Writing great marketing content is damned hard work

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It used to really fry my first boss, an award-winning copywriter, to hear some bozo say “how fun it must be to just sit around and write all day.” Yes, there were people who actually said this. Anyone who’s ever written for a living can relate to the irritation. Good writing, or creating good content, or whatever you want to call it, is damned hard work. There’s just no other way to put it. Especially for those who take the craft seriously and seek to commit acts of literature even when it is “just website content”. The quotations are used advisedly because website content that compels busy, distracted people to take the action you want them to take involves thoughtful insights expressed in appealing ways. No easy task. Ask the people whose words got you to click on those call-to-action buttons once you got there.

Words and images that prompt the desired action is the essence of marketing: you must pinpoint your target market, understand the needs of the right buyer and package a deliverable product or service at the right time. All of this implies deep knowledge of your buyer, customer or user. It’s the offshoot of clear thinking.

Muddy writing is the product of muddy thinking. You have only to read the techno-speak and gobbledygook blathered and written, often in emails, in the typical corporate office today, even by those who should know better, in companies of all shapes and sizes: the acronyms, the language inflation and the use of nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns, as in, “We have to watch our spend this quarter”. (Presumably, you’re also paying attention to expenses.) Or, “We need to effort this, immediately”.  (Whatever “this” may be, let’s hope we do it, too.) And don’t even get me started on sports-speak. When I hear people who don’t know a left hook from a right cross talk about “punching above our weight” I want to punch them. Or when they allude to the “two-minute play” when they probably mean “two-minute offense”.

Full disclosure: If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter post.

 When he’s not ranting on this site, you can read Stan DeVaughn and his comrade-in-communications, Peter Davé, on The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle, Silicon Valley’s premiere writing and content-creation agency for the I.T. industry.

 

Four most common mistakes made by writers of marketing material (AKA “content”)

 

This post first appeared in The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle — Silicon Valley’s premiere creators and writers of technology content for the I.T. industry.

1. Focusing on selling, not telling. The brands that do kick-ass marketing always describe how they help the buyer reach a goal. The emphasis is on the buyer and their problem(s).

2. Complicating the message.  One of those brands referenced above, Apple, has a a one-sentence description — or vision — for every product it brings to market. Incredibly, every single piece of written content, in all marketing material, revolves around this one, simple sentence.  Study after study shows that people think in “chunks” and remember no more than three (or four, max) characteristics of anything.  That’s why the best content contains no more than three, core leave-behinds.  Your website visitors are busier and more distracted than ever. Make it easy for them.  Think about the most effective content you’ve read.  Chances are, the writer kept it pretty simple.  It’s why you remember it.  Simplicity is, indeed, the ultimate sophistication.

3. Failing to stay on message. Begin with a clear expression — the single sentence — of what your content must convey.  Then think of it in three parts and sketch an outline of the “sum” of the parts: What? So what? And now what?  In other words, consistent with the core sentence, describe the problem being experienced by the customer/reader, (2) all the dimensions of why this is a significant issue at this moment and (3) what needs to happen for resolution of the issue (solution to the problem).

4.  Ignoring (boring) the reader. If you’re not energized to the point of passion about your subject matter, don’t expect your reader to take up the slack.   Look at what you’re writing through the reader’s eyes. To what would you favorably respond?  Studies show that readers favor a graphic presentation of complex data, thus the popularity and more frequent use of infographics. What would make you keep reading? In your experience, which styles of content convey the most information most forcefully and memorably? Most important, what would make you want to learn  more about what the vendor has for solutions?

What does your team do to optimize the readability and simplicity of your written content — including those white papers?

 When Stan DeVaughn is not ranting on this site, you can read him and his comrade-in-communications, Peter Davé, on The Write Stuff.

Five reasons why marketing-phobic start-ups usually suck

© Rtrembly

We chuckled when we read this piece in Forbes describing why start-ups are reputed for their aversion to marketing.  Not that we find marketing or entrepreneurs especially amusing.  It just seems odd to us, in an age bristling with new tools and techniques to quantify such things, we still hear “wanna-preneurs” whining about their inability to measure the marketing function.  Hello? With folks like Eloqua and Marketo so visible and prominent, not to mention the abundance of so many online choices for determining if and how your marketing efforts are working out, the old fears about wasting-half-your-money-but-not-sure-which-half should seem archaic, right?  Apparently not to everyone.  Here’s a brief summary of the alleged fears, and our responses:

1.  Start-ups don’t understand it.  Only the business-challenged ones. The best and brightest young entrepreneurs share this in common with their seasoned elders: they “get” marketing.  They know that a company eschewing it will very likely struggle to acquire customers in the necessary volumes.   Or, as we like to say, marketing doesn’t start with a product, it starts with a customer.

2. It costs money.  So does everything else that adds value.  For that matter, useful things are rarely cheap. What did you go to all those meetings with VCs and angels for, their bottled water and coffee? We know damn few investors who are shelling out good money to striplings and greenhorns who’ve not cut their teeth on product launches, rollouts, roadshows and all the “marketing” that those efforts entail. Yes, all this is marketing.  Knowing what people place value upon is marketing. Understanding the difference between a real value proposition and hyped elevator pitch is marketing. One more thing: there’s a lot fizz out there about how to get “free” marketing or publicity and how to make people basically work for nothing besides the pleasure of associating with you.  We say this: the old adage about getting what one pays for is as true today as it was when it was coined. Pun intended. BTW, here’s the real-world definition 0f a value proposition: it’s the dollar difference between the value assigned by the customer to the product’s benefits minus the sum of the product’s price + adoption cost.  The bigger the remainder after the subtraction, the more compelling the value.

3. They don’t see it as a priority. See #1 above. Serial entrepreneur Joel Gascoigne’s thoughts express ours precisely. “I think a very valid fear when starting to consider marketing a start-up is that you only get one chance with people you reach. The idea that someone will make their final decision based on their first impression is very believable. We’ve found out this is far from the case…I believe that what feels like ‘too early’ is in fact a great time to start marketing. Most people have probably delayed much longer than they should”.

4. It’s hard to measure success.  In fact, it’s never been easier. There’s an entire category of software (SaaS) that analyzes your outreach, lead-volume, targeting efficiency, lead nurturing, close rate, time to close, cost-per-close, and revenue-per-new customer — to name just a few metrics — that’s being utilized like crazy today. By start-ups. Gartner expects this category to outgrow  I.T. budgets in another two years.

5. Not knowing whom to hire. A start-up would be wise to outsource some functions, depending on expertise level of the founding team.  As far as vetting, it’s no different from any hiring process. You look for domain expertise, certainly, but savvy (and significant accomplishments) in the specific function you want, e.g., PR, web development, content creation, and social media, in our opinion, trumps technical credentials. Be diligent about reference checking and seeing recent work samples.  Finally you want someone you’d be comfortable and confident sharing a foxhole with. Because in the early going you’ll be in one sooner or later, together.

Remember the old saying on the wall of the dentist’s office: “Do I have to floss all of my teeth?” “Only the ones you want to keep.”  Here’s the marketing version: “Do we have to market all of our products?”  “Just the ones you want people to buy.” 

When Stan DeVaughn is not ranting on this site, you can read him and his comrade-in-communications, Peter Davé, on The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle–Silicon Valley’s premiere technology writing and content creation agency for the I.T. industry.

Smaller screens call for shorter B2B content

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This post first appeared in The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle — Silicon Valley’s premiere creators and writers of technology content for the I.T. industry.

To get your online content consumed, you have to hook your visitor.  Problem is, there’s never been so much bait in the water.  Exercise: go through your website and try cutting it in half. Yes, half.

“If I had more time I’d have written a shorter letter” is an apt description of the quandary in which many B2B marketers find themselves today.  Smaller screens, smaller form factors and resistance to scrolling have 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.

The cut-in-half exercise: 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?

When Stan DeVaughn is not ranting on this site, you can read him and his comrade-in-communications, Peter Davé, on The Write Stuff.

Best practices for your B2B website content

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This post first appeared in The Write Stuff – the blog of Write Angle, Silicon Valley’s premiere content creation and writing agency for the I.T. industry.

Whenever we’re assigned to write clients’ web pages we follow best practices, same as we do for all content.  What “best practices” call for on websites is not so different from other forms but the web does force the writer and editor to become a little more brutal.  Actually, it’s the audience that’s the force at work.

Customers are not interested in your product (or service), they’re interested in their problem.  They don’t care about you so much as the need they’re trying to fill or the hard facts they’re trying to gather as the basis of filling that need.  And this tells you two things:

1.  To the extent that your product or service is too much in the face of the site visitor, you increase your chances of a quicker “bounce”, or departure of this visitor.

2.  Ditto above if your content is jargon-heavy with with acronyms or industry-speak.

Except for those pages or links that are specifically tailored for existing customers, or prospects who are well down the path to a decision, you want your web content to widen the top of the funnel.  So, you’re going to score points to the degree you show an interest and expertise in the problems they have, not the fixes you offer.  Not yet, anyway.  With this in mind, product-focused content should be avoided.  Your ‘welcoming lobby’ should be a pressure-free zone to introduce the visitor to your business, same as your social-media strategy should be at all times.  It’s where you start to build trust.

Use only those words and expressions that you are certain your prospects use.  Search engines use signals throughout social media for ranking search  results.  This means that your web site is only incidental to the wider territory your prospects cover every day and in which they interact with other prospects online.  Be sure to use the words and phrases they are looking for, not the flavor-of-the-month terminology you think is cool.

When he’s not ranting on this site, Stan DeVaughn holds forth along with comrade-in-communications Peter Davé on The Write Stuff.

The first step toward making your B2B marketing content drive revenue

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This post appeared today on The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle — Silicon Valley’s premiere, hi-tech writing and content-creation agency.

So when an authority like Marketo weighs in on why a steady stream of great content is key to driving B2B revenue today, we’ll pay attention.

Marketo is a leader in marketing automation (MA), the software that more and more companies use today to make their marketing teams more measurable and accountable, more engaged with customers and better enabled to scale time and resources. In other words, it makes the companies that use it better at marketing and selling. And it’s been good for Marketo, and for Eloqua, to name the two biggies in MA.  Expenditures on marketing technology, according to Gartner, will exceed corporate IT budgets by 2015.

At Write Angle, we were struck by something Marketo had to say via a recent post by Heidi Bullock: “Technology is awesome, but it really is only as good as the people who implement it and manage it on a day-to-day basis. That’s why it is important to think about your team structure when putting software systems in place”.

So which member of this team was first on the team list cited by Marketo? It was the day-to-day manager of content.

No matter which member of your team is tapped for the job, the skill-set is the same: It must be someone who can conceive and create a steady stream of compelling content, from written web copy, case studies or white papers to engaging video that showcases your value proposition from all angles — and re-purposes this content across all media and platforms. Whether you have the talent on hand for this key task, or choose to outsource to a content writing service, the overarching need for marketing content in today’s content-marketing world is clear.  The question is: How clear is your content today and how do you know for sure?

As Big Data grows bigger, vendor differentiation grows more important

iStockphoto, scanrail

 

This post appeared today in The Write Stuff, the blog of Silicon Valley’s premiere technology writing service Write Angle.

Communicating what makes you different in the Big Data analytics market has never been more important than right now. The sheer number of exhibitors staking a claim in the Big Data bonanza at the Strata Conference underscores how quickly competition is emerging in this market.

 This week’s conference showcased a veritable Who’s Who in the industry today, including one of our clients, Glassbeam.  Distinguishing itself among the throng of Big Data players, Glassbeam develops big data applications that help companies improve their business and IT operations by intelligently extracting strategic and tactical insights from huge amounts of multi-structured machine data by way of pre-packaged applications.

 To communicate this market position, we helped Glassbeam by preparing fresh web content, creating a product-management solutions brief, a white paper on multi-structured data and a strategic case study featuring Aruba Networks.

 As the competitive landscape become further cluttered with more vendors, claims and counterclaims, credible content  that sets a vendor apart from the crowd will only grow in importance.

 

(When Stan DeVaughn isn’t ranting in this blog, he’s collaborating with Write Angle agency partner Peter Davé in a never-ending quest to purge Silicon Valley of lame marketing content. He approved this message.)

 

Does your website say good things about you?

© Robnroll

If lame marketing content is such a serious disadvantage why is there so much of it on so many high-tech websites? No early-stage company thinks of itself as a sub-par marketer.  But this is what’s conveyed by many high-tech websites with vague or overblown claims and unclear messages indistinguishable from the competition.

And it makes no difference if it’s a mature brand or an upstart in an established category or an early-stage outfit struggling to establish leadership in a new one. In each case, content that clearly communicates who you are and why you’re significant does three things, all of them good:

• It sets you apart from those who are less articulate and creates an air of accessibility.
• It facilitates understanding of your industry, especially a new one.
• In a new space it cements your standing as a leading exponent of the “new, new thing” whatever that happens to be.  Industry watchers and sales prospects will naturally gravitate towards you.

We were again reminded of the dearth of writing that sells in this post by New York Times best-selling author Dave Kerpen ( Likeable Business and Likeable Social Media). Self-evident and relevant as his principles may be, especially to B2B brands in technology, they are no less elusive. Clear and compelling written content will positively differentiate your messages and give you a leg up. People who write well are taken seriously more readily, he says.  Likewise for young companies striving to seriously impress prospects and opinion leaders.

In mercurial marketplaces, expressing your brand with precision and speed can represent a key competitive advantage — but only for those marketers who can see the writing on the wall. What’s your written content saying about you?

When he’s not ranting on this site, Stan DeVaughn can be found holding forth on The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle, Silicon Valley’s premiere content creation and writing agency for I.T. and other technology categories.

What your momma can teach you about writing good content

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This post originally appeared on The Write Stuff where Stan DeVaughn blogs on behalf of Write Angle, Silicon Valley’s premiere technology writing agency.

Chances are your mom was a tough customer with a sophisticated BS-detection system.  Especially when it came to shopping and sifting through manufacturers’ claims. Today’s mothers, if we are to believe the studies, are every bit as shrewd.  Difference today is that mom knows her way around the Web and how to find exactly what she wants. Hint: she goes far beyond the brand’s website to find “the friendly neighbor over the virtual fence” who can share the inside scoop on how different products compare.

In other words, today’s moms’ behavior in their marketplace is identical to that of the hardest-nosed prospects in yours. So what lessons can you as a B2B marketer draw from the most successful consumer brands when it comes to building credibility among their most skeptical customers — those prove-it-to-me moms who guard their family’s budgets with a fist as tight as any corporate controller’s?

1. Redouble your efforts to make everything you present specifically relevant and timely to the target. Successful brands understand that today’s e-customers turn first to experts and respected peers, never the brand spokespersons.  And just as moms go right to the blogosphere for tips and guidance, B2B buyers increasingly go straight to the alpha opinion leaders in their categories.

2. Try harder to instigate only those discussions about your industry and technology that the opinion makers and thought leaders want to have. This is a subtle shift from a time, not so long ago, when marketing departments and their various agencies would look for issues that a company might be able to “own”.  The trick today is to pinpoint specific hot buttons drawing the most buzz and then to weigh in with your perspective based on the experiences of your users. If your brand message is delivered in harmony with the hottest issues, over time, you enjoy the halo effect. This inspires direct conversations with more of the hottest prospects and the trials that convert to sales.  From there the credibility spreads and accelerates.

3. Constantly test your material.  A/B testing among various customer segments can reveal surprising data about user sentiments and product usage. Expose different messages that emphasize a different spin and compare the responses in terms of the activity they draw.  Then craft the next wave of content accordingly. Your mom would be proud.

Why content creators must insist that engineering delivers.

© Stelogic

 

What can the Grammys teach B2B marketers? That if you’re promising something, you’d better deliver it. There’s a simple lesson that content creators and all marketing-communicators (listen up, PR people) can learn from the way  last week’s Grammy Awards, ostensibly a tribute to Bob Marley, fell short.  And then heard about it.  We understand that engineers don’t report to marketing but the fact is that whatever is pushed and touted in the mediasphere today must be realized in the marketplace.  The penalty for failure is swift and severe as never before.

You take a certain amount of ownership when you create the content that customers and prospects consume. There’s a social contract here. And never underestimate the enforcement power of the digital culture in which those customers/prospects live. In other words, don’t get “Grammy’d”. Or, engineered. Get on the delivery track to fulfill your content’s promises — insisting on real proof points and testimony from satisfied users/beta-testers willing to speak up on your behalf. Even if they’re not in a position to testify, you’ve done diligence just by verifying.

When he’s not ranting on this blog, Stan DeVaughn can be read on The Write Stuff, along with Peter Davé. Write Angle is Silicon Valley’s premiere agency for technology writing and content creation and where the unofficial motto is Trust But Verify. At least when it comes to product claims.