Your keyword basket contains the terms people use most frequently to find you. Be sure to share it with your marketing communications writers.

Have you spent time and/or money researching the terms that people use to find your blog and Website, your “keyword basket?” Do you realize that you can pump these terms into the white papers, case studies, articles and presentations you hang out on the Web as well?

Your marketing communications writers should have access – and maybe even input – to the keyword basket that results from your search engine optimization efforts. They should be creating content that judiciously uses these keywords to help the pieces get found on the Web and draw more visitors to your site. Keywords aren’t just for stuffing into your <meta> tags, after all.

This occurred to me while I read a Stephanie Tilton article, “Buyer Personas: How to Deliver Relevant Content to B2B Buyers“. In the same conversation during which you tell writers about the piece you want them to deliver, you should describe the persona of the ideal reader AND you should talk about keywords of importance in the piece.

Of course, keyword baskets are still a novel concept to some marketing managers. I can think of three companies that are keyword basket cases because of how they handle – or don’t handle – their keywords. Here are the scenarios and how to avoid ending up in them yourself:

1. Company A doesn’t have a keyword basket at all. It has done an admirable job of growing business through sales rather than through marketing, so it hasn’t paid much attention to whether people find its content, let alone how they find it. The Webmasters have stuffed a few words into the <meta> tags on the home page, but there’s no concentrated, ongoing effort to assemble and maintain a keyword basket.
2. Company B has a well-oiled marketing machine behind it. This is a company whose Web team meets weekly to plan and work on a fabulous Web infrastructure for shooting content in huge salvos from cannon on the roof. The team disgorges disparate, technical content in an orderly manner week after week, but is wrapped around the axle when it comes to its SEO strategy. “People will find us,” the team believes, even though it could easily distill keywords from its content and analyze them from Web statistics.
3. Company C has a keyword basket that it gladly shares with writers, but it’s monotonous. The company stuck to the short, fat, dumb terms that drive 70% of visitors to their site, while ignoring finer, more subtle terms. The keywords in the basket are little more than permutations of the half-dozen or so words that most people would associate with its line of business. This makes for a simple basket, but not for very effective use in white papers or case studies, because almost all of the content from everybody in the category contains the terms. The basket is missing long-tail terms that describe in greater detail the nuances and unique value proposition in the company’s services.

Is your company a keyword basket case? What can you do about 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.

photo credit: Marshall Astor

Related posts:

1. “This Paper Is a (Keyword) Basket Case.”
2. 5 Ways to Bring Your Marketing Writer In Closer
3. 3 Ways to Help Your Marketing Writer Put Out Great Content

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

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. Q: When is a White Paper Not a White Paper?

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

Related posts:

1. Social Media Engineering??
2. Search Engine Optimized or Ideal Reader Optimized?

What about optimizing your content for your Ideal Reader, though? It’s easy to fill your Website or blog posts with text written around keywords you’ve pulled straight out of Google’s Adwords Tool or Wordtracker.

But are you throwing out the baby with the bathwater when you focus more on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than on RLPs (Real, Live Persons)?

Search Engine Optimization Is…

A potential business partner in Asia unveiled new Web content. “I would appreciate your thoughts on our site,” she wrote me.

I had a look at the site. It’s obvious to me that they hired a marketing writer to talk about the company’s features, benefits and “core competencies” (yecch). It’s an atrocious throwback to the days when the Web was just an electronic brochure onto which we all heaped our specialties and tried to shout the loudest. I can’t stand it, and might even consider it a liability if I were evaluating her company against her competitors.

Nevertheless, search engine optimization is in love with her Website.

• The copy is sufficiently filled with keywords to demonstrate authority (q.v. Brian Clark), though not oppressively.
• The site is well structured, including sitemaps on each page.
• The pages weigh in at the optimal 250-500 words each.
• There are links within the site for more detailed explanations of the company’s process and technology.

At least for the time being, search engine optimization is quite happy that they’ve submitted this site. It will need refreshed content before long, so that the search engines do not become bored with it, but otherwise, it embodies the main principles of SEO quite well. (I wish I could give you the link, but I consider it bad form to criticize publicly in this manner.)

Ideal Reader Optimization Is…

Do you know what your readers want from you? Do you know what they want to read? Are you giving it to them?

It’s easy to write about what your company does; it’s vastly harder to write about what your audience wants to read, because you have to know them well, or ask them what they want. Then you have to believe them when they tell you, then you have to hire a writer who can tell your story in a way that they want to read.

What’s the easiest thing in the world to write? A letter to someone you care about. Why? Because you know how to tell your story through filters that mean something to him or her. You already have a relationship in place, and the letter becomes one more piece of that relationship.

First One, Then the Other

You need to build your online presence around keywords and Search Engine Optimization. They cast the wide net that brings you readers, followers, future customers and fellow travelers.

Once you’ve hit your stride and have a mutual relationship with a body of readers, you pursue Ideal Reader Optimization. You stop worrying about embedding keywords in your titles and h1 tags and using “2-3 keyword phrases 2-3 times per page.” You come up with better titles that capture people’s imagination in a way that keywords cannot. You will lose some of the original audience, but that’s how it goes.

So, what are you hiring your marketing communications writer to do: Search Engine Optimization or Ideal Reader Optimization?

photo credit: kainr

Related posts:

1. “This Paper Is a (Keyword) Basket Case.”