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It’s 2012.  Do you know where your web-site visitors are?

More to the point, is your web site — and all the content on it — readable to visitors using handhelds and tablets?  Couple of years ago, Morgan Stanley wowed the marketing world with some predictions about the way people would be consuming information in the year 2012.  They projected this year as the tipping point when sales of handheld devices would exceed desktops and laptops combined.  The year when your marketing content, to accomplish its mission, would have to accommodate “the small screen”.

Admittedly, not many long-form whitepapers and case studies are going to be read on an iPhone. But think about it.  Chance are you, or someone you know, is reading the latest best-seller on an e-reader, right?  Message: if your web site demands that your visitors plunk themselves down at a desk, it’s a site that’s just not working as smart or as hard as your visitors are working today.  And sometimes this means working on a tablet, or a smart phone, for a large chunk of the day.  Indeed, we described this requirement last year for EndPlay, a web content management (WCM) developer. Sophisticated
consumers demand entirely new levels of site interactivity and customized content.  And this demand far outstrips the capabilities of today’s fast-aging and decentralized tools and technology.

So how does this impact your online marketing materials? Generally speaking, to borrow from our colleague Newt Barrett, your customers want to:

• connect and communicate wherever they are, whenever they want
• consume information via the Internet, including e-mail, news, web-based content
• get their social media fix
• consume locally based information from word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, etc.
• write a short e-mail or text messages
• listen to music, watch videos, watch TV or movies
• play a game now and then

With this in mind, to cite Barrett, here’s how to exploit this mobile tipping point:

• Make your website readable on the most important mobile devices: iPhones, Androids, and iPads. Lose Flash. Any flash on your website must assume a secondary role on your home and landing pages today.
• Create an iPhone or an iPad app that leverages these these devices.  Think about how the touchscreen might improve visitor interaction with your content.
• Get social with Facebook, Twitter or other applications where your customers will likely be when they’re in a research (or buying) mood.  Most people today actively pursue social media opportunities on their handheld devices.
• Don’t make people print something out if they can simply show it on their mobile device.

Your customers are on the move today. Right his minute. Make it easy to connect with them, for them to connect with you. Of course, all of this assumes that you have great content for them to consume. You do, don’t you?

Marketing people in early-stage companies have daily to-do lists that would, per head, choke many of their counterpart departments in larger enterprises.  Still, as we continually preach, the need for ever-fresh content on web sites is a primary to-do for companies of any size.  The fact that business blogs are typically the fastest, simplest means of keep content topical and fresh is the biggest reason why they’re so prevalent.

But a recent Inc 500 survey revealed a sharp decline in corporate blogging last year compared to 2010 (37% vs. 50%). In the same survey, however, 56% of the non-blogging companies said they planned to start or re-start a blog in 2012.  We suspect the reasons for the drop-off may have to do with the realities of blogging and the resulting disillusionment of bloggers who failed to recognize benefits.

To those companies intending to blog for the first time and to those willing to jump back in the game we send best wishes —  and a caveat.  We counsel a variation on the advice proferred recently by Reputation Capitalization’s Mary Slayter.  We have our own checklist we offer our clients.

You know you’re ready to publish a blog if:

1. You are not a control freak. You trust the employees tapped for content generation to represent your brand without an onerous review process that takes a half-dozen people and untold hours of deliberation.

2. Your goal is to establish a reputation as a trusted source of industry information as a means of eventual revenue.  The operative word here is “eventual”.  You’re OK with the long-term-prospect nature of actual revenue coming directly from leads your blog will create.  Of course, results will vary company to company, industry to industry. Quality leads generated by effective keywords on the rest of your site is a different matter. The payoff is swifter than publishing a blog, but the time and effort to maintain efficacy is more labor intensive.

3. You have no problems linking your content to a competitor’s site. We especially like Slayter’s counsel here: “A robust industry blog will require you to have civilized, public conversation with your competitors. A generous spirit in this regard  is what will make you a thought leader in your industry; it also has some powerful SEO advantages”. Hey, your customers know they have choices. Earn their confidence by showing confidence in yourself.

4. You understand the utility and the value of any content having nothing to with pitching your wares.  You write the blog to gain and keep readers.  Period.  You understand them well enough to know instinctively what compels their interest and what they find interesting enough to warrant their time.  Your whitepapers and case studies reflect this exact same insight.

5. You know there is no free lunch. And no free blog. For this reason, you’ve set aside the sufficient resources for design, content and promotion.  Why? Because to measure content marketing’s contribution against the other elements in your mix (traditional advertising, PR, etc.) you need to examine actual  costs.

So, did you or a company you know discontinue blogging recently?  Why?  How did you respond to the checklist items above?

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?

We were recently invited by one of our security software clients to come in and help craft a pivotal presentation for one of their blue-chip customers.  We ended the day with a high-horsepower pitch– and a reminder of what an effective presentation is…and isn’t.

Fortunately, the client appreciates Guy Kawasaki’s principles of the 10-20-30 rule: no more than 10 slides that support a 20-minute stand-up and utilize 30-point type from the Arial font (which studies repeatedly show is easiest on the eyes).

The secret to turning slideware into a weapon of mass persuasion? Here’s what we advise:

1. Internalize the psychographics or temperament of the audience. And let this inform your pitch. This is absolutely step one. Who are you addressing and why are they interested in this topic?  What are their foremost concerns?  What kinds of appeals would be most compelling to them?  What data or evidence substantiates your position? Why would this resonate? What kinds of points can you make that would cause them to mentally applaud you and be persuaded that you have their interests and issues in mind?  Only when all this is clear and comprehensible are you ready to create content.

2. Clarify the purpose of the pitch and its objective. Given the audience, what do you want from them? What idea do you need to convey? Hint: you want to arouse a discussion in which you can elaborate and clarify your leave-behind message. This is the real purpose of any presentation. You want to extend the wrap-up section of the formal pitch, in which you told them what you told them, so you can launch into a useful conversation or Q&A where you can continue telling them. And presumably encourage their buy-in or support, while getting the skeptics to further consider.

3. Storyboard the pitch. In no more than three or four general sections outlined on a whiteboard, in sequential blocks, outline the content that tells the story: an introduction that describes what they’re going to hear, a main section or two that lays out your points and presents substantiating facts and figures, and a concluding section that re-states and summarizes the salient points and substantiation.

4. Transcribe key takeaways of each storyboarded section or “chapter” onto the slides, but in very brief, concise points that highlight the story you are telling.  When you present, do not merely recite the content on the slide.  Let the slide underscore your narrative. Use body language and tone of voice to emphasize key points (not animation).

5. Rehearse, dry-run, and rehearse again. And again. Screen the pitch to a preview audience of devil’s advocates.  Insist on ruthlessness. Tweak your content and delivery. You will be rewarded by the end-result.  Everyone knows about Steve Jobs’ copious hours of rehearsal. This is how and why he sounded like he was speaking contemporaneously, coolly off-the-cuff. It was also mission-critical to his success as a communicator. Jobs was prepared. And when it comes to stagecraft, he’s a pretty good role model.

How do you prepare for your presentations?  Do you approach them as opportunities?  How do you engage your audience and inspire a lively discussion?

Declaring the death of a trend can get attention but it doesn’t make it true.  Take “blogging is dead”, or “dying”, as a prime example.

We recently came across a Mark Twain-like “death”of blogs and the Web. ‪The supposition is based on the belief that blogs simply get drowned out by the avalanche of data choking would-be readers’ mailboxes, browsers, and social-media pages.  There is truth to the claim of data overload, of course, but it doesn’t nullify the positive impact of well-conceived blog content that serves the interests of readers and grows the number of the visitors you want coming to your site.

There’s certainly no data we’re aware of to suggest a declining number of blogs published on corporate web sites.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.  It was projected last year that 43% of U.S. companies would be utilizing blogs for marketing in 2012 – compared to 16% in 2007.  So, yes, reports of the death of blogging are exaggerated.

The reason for its good health is easy to understand. Keeping web sites and blog content fresh and relevant to customer readership continues to be the simplest and quickest means of sustaining and enhancing your web presence.

It’s also a simple, quick way to build and substantiate thought leadership in your category whenever you can hold forth on topics of educational interest to your marketplace of customers, prospects and industry followers.

Branded blogs that thrive are those that evolve right along with the web itself. Just as corporate web sites are far more interactive today than their passive ancestors, today’s business blogs and market-savvy bloggers strive for two-way conversational engagement with readers.  They invite give and take.  This is in sharp contrast to their one-way communication soapbox predecessors.

Empirical evidence ties sales productivity, in the form of lower-cost lead generation, to a vendor’s blog activity.  Another reason why intelligently out-sourced blog content development to domain experts can represent such an intelligent (and measurable) investment in business development.  As long as they remain so useful, blogs won’t be disappearing any time soon.

Did your blog generate quality leads last year? What’s your process for coming up with new ideas to write about?  Do you solicit subject matter from customers? What’s your plan?

2.  Make it simple: suggest the subject matter or request that they come up with something they already care about and give them a clear deadline.  Get a firm commitment.  And make your editorial guidelines simple — no more than one page.  Spell out the most important things they need to know and point to your blog-post examples as models to emulate. Create an easy process based on editorial flow happening on your intranet, via email, or through your blog software.  Include this in your guidelines and make sure its understandable.

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?

Creating great content on your web site and keeping it fresh — and specific to your customer offerings — is key to higher, more effective market visibility.  Why?  Because fresh, compelling, customer-relevant content creates the links that elevate your ranking by the search engines.  The more relevant links you attract, the more you increase the traffic you want. This, in turn, generates more click-throughs, more trials, more orders.

So how to do this with so much else on your plate today? At Write Angle, we suggest doing as our colleagues over at HubSpot ceaselessly recommend: hire a creator of remarkable content, not some self-styled SEO ninja.  Start by identifying the most compelling storytellers in your domain. The ones who know your business and can write for the readers you want to attract.

SEO Scientist Dan Zarella , who is quick to distinguish himself from a “ninja”, unwrapped a new set of datapoints the other day. They underscore the notion that the online results we all crave come our way organically to the extent that we produce and publish more content more often.  And this means more blog posts that contain remarkable content.  “Re-markable” is defined as irresistibly share-able, re-Tweetable and forward-able links, all of which combine to enhance your search rankings.  Exactly what content creators are supposed to do.

Here are the key take-aways from the data:

1.   Blog posts are the simplest way to refresh your online content on the most frequent basis.

2.   Fresh content drives visits and traffic.

3.   You cannot post too frequently.

4.   Post the most topical material specific to your offerings that appeal to the current interest of your customers and prospects.  Avoid industry jargon and focus on words conveying timeliness and immediacy to your reader.

5.   The more targeted you make your content re #4 above, the greater your chance of being found.

6.   You are as much in the publishing business today as the business of your category.

Question: what’s happening right now in your customers’ world on which you have a provocative observation or thoughts worth sharing with them?  If you were a customer, what would you want to know? What would compel you to share it with your associates? What can you do to accelerate the sharing of these observations? When was the last time you published something that was conceived from the vantage of the visitors you want to attract to your site?

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?

As writers of marketing content, we at Write Angle think different. For example, we believe that content, and the professionals  who produce it, can influence product strategy to a much greater degree than most people assume.  Can’t think of a better way to honor the memory of our former colleague, Steve Jobs, who “thought different” and shared this belief.

Here’s what we mean. Lost in last week’s deluge of Jobs’ tributes was broader recognition of what really separated him from the pack for so long: his uncanny instinct for making it easier for people to do what they already enjoy doing. Jobs had an innate ability to immediately recognize what users actually wanted from products and services. Then he worked ferociously to deliver easier, better ways for them to get it.  Long before anybody touted the so-called  “product experience”, Apple was pumping out the best experiences imaginable.  The wild popularity of these products proved it.  Apple (Jobs) did not invent the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, the music player, the cell phone or the tablet computer.  But they sure as hell made each one drastically easier and more fun to use –not to mention irresistible.   Apple products are consistently cool.  How many technology offerings can claim this?

So what does all this have to do with what marketing-content creators and writers can do? Plenty. Most engineers and product marketers, especially in B2B land, are justifiably proud of what they invent and take to market.  Problem is, being so close to the device or service can create blind spots when it comes to buyers, customers and users of these inventions.  So, when the time comes to describe the offerings and differentiate them in marketing and selling efforts, it’s up to content creator — namely, the writer — to ask the penetrating questions and extract the comprehensive answers that inform this all-important differentiation.

1. What job are we are trying to make it easier for the user to get done?  What’s our stuff actually going to do for them to make their lives easier and/or more productive?

2. What core positioning statement do we want to weave throughout the content?

3. What are the distinguishing technologies/approaches that we need to cite to clearly establish competitive differentiation?

4. What tangible metrics or documented verification substantiates our claims?

5. What are the three most essential messages — the takeways — we want readers to understand?

Don’t forget that it’s never enough just to ask the right questions.  You have to know if and when you’re getting a complete answer and keep pushing until you’re there. The writer must come away with the content of a comprehensive, no-doubt-about-it answer — and then articulate it in a way that resonates with the reader.  Not simply regurgitate what was shared in the sourcing session.  In the process, the technical team — the product jocks — will have to do their own diligence and homework.  This forces the issue.  Steve Jobs knew it wasn’t so much about “knowing” his customers as much as knowing what they wanted to do — and then make it easier and less hassle for them to do it.  It’s no different in the B2B world.

So what does your team do to understand what your users are trying to accomplish with products in your category?  Equally important, does your marketing content communicate this understanding? What more can you do to ensure that it does?