Content marketing doesn’t happen automatically; marketing managers almost always need to jump through hoops to make the effort worthwhile.

A recent Hubspot article called “5 Common Content Marketing Challenges”
mentioned lack of time, lack of experience, lack of readership, lack of results and lack of organizational support as primary reasons for not being able to get content rolling out on a regular basis.

As a marketing manager, you have people asking you – maybe you’re asking yourself – “How hard can this be? The channels are everywhere. We should be pumping content out so people know about us.”

I note a few other obstacles besides the ones in the Hubspot article:

Lack of faith – “How do I know that any of this stuff will really work?” you ask. Well, you know that you need content one way or the other, because you have stories you absolutely need to tell. You don’t need to be the next Ashton Kutcher or Betty White. All you need to do is ensure that Sales has what it needs to do its job: leads and something to show to those leads.

Lack of focus – Pick a couple of channels and get good at them. You’ll kill yourself and those around you trying to spread yourself too thin, so don’t try. It can take a while to find out where your prospects spend their time and how to appeal to them, so get ready for a hunt.

Lack of sleep – Spending those first waking hours answering questions in forums? Hunching over your pastrami sandwich while you tweet? Sitting in bed with your laptop, studying your Web stats? Good luck. Obsessing over the stuff doesn’t really make you a better marketer, just a more tired one.

Remember that your job is to start conversations. And after all, how hard could that be?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/senor_codo/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Facebook’s “friend” metaphor takes on new meaning in marketing communications. Use your marketing content to make friends.

My friend and former business partner John Bromhead has often maintained that the purpose of marketing is to start a conversation. It’s easy to grasp that concept, especially when you’re trying to explain the difference between marketing and sales.

I happened onto a post last week by Johnny B. Truant, in which he blew the long-standing lid off that pot for me:

So I told him: People don’t come to me because I create the best WordPress websites in the world, because I don’t. The people who come to me do so because we’re friends…

If you write and talk about yourself as a whole person, rather than a one-dimensional business drone, people tend to be interested in you.

If you answer tweets and emails in a somewhat chatty, personal way instead of going for the sale when it’s not obviously warranted, people tend to enjoy talking to you.

And when all of those friends — and friends of those friends — one day have a need that you are able to fill, they won’t go to Google and look for the first search result or for the guy with the cheapest price. It’s human nature that they’ll come to you — their friend — first.

With that mindset, you don’t stop trying once you’ve got the conversation going, do you? Your goal is to make friends, and that will take more effort than idle chatter.

Marketing Communications for Friends

How can you make your marketing communications efforts work like that?

1. Don’t lie. Or even bend the truth. You didn’t make friends that way on the playground, and it won’t work on the Web.
2. Give more than you get. Give away a white paper or an e-book, and make sure the recipients get more out of it than they bargained for.
3. Don’t sell. People like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold to, and that goes quintuple for friends.
4. Put some humanity into your marketing communications. “Write and talk about yourself as a whole person,” says Johnny. Can you make your organization sound as though it’s made up of whole persons?

Johnny finishes:

The web has magnified our interpersonal connections and the ability to meet new folks in new ways, but it hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of relationships. If we like people, then we want to hang out with them more, and do more with them. It’s that simple.

Now get out there and make some new friends.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: U.S. National Archives

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What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.

A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,

Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough.  So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.

I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years and can finally weave a parable around it.

In short, my response is:

You say “fake words” and “cheerleading” as if they were bad things.

Here’s why.

Sporting Event = Game + Cheerleading

I’ve taken to attending football and basketball games at my sons’ school of late. It didn’t take me very long to develop a deep appreciation for the role played by the top-flight cheerleading squad in these sporting events: they cheer, kick, jump, form pyramids, turn somersaults, sell raffle tickets and generally spice up the evening. They’re a show unto themselves, really, and I can easily forget about the game I’m supposed to be watching, for all the talent, energy and acrobatic skill they display.

Cheerleaders are unflappable. Regardless of the team’s plight or good fortune, their tone is upbeat, emotionally engaging and designed to make you feel good about being there. It’s a job they do well, and we spectators need them to do it for us. They don’t put points on the board, but it’s great performing nonetheless.

Meanwhile, on the field or the court, the game is in one of three states:

1. It’s a wipeout, and we’re winning.
2. It’s a wipeout, and we’re losing.
3. It’s a close game, and it’s making us nervous.

The marvelous thing about cheerleaders is that, regardless of the state, they’re doing the same thing. Sure, maybe they’re doing the touchdown cheer less often in state 2, but they’re still cheering almost constantly, with smiles on their faces, pom-poms in their hands and high kicks in their legs.

Why?

Because their voice is an important part of the game, too. Other people have the job of scoring points; cheerleaders have a different job.

Writing and Cheerleading

As a marketing manager, you’re responsible for telling your organization’s story and starting the conversations that Sales will continue. But you can’t use the same voice or tone for every story and conversation. (If you do, you must be tired of it.)

What if “fluff” and cheerleading are an important part of your game, too?

Think of the marketing pieces you put out: white papers, press releases, case studies, technology overviews, market research, annual reports, corporate backgrounders, and all of the copy on your Website. Can you honestly look at all that content and say that it’s pure game, pure fact, pure attempts to persuade prospects with may-the-best-company-win objectivity?

Sure, you give your writers access to your executives, to industry analysts, to your internal data and research, and they give you back valuable content that Sales can use to persuade prospects and beat your competitors.

But fess up; you’ve also got some corporate cheerleading in there, haven’t you? A little rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-go-team-go that puts a sunny face on things, even if sales are tanking and your technology is under scrutiny by the European Union?

Can you be that honest with your marketing communications writers? Can you tell them, “That report you wrote last month was dead-on objective, but this needs to be an upbeat piece on how our product is making life better for soccer moms. Don’t mention our ongoing patent litigation; just paint a favorable picture. It’s what we need right now.”

More crucially, when your colleagues start making snide remarks about “fluff pieces,” can you take the heat?

Yes, you can. As a marketing manager you’ve done your job by providing both objective and “soft” content. Just tell the cynics the parable of the football game and the cheerleaders.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: avinashkunnath

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“Marketing communications” and “I promise” don’t always fit in the same thought, but they should. Once you make the commitment to your customers, your marketing communications writer can convey it.

There’s nothing more discouraging than a broken promise, and nothing more encouraging than an honored one.

Which one do you want to make to your followers, prospects and customers?

Figure Out Your Promise

Sonia Simone of Copyblogger renown writes about promises in the context of sales copy in part 6 of her series, “Internet Marketing for Smart People”:

In a more content-driven sales system, you don’t use a single letter like this one to deliver your entire sales message.

Instead, you figure out the most important promises you’re making, and you create content that addresses each one.

…

The first thing you need to think about is what kind of “big promise” you can make to your audience.

I’ve mentioned that the lot of the marketing manager is to start conversations, but what if you spent some time figuring out what your organization’s promise is? What are you in business to promise people, and deliver on?

Sonia again:

What pressing problem do you solve?
What pain do you remove?
What value do you add?
What pleasure do you create?
What freedom do you permit?
What connection do you allow?

Do you think of your company that way? Isn’t that what marketing managers should do?

Build Content around Your Promise

Once you’ve figured out the promise you can reliably deliver on (without going out of business), you need to baptize your writer in it. It’s as important as your message, maybe more so.

She then needs to wrap your content around the promise, with sentences as forthright and determined as the promise itself:

• “Readers of this white paper will find three solid reasons and the data behind them to build their own business case for mobile content personalization technology.”
• “Don’t see your industry, use case or price range among our case studies? Call us, and if we don’t have what you’re looking for, we’ll tell you so right away.”
• “If you’re tired of never being able to find anything on your company’s portal, click here for a demo of our search technology. Within 60 seconds, you’ll know whether it’s right for you or not.”
• “I believe the time to act on teens’ behalf is now. Sooner or later the teen or teens you care about are going to be facing the issues this product addresses, so you can make an investment now, or attempt damage control later. I don’t know why you’d choose the latter.” (from Josh Shipp)

Do you know what your company’s promise is? If so, can you get your writer to convey it? If not, can you get the ball rolling and find out what it is?

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: kayladavis

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Attention + conversation = following

At its core, the goal of a marketing effort these days is to create a following and start conversations that include you. Hire a writer who understands how you want to go about it.

My friend and colleague John Bromhead is fond of saying,

Marketing is the process of starting a conversation.

David Meerman Scott is more specific:

Marketers, PR pros, advertisers, and salespeople are on the payroll for one reason: To generate attention.

In short, we’re all trying to generate attention in order to start conversations. For a long time, we’ve assumed that the conversations would be between our prospects and us, but the big lesson of social media is that the most powerful attention and conversations take place in this “following” that we’re creating in our wake.

Your marketing communications writers need to understand that, and they need to deliver content that fits the way your organization is creating its following.

Don’t most of your marketing pieces contain a section titled, “For More Information”? Why?

Your ideal readers have just met you, and you’ve just shoved a few hundred or thousand words of copy down their throats. Do you really think that most of them want more information? Do you think that they are ready to mail you a check now?

Instead of “For More Information,” say “To Follow Us.” That’s what they’re ready to do now. They want to tune in to the conversations going on about you, to see how/whether you’re engaged with the audience. They want to see what kind of attention you’re generating, and what you’re doing with it.

Do your white papers, case studies, Web content and copy still pump information at your readers so that they’ll buy from you? Or, does your content give readers enough value for them to want to follow you, then decide whether they want to buy from you when the time is ripe?

How have you made that change? Have your marketing communications writers made it with you?

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Brianforbes37

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Don't market to me, tell me a story.

People won’t read all the way through your 250-word press release, but they will read your 1000-word story. Can your marketing communications writer deliver a story for you?

 

Susan Straight, professor of creative writing at University of California at Riverside, posted an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

Over the years, some people have said to me that it’s frivolous to teach writing — compared with a practical skill like auto mechanics or biology or engineering. But I say that each of my students who learned to tell a story, who taught someone else how to tell a story, who read a story and thought about it and kept it inside until its meaning was clear, learned something vital. The world runs on stories. It is how we humans survive.

What I tried to give them, and what I hope to give my students this fall, is the power that comes with the freedom to write about themselves, to tell their own stories and the stories of their communities, populated by people they know, real or imagined.

Can you believe that, as a marketing manager, it is part of your job description to start a conversation with your prospects by telling a story?

How else are you going to do it, and not turn them off? To paraphrase Susan, “your marketing effort runs on stories. It is how your company survives.”

When you hire a marketing communications writer, ask for a story among the writing samples. Case studies and customer success stories are fertile ground for this, but not all case studies make it to the promised land of good stories.

Three marketing managers are walking down a road in Texas when they come to a bridge over a creek…

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: ardenswayoflife

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6 new channels!

Hire a writer who understands that the social media business story is still warming up, and that it consists of several different channels.

How is your business using social media in all its channels? More importantly, how are the people inside your business using them?

I hope you are past the notion that this is all about a bunch of teenagers exchanging gossip, or that this is just “the new t.v.”? There are plenty of social media business success stories, including these compiled about Twitter by MarketingProfs.

There’s a strangely inverse relationship between business and social media:

• Business starts out as being about money, but ends up being about relationships.
• Social media channels starts out as being about relationships, and end up being about money (if you play them right).

Your Social Media Business in 6 Channels

So, what is your business in social media? Can you tell the players? Do you even have a program yet?

Heather Lutze of the Findability Group summarized social media for business as being in 6 main channels (as of this summer, anyway). With a tip of the hat to Heather, here’s my supplement to her summary:

1. LinkedIn – ranks well in search engines, strong focus on business and professional content, good place to describe your company.
2. Facebook – not as useful for search engine marketing because the personal pages are not indexed (group pages, however, are indexed). Facebook started out as strong in personal networking (think colleges and margaritas) and has gained a lot of momentum by facilitating business-to-consumer relationships.
3. MySpace – The social media darling of yesteryear, its reputation has not benefited much from news items detailing bad behavior among its users. Hey, it’s what we had first, so we all saw what we could get away with. Got a band? Be on MySpace.
4. YouTube – Yes, you too can market yourself with video; just ask Blendtec. You can also screw it up if you’re not careful; just ask Bank of America. Well indexed for search engines. Not as easy as updating a LinkedIn profile, but you may as well try something new in your organization. It’s the 21st century, after all.
5. Blogging – Search engines love blogs (constantly updated content), your customers love blogs (if you’re really creating a relationship with them and not just breathing your own exhaust) and your search engine marketing effort loves blogs (new ways to explore the keywords prospects use to find you). Blogging is a lot of work. So is business. Remember?
6. Twitter – Zen meets the Internet. Don’t try to control Twitter; just ride it as best you can. It’s its own best search engine, and you can find information, trends and opinions there as they arise.

Tell Your Story in Social Media Terms

Once you’ve decided on the channel(s) you want to approach, you’ll need content, because whatever you may do in social media, you need to tell your story eventually. Your marketing communication writers need to get your message out consistently and to a variety of audiences.

You cannot fill your Social Media channels with brochure copy. Nobody on the Web cares about you, your company or your products; they care about what you can do for them and their problems.

When you hire a writer for social media in business, you need to start and maintain a conversation in a new language, and not just re-hash your strengths. Your Web content writer needs to understand your message and tailor it to as many different channels as you select.

What do you think about these social media business channels? Where and how are you casting your lot?

photo credit: avlxyz

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It starts with The Event. Maybe you’ve undergone an internal transformation, and you now have a secret sauce that will help you leave your rivals in the dust. Perhaps you’ve survived a hostile takeover bid that has left you stronger. Or you’ve just received approval for your patent on a better mousetrap.

You have the noble goal of writing up The Event and putting the story into people’s hands so that they’ll admire you, seek to emulate you and want to buy your products.

Good luck.

Thought Leadership Hubris

It’s a bit cheeky, saying that you’re going to lead thought. It reminds me of resolving to get somebody to fall in love with you. In fact, that’s what it is, and that’s why there are several obstacles to your thought leadership effort:

1. I’ve worked on thought-leadership white paper projects. They’re devastating. They are more taxing than The Event. Everybody has a different perspective on the project and it will almost surely take you longer and cost you more than you bargain for. It’s too big a bite.
2. In your own experience, have you ever read anything and suddenly noticed that your thought was now being led in a different direction? What makes you think your paper – or entire content campaign – will have this effect on anybody else? Probably the biggest popular force leading thought these days is Apple Inc., and they’re doing it with the impact of their products on consumers, not with their content.
3. In the era of social media, it’s almost silly to think you can lead thought, because thought is more mercurial and fickle than ever. People want to follow, but they don’t want their thought led. If your content does result in new customers, how are you going to greet them: “Thank you for letting us lead your thought,” or “Thank you for following us”?
4. As a marketing manager, your goal is to start conversations. What kind of conversation are you trying to have if you attempt to lead people’s thought?

Don’t Lead Thought; Develop a Following

Smart marketing managers will look at this differently: Instead of trying to lead thought, they devote the energy to building a following.

This is an important nuance because you can’t measure how much thought you’re leading, but you can measure the development of your following. This is the true value for business of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Mind you, people like David Meerman Scott lump blogs, podcasts, case studies and all other sorts of marketing communication into the category of “thought leadership,” and maybe they are able to lead thought with campaigns like that. But most of us are just struggling to get our content ducks in a row, and “thought leadership” is shooting for the moon to us.

The Moral: You can lead eyes to your story, but you can’t lead thought.

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What does a Content Buffet look like?

Let’s say you have a recent, huge win:

• a landmark new customer
• a long-held strategic goal reached on time and under budget
• an overnight success five years in the making
• a game-changing new way of doing business that your competitors can’t duplicate even if they know what you’re doing

“We’ve got to tell this story!” you say. Your company and all the partners who have helped you make it happen are dying to get the news out. You convene a meeting with all of the stakeholders and present everything you know about the win: why it had to happen, how many bumps you hit, what it fixed, how it makes your business different, what your customers are saying now, why your stock price is climbing, how your employees are excelling.

It’s a huge story, with lots of anecdotes, charts, numbers, graphs, references and quotes. Everybody at the table wants the story for his/her audience, channel, message, format and business objective.

Suddenly you realize that it may be one story, but it’s two dozen “tellings.” You’re standing at the head of the Content Buffet, plate in hand, ready to go. If you rush through and gorge yourself indiscriminately, you’ll be sorry later.

But if you’re careful, you can get a lot of efficient content out of it.

What do you do at the Content Buffet?

1. Take inventory. Identify everybody’s story-needs and make sure you understand them before you have anything written. Nobody wants to be forgotten or get stuck with with content that meets somebody else’s needs, but not theirs.
2. Canonize messages. Are you going to use the same message in both the version you give your employees and the one you give prospects? Of course not. Develop a message for each audience — or set of similar audiences — and hire a writer who will use them as a point of departure, the central reason for writing and reading the story.
3. Compile the greatest hits. The big news in the HR story is how your employees worked out their own new job descriptions. Execs want to read what your managers had to do to get their teams on board. The scientists want to see how you changed the DNA of a rabbit. Every story has greatest hits, and every audience is receptive to a different kind of greatest hit. Figure out what they are and make sure they stand out in the piece.
4. List the questions, then answer them. Every story breaks down into the answers to a series of questions, the same as a conversation does. The first question, of course, is “Why should I care?” (See “Canonize messages” above.) The rest follow from there: “What did you do first?” “Why did you do that?” “Who helped you?” “How do you know you succeeded?” “What would you do differently if you had to do it again?” At the end, tell your readers how they can get in touch with you if you didn’t answer all of their questions.
5. Decide on formats. Your sales force may want a report or white paper to hand to prospects, but your sales coaches want a script and a presentation to train the sales force. Don’t make everybody pick vanilla; tell the story in a format that will work for each audience.
6. Create calls to action. Never lose sight of why you’re telling the story: To elicit a response. Whether for sympathy, indignation, compassion, trust, confidence, curiosity or persuasion, you want your story to lead to some next step. Figure out what that is for each audience and build it into the way in which you tell the story.

First map this out, then pick up a plate and go to the buffet. You’ll get a lot more out of it.

photo credit: freeparking

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But what happens when you don’t know what you want, or when you ask for something that is different from what you want? The writer can’t look inside your brain and figure out what you want. In fact, if you confuse him enough, a smart writer will simply decline your project, and invite you to go confuse somebody else.

Frankly, I see this a lot with white papers.

Marketing managers think they need a white paper because it’s a magic carpet to more leads or industry recognition. You can do a lot with a white paper, but it’s not a panacea.

In March, I met a colleague in long-distance telecom company who offered from a form-fill page a white paper he had written. He was looking for a writer to create follow-on white papers and develop much more content for his site. In May, we exchanged e-mail on how the project was going.

I’m questioning the white paper project now. Take a look at my form-fill page: [link removed]

I’m only getting about 1 request per day for my current white paper. Am I doing something fatally wrong? If I’m going to invest the money in more white papers, I want to make sure they pay off quickly.

Thoughts?

I had a few thoughts:

1. He asked too many questions on the form, and it turned people off. You can’t start a conversation that way.
2. The existing white paper wasn’t interesting, and it didn’t tell people how to save money on their long-distance calling.
3. “One request per day” tells me that the white paper was a standalone effort, and that he had no other content or attention-getters driving people to the paper.
4. “White papers…pay off quickly” are two concepts that don’t really belong in the same sentence. Race track bets and slot machine expenditures pay off quickly; white papers do not.

This manager knew what he wanted – lead-generating content – but I think he was asking for the wrong thing – white papers. I prompted him to think more broadly about content that would serve his purpose: case studies, blog posts, how-to articles, Web pages, and so on.

If he hired a writer to do a white paper, he would end up with what he’d asked for, but not what he wanted, and he would become even more frustrated for having spent the money on a white (paper) elephant.

Writer Gordon Graham weighed in on this as well:

Caution: Many people say “white paper” when they really mean a customer story, a brochure, or even a press release. Perhaps your client REALLY means a white paper, perhaps not. Don’t be afraid to propose what a prospect really NEEDS, not what they say they want.

For-instance, I’m engaged with a prospect who asked me about doing 5 to 10 “white papers” for a new web site. I’m pretty sure they can achieve what they want to with shorter 2- to 3-page “articles” instead of full 5- to 8-page white papers. So I’m proposing that… meaning that they can get 10 or 12 shorter articles for the same budget as 5 longer white papers.

It’s important to listen carefully to what prospects are trying to accomplish, and then give them your best advice about how to achieve that… regardless of the preconceived ideas they may have in their minds.

Do you trust your writer enough to talk about your broader content plans with her? If you try it, and you don’t get useful feedback, find somebody with whom you can talk it over, until “what I want” equals “what I ask for.”

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