It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, but by the time it’s gone through a dozen or so hands, there’s quite a bit missing.

So the client’s marketing manager said, “We have the opportunity to contribute an article to a publication. Our PR firm set it up, and the editors like the pitch. Interview the product manager and write it up.”

The publication had some guidelines for writing, mostly about style rather than mechanics. It offered even fewer about what to expect once the article ran.

So we got to work: interview, drafts, contributor’s bio, images, carefully selected links, approvals, ready. That took about two weeks.

The marketing manager handed the finished copy (~1900 words) off to the PR agency, who passed it to the publication. It ran on the Web the next morning, and the eye is never so able to find problems as just a little after it’s too late.

Fixing problems with your contributed articles

Maybe some of our problems stemmed from working in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, it’s lingua franca for moving copy around during review cycles. Unfortunately, it’s not like HTML, and it’s really not like Drupal or WordPress or Joomla or any of the other content management systems online publications use.

Mostly, though, it’s a few questions we didn’t ask. We’re smarter now, and I want you to be that much smarter as well.

1. Images and sidebar

Problem: We included two images and a sidebar in a text box. Knowing how fussy people get about images, we shipped them as colossal, high-resolution JPEG files and let the publication crunch them down as much as they needed to. The images included captions (Figure 1, Figure 2) and the copy referred to them.

The problem was the sidebar, which the magazine had recommended we include. It supplemented a paragraph near the middle of the article, but the magazine dumped it at the bottom, just before the author bio. It was useless down there, but the moral of the story (which I had forgotten – my bad) is that sidebars don’t get along well with these pages.

Fix: Use a sidebar, but create it as an image near the text you want to emphasize.

2. Links

Problem: We embedded several hyperlinks in the article, mostly to webinars and pages on the client’s site. Not all publications like that, because you’re using their real estate to promote your content. In fact, the author bio contained four links; the publication scrubbed them all on the main page, but allowed them on a separate About the Author page.

Fix: Find out the publication’s policy on hyperlinks. They may have a limit of one link per 500 or so words, and they may have a policy that favors authoritative links (e.g.,  to Wikipedia or Reuters) over linking to your own assets. For that matter, include links to other content in the publication; they’ll probably like that even more than links to Wikipedia. Is there a more sincere form of journalistic flattery?

3. Numbered lists

Problem: It’s hard enough in MS Word to list four numbered items, then enter some non-numbered text, then resume the numbered list. It’s even harder on the Web.

Fix: Don’t clown around with this kind of formatting if your article is destined for the Web. It just annoys the people who have to tear it apart and disrupt the structure of your article. Or, hard-number the items into the text instead of using automatic numbering and list items (<li>).

4. URL

Problem: To the extent that a keyword-rich URL gives your content an SEO boost, it’s a nice thing to hope for. Unfortunately, the CMS assigned the article a lame URL: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2207848. Not much SEO juice from that, and no benefit to the publication, either.

Fix: Ask for a decent link. All they can say is “no.” The CMS should be able to accommodate this.

These four fixes should ensure that more of your water survives the bucket brigade.

What else have you found out about submitting contributed articles to Web publications? It’s a different world from paper-based press, isn’t 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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: mcoughlin

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In my last post on file properties in Microsoft Word docs, I described ways to interpret some of the metadata that lives in those files. As a marketing manager, you probably read and create PDFs almost as often as you do Microsoft Office docs, so keep your eye on metadata in these files too.

Reading document properties in PDFs

First of all, you realize (don’t you?) that PDF is NOT proprietary to Adobe. It’s a standard format, and there are plenty of non-Adobe products for creating and viewing them. Nevertheless, consider Adobe Acrobat, which is representative of most readers. And free.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, you can select File > Properties, or hit Ctrl-D to open the Document Properties dialog:

Title, Author, Subject, Keywords: Fortunately, these fields populate themselves from the application in which you created the document. If you don’t like the values, you can change them here before publishing the document to your website or checking it into your content management system.

In particular, you should introduce keywords. To the extent that the bots pay any attention to keywords, they will find them in this field, in the same way that they will find them in the <meta> tags of HTML pages.

Application: If you’ve used a real layout app like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator or Quark XPress to create your brochure, case study or white paper, then this field helps show that you’re a serious marketing professional. But if you’ve done it on the cheap, using Microsoft Word or – heaven forfend – Publisher, this field will rat you out and inquiring minds will see it. Yes, there are a lot of good-looking Word templates around, but they aren’t the ones that most people use.

Location: You have no control over this field. It updates itself with the location of the PDF on the reader’s computer, not on the computer on which the PDF was generated. The field is a hyperlink, by the way, and if you click on it, it will open the handy Temp folder in which your operating system stores jillions of files you view and read on the Web. Throw away some five-year-old PDFs, if you’re in the mood.

Security tab: Did you know you can protect the content in your PDFs?

Unscrupulous people might want to take your work and pass it off as their own. Or, if you want the document to be read only on a screen, they might want to defy your wishes and print it out. They may want to fill it with nasty comments about you and slander your name all over the place. Isn’t it nice to know you can prevent all that?

For this, you need the professional version of a PDF generating application, like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Nitro PDF Professional; you can’t do it with the free reader application. After generating the PDF, visit the Security tab and head off all of those miscreants at the pass by setting restrictions on what they may and may not do with your white paper or eBook. You can also configure your PDF add-in to apply the restrictions when you first generate the file.

Marketing managers, note: There is some cachet to applying at least a few restrictions. It demonstrates that your team knows that these options exist, and that you’re savvy enough to want to protect your work. There are probably plenty of ways for a determined thief to hack into your PDF, but at least you can make it clear that you tried, and that you do place enough value on the content to want to protect it.

So, that’s why I like to hang out in the document properties. Do you? What have you found there?

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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1. File Properties in Microsoft Word Docs – All Kinds of Dish

The coolest thing about listening to records was the music. The second-coolest thing was the liner notes.

Who wrote this tune? Who played bass? When did they record it? How long is it? Where was it recorded? Who’s on backup vocals? Who designed the cover?

Wrapped around the content was a layer of information that described the music and revealed bits of a story behind it.

Many years later, I came to understand this information for what it was: metadata. Data about data.

File properties

Every file you send and receive today contains metadata, a little story behind the content. In some files, it’s as simple as:

• filename
• size
• date and time last saved

Those metadata don’t tell much you of a story. But most files containing real content – MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files – can reveal a lot more.

Maybe it’s that I don’t spend enough time perusing record liner notes any more, but I am constitutionally incapable of reviewing an MS Office file or PDF without first poking around in its file properties (or document properties). I just enjoy looking for the story behind the file.

Microsoft Office file properties

Have a look at the dialog box below that contains the metadata in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I usually go straight to the Summary tab, which contains the most metadata.

First, I should mention that merely locating this dialog box is becoming more difficult. Until Office 2003, a simple Alt-F, I sufficed to pop it open in Windows. Since Office 2007, the key combination is Alt-F, I, Q, S, down-arrow. They’re not making it any easier. (If you know what it is in Office for Mac, please let us know in the comments.)

File properties dialog, Microsoft Office

Title: This field is self-explanatory, but it doesn’t depend on the file name. Usually, the app scoops up the first few words or the document, or any text you’ve formatted with the Title style. You can also make up your own title and place it in this field yourself. There’s probably some way to search on Title in Office, Windows or MacOS.

What’s interesting, though, is the metadata that might be left over from the last time the file was saved. Suppose your company is Macy’s, and Cosmodemonic has sent you a pricing proposal, and the Title field reads “Special Pricing – Gimbels”. So, you’ve just gotten the bit of dish about whom else Cosmodemonic is talking to. Busted!

Author: This field does self-populate, but not very consistently. It’s usually the most interesting bit of metadata to me because it contains the name, as burned into Microsoft Office during installation, of the original author of the file.

Unfortunately, a lot of enterprises burn a boilerplate author name – “Gargoyle Industries Employee” or “Breathlessly Ecstatic Dell Customer” – into Office, so the default entry tells you nothing useful.

However, the Author field can surprise you, too. Like when you get a late revision of a paper you wrote, and somebody else has replaced your name with his/her name in this field. Busted!

Company: Again, this field is populated with data burned in during the installation of Office. Of course, it’s possible to overwrite it, but not everybody knows that. So the next time you receive a legal document like a contract or a non-disclosure agreement from a business partner, have a look at the Company field and find out which law firm they swiped it from. Busted!

Keywords: But enough of the cloak and dagger. The Keywords field contains metadata of some potential business importance, especially when you populate it with the keywords that you want search engines to find.

I’m not sure that the search engines pick up these keywords if you simply hang your Word, Excel or PowerPoint file out on the Web, because these formats are binary. But if you save your Office file as a PDF or – heaven help you – HTML file, and then publish the file where the search engines can find it, you’ll see that the keywords you enter to this field are preserved for the search engines to index.

Comments: This is an excellent place to store comments about the file’s history. Excellent, except that nobody would ever think to look for important information buried all the way down here. Most people pump the file name with version numbers, revision dates and initials of reviewers, all of which should really go here. Again, metadata in this field is probably searchable in Windows or Office.

Statistics tab: Click over to the Statistics tab of this dialog box for one other bit of metadata, which is Last saved by (or Last modified by). This is not always the same as the author, especially if the file has been out for review. So, if Mr. Big sends you back “his” revisions and tells you how carefully he pored over your most recent draft, and you see that the file was Last modified by an intern, you can privately assume that perhaps Mr. Big is exaggerating his involvement in your draft.

Custom tab: Finally, on the Custom tab you can create and set your own variables and properties and use them for document automation and update-fields. When you send the file as an attachment in Outlook, several bits of metadata (e.g., _EmailSubject, _AuthorEmail, _PreviousAdHocReviewCycleID) land here automatically.

Had enough sleuthing for one post? Next time, I’ll walk through the document properties in PDFs. There’s plenty of dish there as well, if you know how to place 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: Epiclectic

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I’ve spent a decade or more in content marketing, helping clients refine and tell their story with case studies, white papers, newsletter articles and Web content. I’ve been helping them demonstrate that they understand their customers’ problems and can be trusted to help solve them.

For that matter, I’ve put out acres of my own content to build trust with my prospects.

For that matter, you have, too. We’ve published jillions of words to attract prospects and help move them down the sales funnel.

Doesn’t it get tiring sometimes? What if we didn’t have to work that hard at it?

Some businesses don’t need content marketing

I spent 24 years looking for a decent barber and finally found one in Bruce, the husband of one of my wife’s friends.

You want to hear the sum total of Bruce’s content marketing?

“Hi. This is Bruce. At 281-5026. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.”

Bruce’s shop has been reviewed twice on Yelp, but he isn’t named in the reviews and I doubt he even knows the reviews are there. He has no website, no blog, doesn’t know what a white paper is, has no use for case studies or a newsletter.

But he’s made a successful living cutting hair for ages, and he has a steady flow of new and returning customers.

Obviously, Bruce’s business depends on referrals and word of mouth, not on his ability to land high on the SERPs. In the world of business-to-consumer (B2C), sometimes you can get away with that.

Referrals and word of mouth are important to your business as well, but it’s only part of the mix. That’s why you, as marketing manager, spend your day pumping out audio, video and text to create conversations with prospects and preserve relationships with customers.

Bruce manages to create those conversations and preserve those relationships one-on-one, and the sum total of his marketing presence is a cell phone greeting.

Must be nice…

Of course, business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is a long way from B2C content marketing. But still, it must be nice to compress it into “leave a message at the tone.”

By the way, what do people hear when they phone your organization? What kind of relationships are you building while your callers are on hold or navigating your directory?

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: aroid

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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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Pamela Wilson published a report called “8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content.” It’s not about how to build white papers, case studies, Web pages or articles, but about how to dress them up. Line breaks, subheadings and bullet lists, as Pamela points out, make it easier for readers to get through your content.

There’s a lot of psychology at work in this.

“I want people to listen to me.”

As the publisher, you have a crying need for people to listen to you. Your organization has a story to tell, and you’ve paid a marketing communications writer good money to tell it.

You want attention.

“I want to learn a little and get through this thing.”

The readers in your audience want two things: to get value out of reading your content, and to get your content behind them as quickly as possible. They’ve accepted somebody’s influence to visit your site and find your paper and they’ve awarded you a few minutes of their precious time, so hurry up and get to the point.

They want gratification.

Giving readers their gimme

Nothing gets in the way of making your readers content with your content like subjecting them to a wall of text.

You’ve seen those, haven’t you? Maybe written a few of them? A page of copy that is just paragraph upon paragraph of narrative, devoid of graphics, callouts, white space, subheadings or anything to break up your deathless prose?

Or a paper that begins to buckle under its own weight, because everybody who reviews it wants to add more ideas to it?

You need to give your readers a damned good reason to slog through every page of your content. A graphic, a table, a callout box in the margin, a bullet list…Your reader needs to feel that she has accomplished something by the bottom of every page.

Have a look through some of your content (or the content your predecessor published, if you’re lucky enough to have a scapegoat). Pour it through the two filters described above:

1. Does it tell my story?
2. Can readers learn something useful to them in a hurry?

Go ahead – pick one of your white papers, case studies, newsletter articles or blog posts. It’s easy to tell your story; it’s not so easy to make your readers content with your content.

How do you do it? 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.”

photo credit: Marshall Astor

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Josh Shipp, the motivational speaker behind HeyJosh.com, freely describes his rough upbringing as a foster child. Realizing that he was adept at grabbing his classmates’ attention and making them laugh, he plied that talent in ways that disrupted class and got him into trouble at school.

One day, a discerning teacher asked him,

Good job, Josh. Now that you have their attention, what are you going to tell them?

This question helped to turn his mischievous side into a constructive one, and he has spent much of his life bringing parents and teens together.

As a marketing manager focused on content marketing, you need to keep that same question in front of you.

Now that you have their attention…

Social media, blogs, video and networking sites are this year’s vehicles for getting attention and building an audience. Here’s a story of how I got a little attention a couple of weeks ago.

Last spring I figured something out about social media and how I fit (or don’t fit) into it. I hammered out a pretty good blog post on the topic, but realized I could put it to better use as a guest-post on a social media-oriented blog. So I spent about three months watching blogs like Copyblogger, Duct Tape Marketing, Convince and Convert, Marketing Pilgrim, Social Media Explorer, Social Media Examiner, Brass Tack Thinking, Techipedia, Louis Gray, Brian Solis, Problogger, Chris Garrett and Junta 42 – trying to find a post with good traffic that would accept content from guests.

(This was an education in itself, and frankly not as easy as some would have you believe. I hope to post on it in greater detail one of these days.)

Finally, I submitted it to Mark Schaefer of Businesses {grow} who liked it and thought it would be a good fit. He ran it on July 29 as “This is why you’re a social media loser.” I had created a signature with a link to my own blog and site, anticipating a bump in traffic.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of tweets I received (69, though most were duplicates) and the number and tone of comments that Mark’s community wrote. Even Mark himself parachuted into the comment stream and gave me a tip of the hat.

Well, now that I had their attention…

…what are you going to tell them?

What, indeed?

The morning the guest-post ran, I was waist-deep in an e-book I’d been planning as incentive content for the visitors from the guest-post. I designed the e-book for marketing managers who need to – but don’t really know how to – hire writers, Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it in time to catch this wave of traffic, so I need to chase the wave on Twitter and hope to catch up to it.

Of course, this is just one loop around the cycle. For most of us, the nature of content marketing is to launch one attention-getter after another, then tell or sell one new thing after another to the ever-growing audience.

If you’re in content marketing, your job is to keep the plates spinning. No wonder Jay Baer says,

Every company is its own TV station, magazine, and newspaper.

Plan to keep the hits and headlines coming. And always be ready with the next thing you’re going to tell them.

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 e-book, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: lissalou66

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The title of your white paper is where you sell your idea to the prospective reader. Don’t blow your chance to make a good impression.

Industry colleague Jonathan Kantor publishes a list of free white papers each week from his blog, White Paper Pundit. I’ve followed it the last few weeks, looking for interesting titles. They are few and far between. (Mind you, these are not papers that Jonathan himself has written.)

Have a look at this list from last week and tell me what you think of them:

1. Hosting a hybrid online conference
2. Enrollment Marketing Predictions for 2010
3. Lessons Learned From Windows 7 Early Adopters
4. Real World Predictive Analytics
5. Protecting Your Constituents’ Personal Information
6. Collections Lawsuit
7. Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It
8. Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness
9. The Empowered RIM Manager
10. The Predictive Enterprise
11. Social Media and the 401(k) – The Time Is Now
12. The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication
13. An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Decrease Marketing ROI
14. Do Fortune 100 companies need a twittervention?
15. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
16. SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
17. The Lisbon Treaty
18. Why Vyatta is Better than Cisco
19. Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
20. HP_UX 11i v3: Congestion Control Management
21. The Road Traveled
22. How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
23. Transloading Efficiency
24. Sustainable Agriculture

Did any of those grab you? Even if you were in the position of needing to read up on these topics, did any of these titles raise its hand and squeal, “Oh, pick me, pick me!”?

White Paper Titles – Good and Bad

Let’s examine a few of these.

• Collections Lawsuit
• The Lisbon Treaty
• Sustainable Agriculture

This seems like search engine optimization gone wrong; the titles are perfect for SEO, but when they show up in the results, they’re not very tempting, are they?

Whose point of view does each paper examine? What aspect of each topic does the paper cover? Who is in the intended audience? What will they get out of reading the paper?

Consider another group:

• Real World Predictive Analytics
• SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
• The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication

These titles give us a bit more information and help us qualify them better. “I don’t need to consolidate my SQL Server implementation; I need to build it up. Guess this paper’s not for me, thanks.” Or, “Maybe duplication is what’s bogging down our backups. This might be worth a read.” And, they’re SEO-ready.

These titles give us steak, but not much sizzle. Your paper deserves both.

One final group:

• How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
• Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
• Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness

These are pretty well evolved titles. They demonstrate that the paper is not for everybody, and they save me time by giving me enough information to qualify them.

They’re long, but there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with SEO-ready keywords at the beginning.

3 Steps to Good White Paper Titles

1. Include the job title of the intended reader. This is part 1 of the steak; it tells me you have done homework to find out who I am.
2. Include the business problem the paper addresses. This is part 2 of the steak, in which you focus NOT on your expertise, but on the thing that has my hair on fire. (See David Meerman Scott on the single most important pitching tip.)
3. Include verbs. This helps the sizzle.

So, how about:

• Literacy Instructors Scramble – Get the Most Out of No Child Left Behind before It’s Left Behind
• Let the Casual Bloggers Decide: WordPress or Blogger.com over the Long Haul
• What Is My Pancreas, and What Did I Do to It to Deserve Cancer?
• Rubbing the Buffalo off the Nickel – 5 Ways Deans Can Increase Revenue and Lower Expenses

And, since you’re front-loading the title with SEO keywords, you can consider publishing the paper under two different titles (A/B testing), with each one focusing on either 1 or 2:

• Translation and Manufacturing – How Managers Can Successfully Mix the Two
• Manufacturing Managers Take on Translation and Make It Work

What are you doing with titles to get your customers to read your content?

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: Doug Coldwell

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2. Q: When is a White Paper Not a White Paper?

I was pleased to see that client Xiam Technologies was making excellent (re-)use of their white paper, “Make It Easy on Me – 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet,” the fruit of our collaboration this past summer.

Xiam is using the white paper as a content-lead into msearchgroove, a knowledge portal on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media.

Personalization is also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.

The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled “Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet.”

Content like white papers, case studies and technical articles is rich in SEO-potential and industry authority. Why restrict it to the corral of your Website when you can give it away and get it to roam the plains of the Web, seeding your brand? (Tip of the hat also to msearchgroove, who obviously sees the potential for leverage.)

Never forget the Content Buffet. Xiam is one of those laying out a rich spread.

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: KVDP

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1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I

Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels.

“We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.”

Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but you as the marketing manager can see it, as you peruse your content-landscape for pieces that will catch the attention of prospects and influencers in your industry.

Have your writer edit long pieces down to short marketing pieces that take on their own life and tell your story more succinctly. MarketingProfs’ “Get to the Point!” series does this very well for its paying members by distilling marketing-oriented content from a variety of long-winded sources down to regular, five-paragraph e-mail messages.

Source Content

Some obvious candidates for repackaging:

• White papers and thought-leadership papers. Companies place a lot of store by these pieces, so don’t treat them like wedding china and leave them hanging in a cupboard on your Web site for only occasional use. Have your writer pull out individual sections (The Problem, Current Approaches, What the Industry Needs, etc.) and make them self-standing.
• Webinars and podcasts. These are good sources, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a simple matter of transcription. Even trained speakers introduce a lot of non sequiturs and interrupted sentences to live delivery, so your marketing communications writer needs to bend the text back into useful shape and logical flow.
• Slide deck presentations. I’ve posted on this before, and presentations are bagfuls of bullets waiting for an chance to live outside of the projector. Your sales and product teams probably have dozens of them that you’ve never seen before, but that can help you tell your story better and more authoritatively.

3 Ways to Make Them Work

You don’t need to tell your in-house contributors that their content is too long; just tell them that you’re going to give it life in several more important channels.

1. Teasers. Use them like movie trailers to bring visitors back to a landing page with the entire piece. The right five paragraphs in front of the right technical audience will result in clicks, page visits, downloads and conversions.
2. Blog posts. You do have a blog, don’t you? Have a look at Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging, and follow Denise Wakeman for tips on making corporate blogging work. When you have ready-made content you can post, you’re halfway there.
3. Article/content marketing. Another important place for shopping your content out is in content repositories like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity, buzzle.com, articledashboard.com, amazines.com, ideamarketers.com and others oriented to your industry. Of importance here is the resource box you create to ensure that readers can find and follow you once they like your content. Read Steve Shaw at Creative Article Marketing for more on this channel.

In most organizations it’s easier to find long marketing pieces than short ones, but there’s a lot of value in the content once you’ve re-purposed it for new channels.

Have you tried this in your organization? What results do you see?

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work
2. 5 Ways to Bring Your Marketing Writer In Closer
3. 3 Ways to Make Your Subject Matter Experts Think