How does your organization use case studies? Do you realize how potent a tool they can be in your Content Buffet?

[Quick factoid in case you want to be convinced: Eccolo Media's 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey finds that 68 percent of respondents rated case studies as "very” to “extremely influential” in 2011, as compared to 39 percent of respondents in the 2010 survey (page 8).]

Why do case studies work?

They work because people don’t want to feel alone in taking a chance on your product. Whether you’re selling mixing bowls, gas turbines or a college education, nobody wants to be the first to try your product.

So keep that in mind when your marketing communications writer is creating your case studies. Instead of describing how cool your product is, tell a story in which your prospects can see themselves so that they don’t feel they’re taking a big risk by sending you their check.

Of course, you can’t calm everybody’s nerves with one case study, so organizations with a content marketing strategy create a series of them and give them titles that make it easy for people to find one in which they can see themselves.

What’s in your prospect’s head?

Depending on how your marketing communications writer executes your content marketing strategy, your case studies will trigger one of these thoughts in the brain of your prospect:

1. “These guys have some big customers.” Sometimes you want a case study that drops names. Who can resist that temptation? If you landed the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and made them happy, trumpet that from the rooftops and put that idea into your prospect’s head. Most of the time, though, the namedropping is pretty transparent and it’s wrapped around a frankly rather dull Problem-Solution-Result structure. It’s not pretty, but if you have to get the piece approved by a phalanx of your client’s reviewers, you may need clinical, succinct copy.
2. “This is the same problem I have, and these guys understand it.” If you want to plug the reader right into your socket, show that your customer actually had multiple problems – they always have, somewhere – and that you didn’t stop asking questions when you reached the first one. Explain how you fixed them, in as much detail as you can get away with.
   
3. “If these guys can frim the jim-jams for them, maybe they can frap the krick for us.” For this, you need to drive imagination with a case study that tells a real story, especially a story about an unexpected use of your product. You have to show your readers what your customer accomplished with your product, then put them in the frame of mind to think one step removed. That accelerator was designed for a robot? What if we used it in a history-making tchotchke?

What kind of ideas do your case studies plant in your prospect’s mind? Does it align with your content marketing strategy?

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: gurdonark

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3. Business to Business Case Studies – Which Format?

If every sentence of your marketing copy isn’t selling me on technical benefits or business benefits, why are you bothering to put it in front of me?

Worse yet, if your copy is sprinkled with drivel and fluff, why put it on your website where the entire planet can see it?

I saw a couple of examples of really bad copy this week, and they’ve got me thinking about how technology companies struggle to tell their story in a meaningful way.

Ad out: Marketers

We hire marketers to start our conversation with people outside the building. We tell them our technology story and we expect them to filter it into something appealing to different audiences. For example:

In order to deliver the type of user experiences enabled by these innovations, software must keep pace – otherwise we will fall painfully short of capitalizing on the opportunities presented by these unprecedented hardware achievements…It’s the next great challenge faced by an industry with a history of meeting and surpassing high consumer expectations.

No engineer would ever say that. I’ve written meatier content than that and had engineers tell me it was fluff.

Ad out: Engineers

So should we let the engineers do the writing, like this?

With up to 3-stream MIMO and 900 Mbit/s radio performance, our 802.11n APs deliver Ethernet speed without the wires. Multi-radio, multi-channel mesh routing and automatic mesh failover offer fault tolerance, and provide fast coverage in hard-to-wire areas.

Engineers aren’t right about everything. They understand the tech, but they don’t always understand the need to appeal to different audiences. They know how to appeal to other engineers, but rarely to journalists, analysts and C-level prospects.

Drop the confetti and pick up the razor

Frankly, I’m not impartial. I may get mildly annoyed when I see ham-handed geek-sell, but I get downright cranky when I see lousy marketing copy masquerading as technical sales material.

Marketers, try your hardest to tell the story the way the engineers want to tell it. Just be sure to edit it first.

Engineers, quit looking down your noses at the marketers. You can’t do their job any more than they can do yours, so educate them.

Let’s see whether we can do better, shall we all?

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: Sakarias Ingolfsson

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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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1. Giving the Readers Value
2. 3 Ways to Make Long Marketing Pieces Work
3. Statistics in Your Content – Make Sure They Stick

Jason Cohen, a technology entrepreneur who’s not afraid to blog about his profession, extends all the sympathy you would expect of a Marine Corp drill sergeant to fellow entrepreneurs who can’t get around to blogging. In “Attacking your sucky excuses for not blogging,” he soothingly reminds us:

Not much in life that’s worthwhile is easy, especially at the beginning. That’s not an excuse to not do it.

Here’s a bunch of other excuses you’re probably using to avoid becoming a good communicator with influence in the world. Maybe by showing you ways around them you’ll take the plunge.

He then deflates most of the frequently invoked excuses for not blogging, which, if you’re not blogging, you probably already know.

Symptom of a deeper issue

Or, maybe you’re a social media loser.

There are lots of things that are not for everybody, and maybe you’re just not good at expressing your organization’s opinions, let alone talking about yourself.

Blogging is meant to be informal, and maybe the informality intimidates you. (Formality probably intimidates you even more.)

But what seems more likely – and more ominous – to me is that you have something to hide.

When I visit a Website of a small company, I always look at their About Us page to see whether they are brave (or honest) enough to identify themselves to the audience. (I also do this to see whether it’s just two guys and a dog behind the outfit; actually, I don’t even mind that it’s just two guys and a dog, as long as they’re willing to show me that they’re small.)

What are you hiding?

Why don’t you tell us your story somewhere on your site and blog about the things you and your company are doing? Who are you? Where were you before, and how come you’re not there anymore? Is it just you and your laptop behind this Flash-besotted multimedia Website, or are other people in your company?

Your blog, Facebook page and About Us page are different sides of the same thing: whether you have the cheek to tell your story in front of everybody.

If I have a business problem, I don’t care that the company that can solve it is small or shy or too busy to blog more than a couple of times a month.

But I do care if it doesn’t have the nerve to tell its story on the Web so I can see whether it’s the kind of outfit with which I want to work.

What’s on your About Us page? For that matter, what’s on mine?

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: Helga Weber

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1. “It’s Time to Feed the Blog Again”

Can you imagine business life without a Web presence? How would you tell your story and do content marketing? How would new customers find you and existing customers follow you? What would you do if you couldn’t say, “Yes, let’s put that on the Website”?

It’s nearly inconceivable for most marketing managers, of course. When was the last time you tried unsuccessfully to find a business online, or heard one of your peers say, “We don’t have a Website yet”? It takes one back to the mid-1990s.

What? No Website?

Would it surprise you that many of the small businesses you’ve visited in the last month have no Website? Or that those business owners don’t feel that they need one?

In “Less than Half of Small Biz Have Sites,” MarketingCharts points out that

Less than half (45%) of small businesses have websites, according to data analyzed by online form builder Formstack. Formstack defines a small business as having maximum annual sales of less than $5 million.

A survey from Discover Credit Cards found that, although small businesses are beginning to embrace e-commerce, less than half of small businesses surveyed (2007: 33%; 2009: 45%) have a Website.

You’ve been in plenty of <$5-million businesses lately: day care centers, shoe repair shops, liquor stores, barber shops, corner groceries. Did they seem odd or unprofitable because they don’t have a Website? They have credit card relationships, according to Formstack and Discover, and cell phones and maybe even e-mail.

But they think that their business does not currently need a Website (41% of those without one), think it would cost too much money (19%), think it would cost too much time (16%) or think it would be too complex (9%).

Many corner markets, dry cleaners, bakeries and other mom-and-pop operations have enough neighborhood foot traffic that they really don’t need the Internet to turn a profit.

What must that be like?

Information cost and the Web

Why do Websites exist? Why do the marketing managers who run them and the marketing writers who populate them have jobs?

It’s because there is an information cost associated with getting buyers and sellers to find each other. Sellers create Websites and generate content in order to lower that cost to just a few clicks.

Isn’t it funny that such a large percentage of today’s buyers and sellers still find each other without incurring those costs, and without using a Website to lower them?

Could you go back to marketing without a Website? How would you do it?

*With apologies to Alfonso Bedoya, who had the privilege of delivering a similar but far more eloquent line in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948).

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: Maurice Koop

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Jessica Shieh reports in Marketing Profs that recent studies suggest the buzz around Facebook may be in the fast lane to diminuendo.

For many of us, dizzied by the number and variety of social media channels in which to tell our story before our competitors get there and tell theirs, it’s not too soon. “Whew,” we gasp, “now we need to focus only on our Web site, blog, Twitter profile, e-mail campaigns, direct marketing and videos.”

Facebook less popular to whom?

What the decline in popularity of Facebook means – if there really is a decline – is that you need to court prospects elsewhere. If you have engaged followers and paying customers on Facebook, however, they’re probably not ready to throw the towel in by a longshot. They’re still having a good time on your fan page, and you’ll do well to continue giving them one.

I hope you’ve been feeding your website and blog all along though, since unlike Facebook, those are properties you can own. They’re also zones in which you can play by the normal, healthy rules of search.

But maybe you’ve benefited from the information about your followers for which Facebook is taking so much flak lately. If so, personalize while the personalizing is good, and transplant what you learn about your followers into buyer personas to implement on your own site and blog.

So, yes, you should heed Jessica by hoping for the best (the Facebook witch hunt will chug along innocuously) and planning for the worst (you need to depend exclusively on your own site and blog).

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: chadly

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Your Content Buffet is the smorgasbord of content you use to tell your organization’s story: case studies, white papers, newsletter content, blog posts, technical overviews, brochures and so forth.

Consider that your marketing communication writers have their own Content Buffet. You value your writers for their ability to describe your top-of-class spar varnish or 35-micron integrated circuits, but scratch a little deeper and see what else they write, and for whom. Their portfolio is their Content Buffet, and you should take a walk down it.

Some writers are frustrated novelists; some are just good at writing in a variety of ways. Some – I’m not naming any names – need to write other kinds of content because if they wrote about your stuff day in and day out, they’d go batty. Just sayin’.

Three things to keep in mind about your marketing writer’s Content Buffet:

1. They work in other industries besides yours. I’m still wary of people who claim they can write anything (Oh, yeah? How well?), but good writers attract clients in different verticals. The clients realize that it’s more important to hire a good writer than to hire somebody who knows their business. You may find valuable overlap (read: connections) to other industries in your writer’s portfolio.
2. They’re competent in other formats besides the ones they deliver to you. They do blog posts for you, but they do white papers for other clients; does it surprise you that they can work in both formats? You can broaden your own Content Buffet from your customary data sheets and brochures into a library of pieces that tell your story more compellingly.
3. They build other kinds of sentences besides the ones you use. (They may even use humor.) What does their work look like when they’re not cramming your SEO keywords into every paragraph? John Yunker, a well-known writer in the field of translation/localization, has a night job in creative writing. You wouldn’t know it to read his posts on multi-language service providers, but his novel, The Tourist Trail, is about penguin colonies in Argentina. Wise are the marketing managers who can harness that diversity of writing style for use in telling their own organization’s story.

My experience is that marketing managers know too little about their marketing communication writers. It’s not difficult to tour their portfolio for a profitable look at the variety inside, and start using it to the organization’s advantage.

How well do you know your writers?

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: Karen Blumberg

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Have you been with an organization long enough to remember:

• when things were a mess, and what everybody had to go through to make things run as smoothly as they do now?
• how you used to be known for your parts, and how your customers came to know you as partners?
• when the market associated you with low price, and how you got it to associate you with high quality?

These represent Transformations, seismic shifts in the organization that set a new course. Almost every organization goes through these sooner or later, some more painfully than others.

Maybe you’re the last buggy whip company, and the sun is setting on your addressable market. Or maybe a management consultant has your CEO’s ear and puts in place a new direction and policy. Maybe you get hip to the fact that in five years nobody is going to pay you to do what you’re doing today.

Once you’re through the tunnel, you’re ready to tell the world about the crucible you’ve been through, and how much stronger you are as a result. You’re ready for a white paper outline that explains How We Rescued Ourselves.

Title and Summary

A Transformation white paper is a different kind of content.

You need to make readers feel as if they’re getting a peek in the kitchen at the best restaurant in town. If you pull this off, you’ll have a paper that makes for excellent social media content. Readers see past the façade of ordinary marketing and have the chance for a deeper conversation with you. Tip them off to this in the title and summary; for example:

• What Goes Down Can Come Up – Amalgamated Fuzz Transforms Its Sales Process
• How Acme Paper Took ISO 9001′s Benefits from Production to the C-Suite and Back
• Customer Input Takes Over, and Skater Industries is the Better for It

The Landscape

Count on a varied audience for this paper: customers, prospects, investors, journalists, and certainly competitors will read it, so devote a few paragraphs to the state of the industry and the problems faced by most organizations in your position.

• Tell this as a story, not as a datasheet or a newspaper article. Use conflict-driven business writing to draw readers in, and get to the conflict as soon as practical.
• Avoid using terms like “challenges” and “pain points.” Everybody knows you’re talking about business problems, so call them as much.
• Charts, diagrams, images and even quotations work well as complements to the main body of text.

Precipitating Event or Watershed

Who or what introduced the plan for changing things? Did somebody become fed up? Did somebody raise Cain at a shareholder meeting?

It’s important to describe this as economically yet smoothly as possible, because it’s the pivotal point in the story. Remember, your readers want to know what’s happening backstage, so give them what they want. (It may require some dancing to get this past your execs, but it really is important. Besides, any embarrassment is in the past, and you can anonymize anything too uncomfortable.)

How We Rescued Ourselves – The Transformation Process

How did you get this all done? What did it take? What processes did the organization put in place? Who had to be accommodated? What compromises were needed?

You spend this section telling readers, “Here’s how we did it. It wasn’t easy, but we got through it.” You may even give them enough information so that they too can do it.

Stay in story-telling mode.

Other End of the Tunnel

Here’s the point of the Transformation – indeed, of the entire paper: Yours is a new and improved organization now. List the reasons why.

Using as much subtlety as possible, you want readers to understand that you’re now a better company with which to do business. You’ve done the hard, internal work to purge inefficiencies and the things that separated you from your customers. You itemize the data points that support this:

• 28% fewer customer support calls
• 93% on-time arrivals
• 7% annual growth for the last three years
• a stock price that outperforms competitors by 4%
• Malcolm Baldrige awards

Conclusion and Follow Us

Still resisting the temptation to pat yourself on the back, draw some conclusions about what comes next: More Transformation? Additional phases? New business units?

You’ve taken them through the kitchen in our restaurant. It’s easy to blow it here and efface your good story with nonsense about how great your organization is; keep in mind that nobody cares about your company or products, because they’re preoccupied with their business problems and how you can help solve them. Your well-told Transformation story leaves them no doubt.

Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, video and webinars. If you’ve done a good job, readers will want to keep an eye on you for more insight.

The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your Transformation white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.

Next, the Kitchen-Sink Outline.

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. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.

photo credit: Richard Moross CC2.0

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“White paper” covers a multitude of formats, and it’s rare to find two people who take it to mean the same thing. Poisoned white papers harm the publisher more than the reader, but there are antidotes.

I’ve looked at a half-dozen documents called “white papers” in the last few days and marveled at the variety among them. It’s a maligned term, really, and I think it has come to represent a type of marketing communications content that:

1. is long;
2. is different from a brochure, a case study or an advertisement.

That covers a lot of ground. I’ll leave it to folks like Jonathan Kantor to describe what a white paper is and isn’t, but whatever you or your marketing communications writers have produced, you should make sure that you don’t poison it – let alone your readers or your reputation – with it.

4 Ways to Poison Your White Paper…

1. Wall of text – This can more resemble a rant than a white paper. If you go on for more than a page or two with nothing but text, you’re probably poisoning your readers, no matter how engaging your content.
2. Aimlessness – This is more like a blog post (and a poor, long one at that) than a white paper. It is usually a sign that the author is enthusiastic about the product but does not know how to tell a story about it.
3. Leading the reader by the nose to your product – This is more like a brochure than a white paper, because the goal of a white paper is for readers to sense that they are drawing their own conclusions – at least, some of them. If you’re not leaving them with that feeling, then it’s a brochure.
4. Hiding it under a bushel – This is more like a diary entry. White papers are the main course at The Content Buffet, and they should be prominently posted, tweeted, Facebooked, excerpted and blogged about. If you’re not thinking “Write once, use many,” you’re missing most of the social media wave.

…and 3 Antidotes

1. Break up the text in your paper with diagrams, charts, callout boxes, photographs, quotations and anything else graphical that gives the reader’s eye a much deserved rest. It’s easy to go overboard on this, but if you can give your readers a vacation once per page, it will be easier for them to get through the entire paper, and they’ll remember you more fondly for it.
2. Maintain a balance among sections. For example:
   • 5% summary
   • 25% introduction and presentation of problem
   • 30% current approaches and why something new is needed
   • 30% details and advantages of new solution (ours)
   • 10% conclusion and follow-us.

   This is the antidote for aimlessness because it gives readers a mental pace to keep.

3. Focus on your ideal readers. If you really know them well enough to aim a white paper at them, you should be able to include miniature case studies that tie applications of your product back to real-world people and companies. This is a very powerful antidote because it introduces relevance.

So, whether you’ve produced a pure-land, bona fide white paper, or just something that is long and is not a brochure, take care to remove the poison from it before handing it on to your customers and prospects.

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/-cavin-/ / CC BY 2.0

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Thousands of blogs are born each day, but it’s not all sweetness and light. A summary of the downside of blogging, whether for yourself or for your organization.

Even back in 2006, Technorati was estimating that 175,000 new blogs were born each day, or one every half-second. Even if only one-tenth of them made it past five posts, and even if many of those same keystrokes are now being pumped into other social networking platforms, a lot of people are still maintaining blogs and a lot of us are still reading them.

“What’s Wrong with Blogging?” ProBlogger Asks

In a recent post, A-class blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asks us, “What’s wrong with blogging?” Darren’s following is colossal, and he had over 120 comments within 24 hours, covering a gamut of complaints about blogging in general. A digest of some of what’s wrong with blogging:

• English is the dominant language in blogging (so far), and other cultures/languages are missing out on valuable content.
• Journalists deride blogging.
• Journalists thrive on blogging.
• Blogging has become a form of advertising.
• Many bloggers are reluctant to link to other blogs in the same niche.
• It’s hard to generate valuable content regularly that will get a blog noticed.
• Generally, the quality of writing is low on blogs.
• Too many posts are merely about content on other blogs (like this one, I presume).
• Only bloggers read blogs.
• The get-rich-quick crowd and affiliate marketing are polluting blogging.
• Upstart bloggers are displacing experts in their field.
• Desire for popularity trumps quality in content.

This is a cautionary tale for marketing communications writers working on corporate (and personal) blogs. It is tough work. It probably won’t pay off in the short run. You may not experience instant gratification or a huge following. So why do it?

To tell your story. Passionately.

Use Your Blog to Show Your Passion

Your organization is a going concern, which means that things are constantly changing in it. There’s a story in that, and your followers (newspeak for customers, vendors, friends, investors, journalists, competitors) want to know it.

And, if it’s a good story, you should be passionate about telling it.

Those press releases you publish a couple of times a month? Not much passion in those, is there?

Use your blog to tell people the why behind the news, in a way that shows what your organization is passionate about: child literacy, green power, military hegemony, helping people get rich. Readers won’t magically flock to it, but when they take a close look at you, they’ll see passion, and that’s where followers come from.

Change your objective from boosting blog readership to telling your organization’s story passionately, and you’ll subtract a lot of the stress from the process.

Blogging will still be tough, of course, but it will be much more bearable.

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: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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