet another reminder of language getting in the way of clear speaking and thinking.  The concept of “TLA” the initials for three-letter acronyms, is a long-standing techie tradition.  TLAs are used in marketing techno-speak the way Howard Cosell used to throw around multisyllabic words and ornate phrases.

But there was method to Cosell’s legendary loquaciousness (go ahead, look it up).   He was trying, and succeeding, to differentiate his brand of sportscasting from the drab uniformity of jock-speak and coach-isms.

It’s just the opposite in Silicon Valley, where so many techno-marketeers want their palaver to be consistent with what they hear in the echo chambers of their cubicles and conference rooms.  Too often, what we end up with is incomprehensible, convoluted drivel that’s counterproductive to the key process of successful marketing, namely, communication.

We have two antidotes to the brain-suffocation caused by terminal TLA.

1. Speak and write your main thoughts in plain English, a language honed over the centuries to communicate with vivid expression.  If you must use three-letter acronyms be certain that the concepts behind the words can be understood by a reasonably intelligent 12-year-old.  Think we’re overstating it?  Peter Lynch, peerless investor in the Warren Buffett league, used to say he never bought a stock whose business he couldn’t explain to his seventh-grade son — an engaging and intelligent lad, but not a child prodigy.

2. Spend less time in your cubicle and more time out in the marketplace talking to the people who buy and use your products.  Get them to describe how your offerings are making their business lives simpler, more productive, more satisfying.  How do they express themselves?

In the words of Hal Gregersen, professor of leadership at INSEAD, the solution is to leave the cocoon of an office: “Observe the people using your products and services. Pay attention. Second, network with people who don’t look, think, act, or dress like you”.  The latter may not always be easy to do in the heterogeneous zone of the Valley.  But where there’s a will there’s a way. Or,”T.A.W.” as some might put it.

Follow customers, not trends

There’s an old saying that nobody’s as gullible as a salesman afraid of missing out on a trend. We would put some marketing people into this category today.

Consider two astute observations that came our way recently. One is that you shouldn’t believe all the hype about “in-bound” (as opposed to outbound) marketing; the other says quality content on a web site always trumps search-engine optimization (SEO). You’d think that both contentions would be self-evident truths.  In practice, too many marketers seem only too eager to err on the side of excess when it comes to perceived trends affecting their craft.

The dramatic rise of social marketing is the “trend” here that so many marketers seem afraid of missing out on.  Don’t get us wrong. We’re avid practitioners of all things digital but we’re in solid concurrence with Seattle-based PR exec Howie Barokas. To his way of thinking, the advent of social media has given too many marketing types, particularly when it comes to PR, a bad case of myopia about potential customers and the content aimed at them. While social media has changed the way people consume information and buy things, at the end of the day it’s just another channel. However important, it’s just another element in the mix of advertising, direct marketing, tradeshows, webinars and all the other means by which marketing content is made available.

As for the plight of the SEO-obsessed, we commend the sentiments of our colleague Efi Rodik: “People are sifting through the garbage online to find the good stuff—information that is informative, engaging, and above all, relevant. If your site is so keyword-optimized that it barely passes as English, then you’ve got a problem.”

Having responsibility for marketing content, you can never lose your focus on your end-user. We share Rodik’s view that customers looking for information or resources on the web will always want content that’s easy to read and understand. “If you’re pounding your keyword,” he says, “rather than focusing on providing useful, compelling information, then you’ll lose a conversion, your bounce rate will go up, and your ranking on your search-engine results page will suffer”.

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.