Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

• Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
• Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
• MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

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. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Toronto History

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I subscribe to Fierce Wireless. Every day, they send me a free newsletter with wireless industry news. Big names – Cisco, Ericsson, AT&T, Nokia – sponsor the newsletter, so every week or so I get email with an ad.

I don’t mind an ad, but I do mind lousy copy in an ad.

And I really mind a datasheet that somebody mistakenly used as an ad.

The wrong copy for email

Twice in a week I received a sponsored email through Fierce Wireless from the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (not its real name), an outfit that certainly knows a thing or two about marketing.

The email reads something like a product announcement, with lots of jargon-crammed bullets describing capabilities, features and benefits. It tells me all about active network abstraction and an XML-based Broadband Query Language (BQL) API.

I don’t care about this stuff.

I might care, if the copy talked about the problems that afflict people who need it. But the copy doesn’t even give me that chance.

The copy does mention (twice) that service providers and other network operators can now upgrade. But it doesn’t tell them why they should care.

The wrong email for the audience

Obviously, I’m not a network operator, so I shouldn’t have received this message. It was the wrong email for such a broad audience. It was wasted on me.

But it really didn’t have to be.

People are going to see your marketing communications – white papers, case studies, Web content, newsletters, blog – whether you intend those people as the audience or not.

At the very least, a poorly targeted impression should still help you as a marketing manager to build your brand. Your copy shouldn’t turn potential acquaintances off in a hailstorm of features and benefits.

Don’t put out dull copy. You never know where it’s going to land. Or whom you’re going to turn off when it does land.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: foxypar4

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Consider a Japanese approach to content marketing in which the content disappears after about a day. What can you learn from that?

American content marketer extraordinaire David Meerman Scott wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which is now available in Japanese and enjoying brisk sales.

Scott has partnered with Shigesato Itoi on the localization and publication of the book, and saluted the real-time nature of the content on Itoi’s site, Hobonichi. In an interview with Itoi, Scott comments:

A particularly interesting aspect is that daily content is available for only 24 hours, and then disappears. There is no archive of the daily information. This unusual content strategy is exactly the opposite of what SEO experts would tell you to do and therefore, because it is unique, is a very Grateful Dead approach.

Whether you’re Japanese or not, transitory content feels more like a conversation with your readers. As Itoi says,

Maybe it’s because it allows me to discuss the same theme over and over again. It’s natural: don’t we do that every day? Perhaps I wanted to replicate this behavior.

It’s not important to show people what you and your organization were thinking six months ago, or even last week. The important thing is to take what you’re thinking TODAY and turn it into engaging content. That would be easy, except that today becomes yesterday (then last Tuesday, then last month, then last quarter…) awfully fast.

This Japanese take on content marketing spans both this Content Buffet blog and my Localization Project Management blog, which focuses on international product marketing. Isn’t it surprising how people in other parts of the world think about and relate to content? What if it’s only in the West that time matters to content marketing?

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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Eccolo Media has released its 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report, covering 501 executives of US companies with influence on technology decisions. I want to mention two findings in particular.

White paper consumption down, influence up

White paper consumption decreased 14 percentage points since 2010, from 76 percent to 62 percent.

However, white paper influence increased from 41 percent to 65 percent, as measured by the number of respondents who found white papers influential or very influential.

So, marketing managers may encounter internal resistance to white paper campaigns because “fewer people read them,” but those who do read them, rely on them more.

So, write better papers and assume that they’ll be of greater impact.

Not everybody knows about white papers

This one really threw me.

Twenty-eight percent reported that they began consulting white papers for the first time in the last six months.

Huh?

So there you are, a marketing manager assuming that most decision-makers will instinctively reach for a white paper, when in fact 28 percent of your audience had never used one until recently.

Have that many people been promoted from the shop floor to management in the last six months? Unlikely in a – can we talk? – double-dip recession.

So, no matter how big the intended audience of your white paper, assume that it could handily be about one third larger.

Have a look at the entire report (free download) from Eccolo Media. It’s a good arrow to have in your marketing manager’s quiver.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Jesse757

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“So I have good news and bad news,” the director of marketing started off.

Just when I thought we were out of the tunnel on this campaign…

“The good news is that we’ve shown an early draft of the business-benefits piece to our CEO, and he quite likes it. In fact, he himself wrote a paper for a C-level peer at one of our customers a few months back that draws the business case around our product, and he’d like to provide it as material for our project.

“Obviously, that’s also the bad news.”

He laughed. I laughed. The agency laughed.

Drat.

Managing executive expectations for marketing content

As a kid, I spent a lot of time at Milne Brothers Bike Shop on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California. Mr. Jenkins had a sign on the wall in the service department out back that read:

Labor Rates

$5.00/hr.

$7.50/hr. if you watch

$12.00/hr. if you help

I’ve thought about that as a model for managing customer expectations and involvement, but I doubt most businesses would get very far with it.

The point is that people who do know what they’re doing, don’t generally welcome the involvement of people who merely may know what they’re doing.

So consider these levels of involvement for the executives of your client-companies:

1. “Let me make sure we’re on the same page.” – When, as in this case, the CEO has devoted some time, thought and potentially high-value perspective to his own material, you cannot afford to have your marketing content run afoul of how your CEO sees things.
1. It’s probably better if you can convince the exec to let you review his material, instead of having him review yours.
2. “Let me just approve what you’ve written.” – This is smart. One of my favorite CEOs did this with all the content we generated beyond datasheets and product briefs. He never rewrote our copy, but he had his fingers on its pulse, and we knew that he had the ultimate say.
3. “Let me help.” – This is a pain for everybody. Execs rarely have time to help on these projects, and they become bottlenecks, if well-intentioned bottlenecks. Writing a paper or a thought-piece with a VP or C-level exec is usually very difficult. You’re better off recording her at a conference and turning that into a paper.
4. “Let me butt out.” – Optimal for most parties concerned, in the short run. Really, though, you should try to make your work visible to the execs, if only to justify your effort.

The sound marketing director

“I’m just kidding,” continued the marketing director. “I plan to manage the process so that we can keep our campaign moving ahead without delays. The CEO told me he’d like to see the early direction of the piece, and I’ve told him that I would like to review the material he put together.”

Whew. Option 1.1.

“He wants to be in the loop on this piece. I think he’ll have useful input, and he’ll be receptive to our description of business benefits. It’s a win for us, so long as we manage the changes smoothly.”

The sound marketing manager can make things like this work well. How do you handle it when execs want to help?

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Kelvyn Skee

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I don’t care what Google’s stock price is. They build an enterprise and reputation their way, and we build it our way. We’re not letting employees shoot from the hip in a blog post.

Nobody has said that to me, but it’s how I imagine a client in that position would think.

And, truth to tell, I haven’t fought the lawyers. I would stand nothing to gain and lots to lose.

As a marketing manager, you can crank out – or have a marketing communications writer crank out – blog posts that border on the fanciful. Face it: you’re in the business of imagination, and to keep the interest of your company’s followers, you may be tempted to “push it” every now and again. That’s because:

1. People want to read controversy – or at least opinions – in a blog. They look to a blog for a peek behind the curtains at what’s going on in your organization. That’s usually the antithesis of legal review.
2. The opinions they want to read do not include how great your products are. They want to know how you regard the market and especially your competitors. Legal review is not set up for that.
3. Legal review slows down the blogging process and can deprive timely posts of their edge. Mostly, though, that’s a good thing.

So you can gripe and moan that all your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor because it was censored. But keep in mind that the responsibility of legal reviewers in the content creation process is to ensure that you avoid publishing things you couldn’t prove if you had to. These people are trained to assume that you will have to prove it someday, and they’ve been correct often enough that their role is a valuable one.

Don’t fight them. And if you do fight them, let them win. Someday you can be David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer of Google, and raise as many hackles as he did last month in a blog post about Microsoft and Apple.

But until then, just tell the truth “and make it rhyme.”

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Mike Willis

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“I’d like to cite some figures in this paper about adoption rates for this technology,” said the marketing communications writer. “Can we find data on how sales are rising from year to year?”

Seemed like a natural question to pose. If readers see that 15% of the market used turbo-synchronized schmedlapps last year and 20% used it this year, a smart manager would see a trend and make a note of it as something to follow.

“Actually, we don’t have much data on this,” replied the client. “I prefer to keep our copy around this figurative and stay away from specific numbers.”

Huh?

“As a company, we try not to get tied to individual figures or sets of data.”

HUH? This time, the writer capitalized it.

“Our preference is to point to trends loosely, as in ‘The trend for asynchronous schmedlapps is down and the trend for turbo-synchronized schmedlapps is up.’”

HUH? Capitalized and italicized it.

Then the client uttered the clincher:

Customers are happy to drag sales conversations down statistical ratholes.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Marketing believes that statistics enrich a white paper

It’s hard to argue against using data to back up the claims you make in your white paper or marketing communications content. After all, most people base their buying decisions on one of three things:

1. Recommendations from trusted sources
2. Facts and figures
3. Brilliant rhetoric that intimidates or inspires them

The writer has little control over #1, and makes a living crafting copy around #2, but really shouldn’t be relied upon to make #3 work (at least not in B2B).

Research and reports are the mainstay of marcomm content, so when a customer says, in effect, “We don’t use those,” it leaves the writer at a disadvantage to produce good copy.

On the other hand…

Sales believes that statistics cripple the white paper

This is a salesperson’s perspective, and salespeople spend lots of time talking to and hearing from customers.

If you as a salesperson know that, upon reading the persuasive content your marketing manager has created, a prospect is simply going to pick it apart, impugn the data source and turn it into a speed bump on the road to a purchase order, you might argue to keep the statistics out, thankyouverymuch.

Some prospects may look at your set of data as a challenge to cite an opposing set, or search for an opposing set if they have that kind of time to kill.

So, as desperately as Sales wants collateral and content from Marketing, they may at times prefer that it be, shall we say

content unencumbered by research

Since Marketing is in business to help start conversations, and not to gum them up, some content may need to go this way.

So marketing managers, grit your teeth and endure the HUH?s from your marketing communications writer (and prepare to utter a few of your own). There will be plenty of other opportunities for you to quote all those analyst reports you’ve subscribed to.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Editor B

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Most marketing managers in small and medium-sized companies use an e-mail service provider like Constant Contact, MailChimp, emailr or AWeber. These services offer remarkable power, sometimes for free. But remember: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

You’re always treading the edge of the abuse-abyss. Don’t fall in.

Last week I received a message via Constant Contact from somebody who had merrily gone through LinkedIn, harvesting e-mail addresses of people in his network. I didn’t want the message, and I didn’t even feel enough affinity toward the person to contact him first and tell him that my objective in connecting with him had not been to get special offers from him.

Instead, I looked for and found the Report Abuse link at the bottom of the message. I hesitated for a moment…

Then I pulled the trigger.

Building your list

Keep in mind that there are a few ways to build your e-mail list:

• Readers want you. You can build a list with single opt-in. Readers click on a link, and they’re added to your list. Smart.
• Readers really want you. With double opt-in, readers click that link, then must validate their opt-in by clicking another link in a confirmation e-mail message the service sends them. Really smart.
• You want readers. You gather e-mail addresses and plop them into a database in the e-mail service. Dumb.

I wouldn’t recommend springing the last one even on readers and customers you’ve had for years. If your relationship with them is that strong, it will survive your explaining the move to a new e-mail system and your request that they opt in to keep in touch with you.

You turn an important, psychological corner when you go from e-mail sent directly from your desktop to an e-mail/newsletter service.

It’s a matter of trust, so it’s not wise to surprise people with this kind of thing.

The Abuse Complaint

A few minutes after reporting the abuse, I received an auto-responder from Constant Contact:

We have automatically logged your complaint in our system and will in-turn review the customer account in question. Constant Contact does not tolerate spam and takes all complaints against our customers very seriously. A member of our Compliance Team will follow-up with you only if additional information is required.

In addition, please know that your address has been permanently removed from this senders list.

You’ve probably never seen this side of the transaction, have you?

Real spammers don’t care about this, of course, but marketing managers just trying to do their job should. It’s a sign that you should rethink your shortcut to stay away from the abuse-abyss.

What e-mail abuse stories do you have? Let me know in the comments.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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“But I’m not much of a writer,” you moan. “How am I supposed to get a content marketing campaign going without spending a jillion dollars on great content?”

That’s true. Great content isn’t just great content; there’s usually an entire, time-consuming, arduous process wrapped around great content. There has to be, to yield something that you won’t look at in four months and think, “I’m so tired of that paper.” If you’re thinking that, your prospects probably are, too.

Can’t have great? Choose good.

All right, then, make good content the centerpiece of your marketing campaign to start with.

David Meerman Scott (whose work I often coattail) posted last week on how smart people who are poor writers create great content. He offers three ideas, the first two of which are potentially rather expensive, but the third of which almost any marketing manager can do:

Talk your ideas through and then transcribe the results.

It doesn’t take long to build a library of content from this approach. Sure, it’s humble, and it doesn’t tell the story as well as a professional marketing communications writer will, but it gets the ball rolling.

One of my clients in IT service management is building a huge library of case studies similarly. Its own customers are glad to describe in presentations, keynotes, interviews and testimonials their own IT problems and how the product has helped them, and my client records them. We transcribe and edit them, then produce them as case studies that go onto the Website for SEO.

The marketing managers look at each piece and think,

Well, it’s not exactly the messaging we’d use, but it is exactly the way at least some of our customers talk, so it’s good content. It’s a 15% solution.

They know that there’s no such thing as a 100% solution, and even a 30% solution would cost a lot more than twice as much.

Do you let great content become the enemy of good content? Let me know in the comments below.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: eddiedangerous

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Consider the dance of the review loop. Please.

For you, the marketing manager, the review loop is usually just a speed bump on the road to getting the piece published. You build it into your schedule, you circulate the drafts, you nag the reviewers, but most of the time you don’t stop to think about what’s really going on in a review loop:

You’re making sure that the marketing communications writer heard what you said and captured it correctly.

That’s important, and you’ve got a big stake in it.

Last week, Mark Nichol posted 10 tips for critiquing other people’s writing. I think his list applies more to friends reviewing one another’s work than to the client-vendor relationship, so I’ll supplement his 10 with four more.

1. Don’t be shy. If the writer missed the point, let him know that he missed it. Use a sentence like “You’ve missed the point,” or “This paragraph misses the point.” That’s what happened, so just say it. Then tell him what the point is.
2. Do it in writing, if you can; in a phone call, if you cannot. I vastly prefer written feedback to oral feedback. It means that the reviewer sees that something is wrong and wants to change it, and that she has made the mental effort to put it into words. Real-time, over-the-phone feedback sessions are a pain I endure when it looks like the only way to break a logjam in the schedule and get the project rolling again. They invariably go all over the map, so I record them and take copious notes.
3. Use the words you want to see in print. If a sentence is wrong, change it yourself to more accurate language. Don’t worry about grammar, flow and consistency; the writer will clean it up if need be. This is your chance to pluck out of the writer’s head the incorrect language and replace it with the language you want. It’s easier on the entire process if you use the words you want
4. Change actual text rather inserting comments. Assuming you’re using software like Microsoft Word with change tracking enabled, it’s easy to cross out actual text and write your own. In fact, it’s better than inserting comments, which are not always easy to see.  Writers do better with “Gradual, incremental investmentDollar-cost averaging is more suited to the long-term investor than is market timing…” than with an inserted comment like “This isn’t right. Please fix.”

The review loop is a dance between the marketing manager and the marketing communications writer. The more clearly you express the next steps, the smoother the dance.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Eric Ward

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