Content Marketing Heroes & Zeroes: Which Are You?

Here is the current marketing reality:  Disruptive (yet relevant) content generates leads and sales.  Fluff gets punished!  It wastes marketing dollars, sinks organizations and even companies.

Interesting! If I can use just a single word to describe a successful content marketing effort, it would be "interesting."  If I could add another word, it would be "disruptive".

Interesting content generates sales and has a hugely positive effect on brands.  Here is why:

1.  People that come across that content and find it interesting and relevant usually take an action (if that is the intended outcome).  It may be a buying action (read leads and $$$) or something else.

2.  Viewers that find your content intriguing enough to share with others, may do so by using social and community channels.  This will bring more qualified visitors, leads and sales.

3. Social media sharing also generates positive signals for search engines. People may link to the pages with interesting content.  Positive social response, links and other signals (like Google finding the content relevant for ranking against target high value key phrases), may catapult your content to page 1 of organic search results, generating significant amount of interest, leads and sales -- today, tomorrow and for a long time to come -- without requiring additional investments or efforts.

Boring!  Boring content and fluff have the opposite effect on marketing teams and companies.

1.  Boring content is created.  Social feeds are written. Collateral materials are generated.  Everything seems to be working well.  Except all these activities generate almost no leads.  Marketing budgets get wasted. 

2.  Boring content doesn't get readers.  People don't share, link or discuss such content.  Search engines largely ignore the pages with boring content.  Industry communities laugh at that content.  Brands get tarnished and ridiculed by the very people they are trying to influence and engage.

3.  Organic search lead generation channel becomes completely dead, because the product is nowhere to be found in organic search results for valuable keywords.

With no high quality leads coming from social, community, organic search and referral channels, companies with fluff content and ineffective content marketing teams are forced to look for alternative lead generation sources that are much more expensive and ineffective, like cold calling. This can cause both the marketing organization and later the product/company to fail.


Google on "boring".  Matt Cutts, Google's spam tzar, recently stated that,

"there’s a little bit of reinforcement that helps force you to either be interesting or say interesting things or think hard about how to make something compelling."


Yet, most of content on web sites, blogs and vendor-posted social media outlets is generic and extremely boring.

Here is an example from Symantec's SMB site: "We understand that you want solutions to work, no matter what. We take pride in providing our industry-leading technology to small and medium businesses in a way that’s powerful enough to protect an enterprise-sized company, yet designed for smaller companies."

Here is another example -- this one is from Cisco's web site: "These solutions can help you get the full value of your investment in network architecture and technologies to support today's businesses, and provide the framework to rapidly evolve over time to meet customers' changing needs."

Both statements say nothing, yet can be applied to thousands of products.


Skill Set.  So where is the disconnect?  It's in the skill gap between yesterday's content producers (MarComm) that generate boring and fluffy materials and today's content needs -- fresh, unique and to the point.

It is also in lack of understanding of the importance and the potential of lead generation using content marketing by marketing and other executives.

More on the skills necessary for a successful marketing content strategy in my next blog entry.

It's all about content... and metrics

How important is content quality in your marketing efforts?  Lip service aside, many organizations treat it  secondary at best.  Yet, in the modern world of online marketing, content is one of the most important components of your success.

Let's take an example of email nurturing.  Last week we were planning an email campaign with a very strong article written by an expert and a decent landing page.

We wrote the email and were thinking about the subject line.  My team member had it as "7 ways to ..."  To me, it seemed a little too "fluffy."  So after some more brainstorming we came up with another line that was more informative (at least IMO), like "xx  xx failure rates."

The theory behind it was that the "email receiver" would click on it because it would appear to be more of an informative email vs. "push my products" one.  We spent about an hour on the subject line debate.  Most organizations I know would have considered this as wasted time.  Was it though?

We conducted A/B test during the next few days.  Same email, same call to action, same landing page.   Different subject lines.

Results:

Subject Line 1: "7 ways..."   Open rate: 4.4%, click through rate: 0.2%
Subject Line 2: "...rates"  Open rate: 7.0%, click through rate: 0.5%

As you can see, there is a huge difference in these rates, which translated to 12 (SL1) leads against 50+ (SL2).  This is one of the best demonstrations (supported by metrics) of the difference that content quality makes.

The next A/B test will be this week.  We are going to be testing the email text.  We tuned it on Friday.  Given we see interesting results, I will blog about it later.

6 Ways To Avoid Fluff in Your Marketing Materials

FLUFF is one of my pet peeves. Why use complicated words that add up into phrases that mean nothing?  Words like leverage, easy, flexible, scaleable, secure, ROI, TCO.   They demonstrate lack of subject knowledge and discourage the target audience from reading these documents / web sites / blogs.

Here is an example I just found on a web site of a well known vendor.  "...(product) is the foundation for the CIO's and IT leadership team's performance system. It features a cascaded optimization system, the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world."

What?  A "hybrid world?"  Wasted words.  I counted 19 words that are just fluff and mean nothing.  Wasted space.  Wasted time and budgets.  There are better and more practical ways of writing marketing materials that people understand and read.  My suggestions are below:

1.  Know your audience.  Understand who exactly is your audience.  Which industry?  What is the main function of your target reader?  What are their pressures and challenges?  What are their titles and reporting structures?  Their internal customers.  Demographics.  Internal politics, etc.

2.  Understand the lingo your audience uses.  Talk to your customers directly.  Ask how are they using your product.  Don't assume you know the words they use.  For example, you would fail if you used "IT words" with process engineers in Electric Power companies.  When marketing cyber security to Power and Energy, we had to change about 80% of our marketing materials.  But the results were amazing - almost every IT department we contacted, wanted to talk to us.  Even at the meetings, we were treated like peers rather than vendors.

3.  Simplify.  Read what you wrote out loud.  Pretend you are presenting in person to your target audience.  Keep on rewriting until the text flows easily and you would have no problem verbally presenting it.

4.  Be brief.  Less is more.  Remember, the goal of most marketing materials is not to close the deal, but rather get the prospect interested enough to contact sales or try the product.  Longer texts tend to discourage busy viewers from reading.

5.  Avoid fluff.  Avoid generic words, like flexible or leverage.  Try quantifying or using proof points.  For example, "the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets" is fluff.  However, something like, "a system covering 95% of the industry's IT-controlled assets" is much more credible and easier to understand.

6.  Test.  Most of us, marketers, don't work in the functional area of our target buyers.  It may be a good idea to test the text with your target audience.  This can be a very revealing exercise.  In my experience, this step has revealed some gems that turned into new marketing tools and lead generation approaches that we never knew existed.  For example, from our customer conversations we discovered an IT community called Spiceworks, that turned out to be one of the best lead  generation sources for SMB markets.