What a big-data vendor’s splashy debut can teach about creating great content

 

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 today 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?

 

(This post was also published today in The Write Stuff, the blog of Write Angle Inc.)

Classic recipe for content that generates leads

Ban tryptophan from your content, online or off

The three ingredients to eye-opening content:

1.  An idea that’s relevant and compelling.  What are your customers talking about today?  What do they worry about? Wish for? Lose sleep over? Rely on for comfort? Use as standards of vendor excellence and best practices?  Addressing any of the above, proactively, will get you on their radar.  How you address it determines to what extent it endears you to them.

2.  A presentation, or package, that’s engaging.  A good guideline: scan your case studies with a ruthless eye.  Or have a trusted associate outside your company, one not known for telling you what you want to hear, look it over.  Is the main character your customer or you?  Prospects don’t want to read about your product.  They want to know about the benefits it delivered to your buyer. And how they simplified your buyer’s life.  In other words, they want to read a story about someone like them, not about you.

3.  A “product” that results in re-telling.  Think of your content as product and yourself as publisher. In the publishing business, the objective is buzz about what’s published. You know content is great (remarkable) when, like a story, it is re-told. You want your customers (“readers”) to share it with like-minded customers.  So grease the skids by making your content embeddable.  Make it easily shared across all media platforms.  Brand a YouTube channel if you’ve not already done so. Remember: leads generated by in-bound marketing, e.g. their blogs, generate leads that are up to one-half the cost of leads spawned by their traditional out-bound efforts. 

What’s your recipe for lead-minded content?

What makes a value proposition compelling is same as it ever was in marketing.  Web or no Web.

We still live in a multi-channel world.  Now there is empirical data showing that most word-of-mouth marketing happens off-line, not online.  Check out the findings of the Keller Fay Group, which said that 90% of the of the conversations people have about products, companies and brands do not occur on the Web.

This should be a wake up call for marketers obsessed with social media.  It suprises no one who has understood that a toolbox is not a strategy and that marketing techniques and tactics have always been in a state of evolution.  Look at it this way: Autodesk tools changed the way architects practice.  But the principles of architecture, structural engineering, materials science and mathematics are the same for the construction of the new Bay Bridge as they were for the Egyptian pyramids.  The way we reach out to markets today are a far cry from yesteryear, but the things that make a product’s value proposition relevant and compelling to a buyer are the same as they ever were.  The same in the age of Zuckerberg as they were in the time of Gutenberg, and long before that.  Knowledge of your customers trumps knowledge of whatever tool you happen to use to reach them.  Indeed, the former will always determine the latter.

How to build trust in your brand (or your technology, your product, or yourself).

The announcement today of Facebook Questions inspires an inevitable observation.  If building trust is the name of the game, then there is something very fundamental, primal and simple to remember here.  But like all things simple, some reminding now and again never hurts.  It is this: If you want people to trust you, go out and build a kick-ass product that gets people talking. This goes for B2B, too.  When you do, you’ve gone a long way towards achieving the holy grail of marketing: Word of Mouth (WOM).   Selling great products.  The kind that people like to talk about and recommend. From companies they trust.  Simple.