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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?

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?

At first blush, this may seem like a given.  After all, clients hire a writing service for domain expertise, proven methodologies and a track record, right?  In theory, perhaps, but in practical reality it’s always more complicated.

Constructive criticism isn’t for the thin-skinned on either side of the table.  Especially when you think you’re dead right about what the words should say.   But time and again, the clients who encourage writers to candidly engage in the work are more likely to benefit.  This is especially true at key junctures in a project when course corrections can determine success or failure. A writer’s willingness to play a vigorous devil’s advocate is indispensible. And even more so if a company finds itself mired in a stale or failing campaign, losing market share or suffering from being elbowed out of leadership.

Not all companies possess the DNA for thick skin.   Here are the warning signs and the antidotes:

1.  “We’ve re-invented our segment and don’t have any direct competitors.”  Really?  If so, chances are you don’t have much of a market, either. Better revisit the business plan.  Or do some market research right way.

Rx: Make your content reflect a rigorous understanding of your prospects and users. Choose writers who know the territory and express your competitive differentiation in the language users actually use.

2.  “Our value proposition is time-tested and we haven’t had to update our web site in more than a year.”  Ouch.  Keeping content fresh, provocative and current is a given in the Web 2.0 world of social marketing.  Not to mention that competitive environments in this mercurial world have a way of changing suddenly, regularly and disruptively.  Overnight.

Rx:  Do regular site checkups.  Get customers to give you feedback on your content and compare you to your competitors.  Engage your writing service to do a content audit and make recommendations.

3.  “We have more customers than we can service.” You might think of this as the lulled-into-complacency syndrome.  Getting comfortable is an open invitation to competitors looking to feast on your early gains.  Never forget the sage words of Intel’s Andy Grove: only the paranoid survive.

Rx: Lively, engaging content that spotlights the way users apply your technology can form the basis of much more than garden-variety application stories.  Dive deeply into unconventional applications as a way to showcase more features and benefits.

4.  “We’ve got a three year technology lead on our closest competitor.”  No you don’t.  Cling to this misguided notion and you’ll spend more time playing defense than you will on offense successfully marketing your differentiation and advantages that address your customers’ needs.

Rx: Concentrate on practical market education tools that explain your distinction in the market from a rational, pragmatic and credible point-of view.  No reader wants to be told how great your technology is.  They want to know how your technology is best suited to their requirements to determine if you’re worthy of making the short list.

5.  “Our carbon sequestering technology advances make us a lock for a feature article in The New Yorker.” Right.  The editors there are aching for a tutorial on multi-pollutant removal strategies because the readership is chock full of energy czars, sustainability directors and energy policy wonks.  Not.

Rx: Ask your writers to weigh-in on if and how your written pieces can be best placed or re-purposed.  Don’t ‘spray and pray’ your content.

Bringing new ideas to the table is the engine room of business.  But before adopting those great ideas as gospel, put them through a messaging stress test.   Unless, of course, you subscribe to the irony of David Brinkley’s collection of closing commentaries entitled, “Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion.”

What other signs of “thin skin” can you think of?  What does your team do to encourage outsourced content creators to “push back” on directives they believe are misguided?