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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?

 

Is the white paper dead?  Recent studies suggest they’re not, but there’s no denying that too many of them have fallen into a zombie-like state.  Fact is too many fall short of their sales mission.  But the findings such as those by Sirius Decisions last year reveal that white papers remain primary tools for building influence.

One out of every two B2B customers in the Sirius survey considered white papers the most important source of content when it came to making purchase decisions.  Even more important than analyst reports (54% vs. 39%).  A separate study by Eccolo Media showed that 47% of purchase decision-makers considered them “extremely important” in the buying process. The unmistakable take-away:  the venerable white paper is very much alive.  Now you just need to keep yours kicking.

So what’s the difference between white papers that make customers want to know more about you and the ones that make readers quickly turn to something else?  Turns out that the principles of producing a successful paper today are no different than what it takes to create any successful initiative across all marketing and sales.  It must be carefully targeted, well crafted, optimized for social media and oriented towards a specific result.  Last year, a study by Ziff-Davis revealed that the primary purpose of white papers in the buying process was to provide information during the customer’s research-and-discovery phase.  Message: Those customers will be looking specifically at what you know and have to say about their interests, not yours.

One out of three B2B customers utilize white papers to look for new ideas and solutions. Message: keep your content fact-rich but easily digestible.  Know when and how to use infographics to make a key point, for example.

Nearly one in four readers will narrow their vendor selections with the content found in white papers. Message: spotlight what makes your solution competitively superior. To the greatest extent you can, make your comparisons measurable, quantifiable and, if at all possible, graphic so as to be very quickly understood.  Remember that your reader is at least as busy as you are.

One out of ten readers will make the vendor selection based on white paper content. Message: readers will be influenced to the extent they are convinced your solution is a rifle-shot at their problem.  So you must be intimately familiar with what this problem is. Tailor the content to the customer’s need in the terminology they use and the issues they grapple with.  Know your customer.  Understand their anxieties. If this sounds like the age-old best practices of selling and marketing, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.

At lunch the other day with a couple of serial entrepreneurs, questions came up about the optimum timing of product launches and web site debuts.  Inevitably, the conversation turned to the value of blogging.  Nobody denied the value.  There was, however, disagreement as to timing.  So when is the best time to pull the trigger on your new blog for your new company?

There are those who argue that, in the early going, time and energy should be devoted to customer- and product-development. Exclusively. That there are not enough hours in the day for everything.  We won’t argue. Still, in the web 2.0 marketplace, a few minutes a day, or even per week, during which you crystallize your thoughts and share them with your ecosystem is to our way of thinking not a bad use of time.  In fact, it can be a highly productive one. Why?  It forces you to “stand down” for a brief period and clear your head and think about things in a different way.  Yes, you can go for a walk or shoot hoops or jog or pound golf balls.  Or any number of other things that puts you into a different gear.  The thing about crafting a blog post, however, is that you can make that same shift AND get yourself published. This is no idle indulgence in vanity.  It can foment discussions that serve your larger purposes as you prepare your count-down to launch.

Almost three out of four start-ups die during their first five years.  We wonder, right along with successful entrepreneur Martin Zwilling how many of those failures had a blog.

To the extent your customers are readers today, you are a publisher.

“Marketing content” and “riveting quality” are rarely spoken in the same conversation.   Indeed the latter is typically invoked disparagingly, as in “The content isn’t exactly riveting”.  At Write Angle we’ve been at war with flat, yawn-inspiring content for years.  But this isn’t about us, it’s about you and your mission to deliver content that attracts, engages and retains visitors to your site and converts them into users and customers.  Marketing content can be more than good, it can be downright engaging, which is what you should be striving for at all times.

But there’s another quality right up there with engagement.  More is better today when it comes to getting found online and upping your rank on search engines.  And speedy delivery goes hand in hand with volume.  While “good” is good, when it comes to content good and fast is even better.  Says Kyle Monson, a former editor at PCMagazine now at JWT, “a company’s ability to speak honestly and quickly to its customers, fans, and detractors is a huge competitive advantage”.

Step one: recognize and embrace the publishing mandate of your enterprise which is the imperative of Web 2.0.  Back in late ’80s and early ’90s as technology pulled companies into the age of networks it meant that many of them were suddenly in the telecommunications business as much as the business of their category. Today, in the real-time world of Web 2.0, you’re in the publishing business.  Your customers and prospects are your audience.  How are you building, engaging and growing this audience?  How are your “ratings” right now and what can you do to improve them?

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.

If you can’t get excited about what you’re selling, you cannot sell it

There’s nothing mysterious or magical about good writing for marketing and sales.  The bad news is that it’s hard work.  The good news is that just about anyone who is literate (and has the time) can do it — providing that what they write contains three essential ingredients:

1.  Above all, a product or service that delivers measurable value.

2. A passionate and palpable belief in the benefits your product or service delivers.

3. A no-less passionate belief in what you’re saying.

If this sounds like the secrets of successful selling, it’s because it is.  Writing for marketing and sales is nothing more or less than marketing and salesmanship in print. Or in pixels.  A sales professional who is less than excited about the product will never cut it.  Ditto for marketing people assigned to a product  in which they have no belief.  If you are genuinely excited about your offer and what it represents to customers, the excitement will shine through. It cannot help but breathe life into your words and inspire the interest of the people reading them.  And you can hold the exclamation points.

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How do you gauge your content when it comes to driving traffic to your site?

We counted five metrics described today which are amazingly similar to the ones we consider key gauges on the web-content dashboard.  Because the world in which we now market and sell demands that we do those things that are necessary to be found online, the name of the game is to enable more and more of the people you’re interested in to find you there.  And, as study after study shows, the way you do this most cost effectively is to generate a steady stream of content intended to establish your credentials as a worthy exponent of whatever it is those people are looking for or researching.

1. To create smart, hard-working content, the kind that attracts real prospects and prompts them to take the specific actions you call for, you first have to identify the content that’s hardly working.  Expecting a different result from doing the sames thing(s) repeatedly may or may not be a definition of insanity but to us the definition of smart marketing content is anything that draws the right people to your site and entices them to take the action you want.  To begin creating it, it’s important to know about a landing page’s “bounce rate”: the amount, expressed as a percentage of the visitors who did not take the action you called for, or just abandoned your site after looking at that page.  Any landing page with a comparatively high number (compared to other landing pages) will tell you what is and is not working for you — and your visitors.

2. A landing page that gets people to do the thing(s) you want, such as request a whitepaper or e-book or provide their contacts (or all three) is said to have a high “conversion rate”.   Comparing the conversion rates among your pages is another way to weed out ineffective content or a weak call to action. Importance of landing pages is hard to overstate because this is usually the first impression you make on a visitor.  It is step one in a casual visitor’s  “conversion” to hot lead — and a sale.

3. Traffic sources reveal where your visitors are coming from when they first arrive. It’s top of the funnel where you can learn where people found out about you.  It’s the metric by which you judge your SEO efforts to see if your organic search volume increasing. “If you’ve been doing good social media promotion, then you should see a lot of referral traffic from social media sites and blogs”, says the Web consultancy Hubspot. “Every business will have their own mix of organic, referral and direct traffic, so it’s important to watch over time so that you can track how your various marketing channels are driving traffic to your website”.

4. From your site’s keywords you can determine which terms people use when they go to Google or Bing or wherever, and your site shows up.  Keywords tell you what terminology people use when they find you or when they’re researching your category. They also provide insight about the things people were thinking about when they discovered you. It’s obvious why your keyword strategy is, in a word, key.  But don’t forget to see if, and how much, traffic is being generated by words other than what you’ve been optimizing for. When you uncover them, start creating content around them.

5. Finally, there are the visitors, the actual number of unique individuals who have been to your site. An important read-out, yes, but not of primary importance. It is not a reflection of your site’s intrinsic strength of content.  Which is what you need most. You want your site to draw traffic on its own, by virtue of its content.  Some of your visitors may have influenced by off-line promotion or off-site campaigns.  Good, but not cost-effective. You want your web site to self-sustain. And this is exactly what great content enables.

The most powerful marketing content today, the content you should be striving to create, is the stuff that creates the right discussions in the right context among the right people.

If your content is all about your company, your brand and your products, you’re missing the point of what makes today’s marketing content more effective and memorable.  In other words, you’re not getting what you’re paying for.  If your outreach is basically driven by cultivating a few opinion leaders and staying in control of your message, you’re not making the most of the new landscape and the new tools available to you.  Worse, you’re likely losing ground to competitors who are.

To Bob Duffy, senior social-media strategist at Intel, it’s not about controlling the message so much as providing the context in which information is exchanged and interpreted.

Duffy told Social Media Explorer that brands, not unlike Intel, are doing a lot of what the traditional media (and industry analysts) have always done: publishing what they learn from developers, for example, revealing best practices and creating connections between different tech players. Like his counterparts at other technology brands today, Duffy is creating the context for important discussions in the industry that will ultimately pay off down the road for his employer.

The takeaway for today’s marketing pros? Reach out to anyone who could be part of your community and jump-start the discussions you want to be part of.  Discussions to which you can add value and build your reputation as somebody who’s worth engaging on a long-term basis.  Just keep in mind that you have to stick to the subject matter of the discussion and not be a shill for your brand.  Your community is street-wise.  It is more than capable of connecting the dots. Do as Duffy does: “We don’t try to control the conversation or message, we just want to provide the context.”

What are you doing as a marketer to instigate industry discussions and engage your communities?  What are you learning from, and sharing with, the people who matter to your brand?  What kinds of connections are you creating among them?  How are you measuring it?