What’s in your content: Marketing writing or corporate cheerleading? A parable for the marketing manager.
A dear friend who does a lot of business writing once remarked,
Compact, compelling copy that doesn’t fall into business jargon is tough. So much of it is fake words strung together with cheerleading.
I’ve mulled that over for a couple of years [...]
White paper summaries or abstracts take time to write and to read. Are they worth it? They are if they help answer tough questions in a hurry.
Do you rely on an abstract at the beginning of a white paper to tell you what you’re about to read? Do you think the readers of your own [...]
Rescue your marketing communications content from the tar pit. Your readers can find it more easily and it will tell your story better.
Around 1900, a few men standing near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, realized that there were animal bones in the tar.
“What a find!” exclaimed the first. “We could do [...]
A parable: Valuable content and searchability are as important to religion as they are to your marketing communication.
In our parish, believe it or not, we pay a fair amount of attention to Sunday sermons. You can become blasé about sermons pretty easily, but I’ve heard several of my friends begin conversations with “Did you notice [...]
Your white papers are good incentive content. If you think nobody’s reading them, maybe it’s because the ideal readers cannot find them.
It’s hard not to feel good about having a white paper to give prospects, even harder when you have an entire library of them. If well done, they demonstrate the willingness to align your [...]
Half the art to getting found on the Web involves putting out great content. Your marketing communications writer needs to know this and produce accordingly.
A post at Problogger this week extols the virtues of linking to other content on the Web: Linking reinforces the relationships – both human and digital – that make the [...]
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 [...]
When is a piece too short? When is it too long? Your marketing communications writer needs to factor length and page-/word-count into how she writes for you.
Last night I attended a presentation at my son’s high school. Two presenters spoke in sequence, both with slide decks. Each spoke for 20 minutes, but I felt that [...]
Social media marketing seems like smoke and mirrors, but when the smoke blows away and you take down the mirrors, you still need to hire a writer who can deliver valuable content.
Social media marketing is an exercise in riding the tiger.
The buzz is that the traditional, prescriptive notions of marketing don’t fit very well in [...]
It’s not easy to keep your content machine fed, is it?
You’re finding out that providing valuable content to your readers really does take some work, doesn’t it?
When you were a kid, responsible for the family dog, your mom would holler up the staircase, “Timmy! It’s time to feed the dog again!” You remember that, don’t [...]
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