Recently I spoke with a CMO who wanted to market a commoditized IT product. Naturally, his product has its own competitive advantage. But it was clear to me that his target market would be shopping first on price, and that a feature-benefit message would be challenging to push.

Early in our conversation, he asked, "How much will a white paper cost?"

Like his own prospects, he, too, was shopping on price. He was thinking of his marketing message as a commodity, too.

But that's the last thing he can afford to do. Pedestrian, fill-in-the-blank content simply doesn't have enough appeal to sell a commodity product. On the contrary, the message must be that much more compelling to stand out. That is why hard-to-differentiate products, like cola, beer, and wireless service, have the most creative TV ads.

B2B marketers are increasingly tempted to churn out cheap content. They have hungry channels to feed, such as blogs and email newsletters. Meanwhile, budgets are slashed. So the question, "How much will a white paper cost?" tends to be the first question marketers ask.

Relative to other marketing expenses, good content is a great value. B2B marketers can easily waste the budget they have if they push a weak message that sales won't use, and the market won't read. Our job is to make the prospect care--and the harder the product is to differentiate, the more creative we need to be.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, white papers

As content strategists, we stress to our clients the importance of repurposing content in all channels. This post titled "6 Things the iPad Means for B2B Marketers" by Steve Woods of Eloqua, describes the new opportunities of Apple's iPad as one of those channels. Number 3 of the 6 is particularly interesting:

Books and whitepapers become interactive: as books and whitepapers are more and more read on devices like an iPad, rich interactive aspects become increasingly possible. Embedded videos within a book, links for more detailed exploration of topics, and interactive experiences to highlight a point all become possible, allowing us to rethink the book and whitepaper formats entirely.

The iPad--and other technology that will inevitably follow--will not only provide new channels for repurposing content, it will up the ante.

There is a lot of talk surrounding the iPad's potential to revitalize print media--but not just from the economic standpoint of selling more newspapers and magazines. The iPad will revitalize the formats. The boring white paper will become a thing of the past--the interactive, fun-to-read, fun-to-play white paper will take its place.

Of course, we have had the ability to create rich media content in the web browser for a long time now. For some reason, readers have not demanded media much more rich than a PDF file for e-books and white papers. YouTube has made video a viable channel, but rich media remains rare and expensive to produce.

Will the sheer portability of the iPad change the media formats for marketers, just as the iPod changed the format for music? Are thought-leading marketing executives ready to engage their audiences in bold new ways?

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, technology, white papers

Here's #10 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #10:
Great Web content is dynamic and changing.

Your business is constantly changing. (If you were in a static industry, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog.) New opportunities are emerging. Prospects have new questions and concerns that must be addressed. So your website can’t be static.

News releases are dynamic content—and they give you an often-overlooked way to leverage more traffic to your website. “Getting coverage for your business in mainstream media can be hugely beneficial in bringing a swathe of new visitors to your site, and building inbound links from the media and from all the other people who comment on it,” writes Internet marketing consultant Ken McGaffin.

Every time you create a significant new information paper, write a release and send it out on a wire service.

A related tip: If you have to rely on IT to keep your website current with fresh content, you might be in trouble. Invest in a content management system.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #9 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #9:
Great Web content is interactive.


Use cool tools as “link bait”—something other sites will read about and want to link to. For instance, create a handy web-based calculator for a need common to your audience. Maybe it’s a mortgage comparison calculator for borrowers. Or an ROI calculator for software buyers. Or a calculator to help farmers determine how much herbicide to mix.

Other potential tools could include color selectors, product selectors, or video demos. Whatever the tool is, just make sure it’s “cool,” relevant and well-publicized.

The use of video content in Internet marketing is soaring. YouTube has found that 37 percent of its users have purchased something offline that they saw advertised on YouTube. The company offers this advice to marketers who want to make effective use of video:

• “Just because you have video doesn’t mean it’s good or meaningful to the people in your market. Either modify it so it is, or don’t use it.”

• “Check everything you intend to post on YouTube to make sure it represents your brand and moves your mission forward.”

TechTarget’s “2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2: Closing the Gap.” also confirmed that technology buyers are using social communities in the decision-making process. “A very high percentage of the buyers indicated they now consider social communities to be one of the major places they'd go for information on the Web,” said Marilou Barsam, senior VP-corporate and client marketing at TechTarget.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, social network content, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #8 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #8:
Great Web content is easy to find and easy to scan.

According to David Talbott, a content expert at Studio B, most people who find your content won’t go on to read it unless it passes their scan test. What will pass? Talbott calls it “brain-friendly” content.

“You can force your brain to do things you need to do, like read a boring white paper the boss sent you, but that’s hard work. Brain-friendly content gives brains what they need, so that they keep reading.”

Any content you control—whether it is an email, a white paper, a landing page, or a product page—should be inviting to read. No dense paragraphs or endless scrolls. Use lots of subheads, bulleted lists, callouts, sidebars, charts and photos with captions, and other devices that break up the pages and help the reader determine whether the full text is worth reading.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Maybe it's New Year's resolutionism that is inspiring content marketers in the blogosphere to confront their norms. Several posts this week throw down the gauntlet.

• Copyblogger reports: "Dragon Slaying 101: How to Use Heroic Language to Battle Boring Copy". It's an engaging post on using the metaphors of the heroic quest to invigorate blogs and articles.
• Steve Woodruff, in "Disperse the Jargon Cloud," Steve Woodruff reminds us why we get lulled into using jargon, and what to do about it.
• MarketingProfs reposted a thoughtful article by Dana Vanden Heuven,"Thought Leaders Should Violate Expectations." He describes the characteristics that separates true thought leaders from the jargon slingers.
  

Here's an excerpt from Dana Vanden Heuven's "Thought Leaders" post:

Violating may sound like a harsh word. In fact, its original meaning, that is "to break or disregard" is so often overshadowed by the more malicious definitions that we often see it associated with. (see, expectations at work right there. Think of the first thing that came to mind when you way the word "violate" in the title―I bet it wasn't pretty.) However, when thought leaders violate expectations, they simply break the mold and deliver an unexpected insight, action idea, nugget of information or the all important "Aha! moment" that resets your thinking to their frequency and puts you on a different plane.

Here's a New Year's toast: may we violate expectations, battle mediocrity, and slay dragons in 2010.

Labels: confusing corporate writing, content marketing, web copy writing

Here's #7 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #7:
Great Web content is authoritative.

Great Web content puts your company’s best foot forward. It is original and demonstrates your company’s expertise, not lifted from outsiders or distilled from brochures. It is in-depth, targeted, believable information, not sales hype. Readers will judge your company’s credibility on the quality, depth and interest of your content.

Copyblogger.com makes this point in its “Content Marketing 101” column: “In contrast to traditional ‘interruption’ marketing such as advertising or direct mail, content marketing involves delivering information with independent value that creates trust, credibility, and authority for the business that provides the content.”

When content is credible and authoritative, it builds the reader’s (or listener’s) confidence in the seller. Confident visitors are converting visitors, copywriter Jeff Sexton states. “Make it easy for your customer to imagine taking the action you want her to take. Eliminate any unresolved concerns and replace them with mental images that inspire her confidence in doing business with you.”

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content

Here's #6 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #6:
Great Web content is emotional. It raises the hairs a bit.

Whether you’re selling financial services to consumers or databases to businesses, remember: Companies don’t buy things; people do. So their purchase decisions are influenced by more than steel-trap logic and facts.

“Since we all buy with our emotions first and our rational minds second, you’ve got to uncover the emotional reasons for buying your products and services, or you’ll just be competing on price—a bad place to be,” says Web copywriter Sid Smith. “A strategy built around satisfying your customer’s emotional needs works far better than one focused solely on lead generation ‘tactics.’”

Good content gets the reader involved personally. Look for ways to put the reader into the story. Perhaps her inspired purchase of your product will earn kudos from her peers. Or maybe the content shows a family man how your product or service will give him more time with his wife and children.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #5 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #5:
Great Web content is search-engine friendly--while communicating effectively.

Recently I've blogged about how marketers are being tempted to crank-out content to satisfy increasingly voracious search engines. At the end of the day, people, not search engine spiders,
are the ones reading your content. Market leaders know this, and place a premium on content that doesn't just rank, but communicates.

Search engine marketing specialist Todd Miechiels writes: “Companies everywhere want to throw money at search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) in hopes of getting their share of the new, less-costly-to-acquire customers that Internet marketing has promised.

“The truth is, without content—and I mean good content that clearly communicates, persuades and inspires—a good amount of search marketing dollars are wasted. A lot of companies get lazy on the content development side, which turns a pretty low risk marketing channel into a pretty sure bust.”

Also check out the advice of Aaron Wall in his article, “If People Hate Your Writing, Google Hates Your Website.” He writes, “Content without links only works if you operate in an undiscovered or uncompetitive niche. … If you point a few more quality links at a real content page, it will rank far better and be far more profitable than a hand-crafted page that was created exclusively for bots.”

In other words, it’s important for content to be spider-friendly—but that is a secondary objective. It’s far more crucial that your content is written for people and packaged for people.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.
illustration credit

Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Here's #4 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #4:
Great Web content is should be repurposed.

Copyblogger's recent post, "How to Do Less and Get More," applies to web content and marketing in general. Marketers who frequently rework and rewrite their message might believe they are "keeping it fresh," but they are muddying the waters.

Just because you put something “out there” once doesn’t mean that the target audience saw it, so you need to keep pushing out the same messages—with new twists and fresh formats.

The Internet is perfect for repurposing content. Take a white paper, for example. (Take this white paper, specifically.) You can turn it into several shorter articles. Then, perhaps using an interview format, turn each article into a podcast. Make a video of podcast interviews and distribute it on YouTube.

Get ideas for email subject lines from bullet points and subheads in brochures, case histories and webinar presentations. Issue press releases on new white papers and webinars. Include an image of the paper’s cover so that search engines will index it, too.

These are just a few ways of repurposing content. Go through your “inventory” of content, and you’ll think of many more.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content, web copy writing

Since the story about AOL's pay-to-play model broke last week, several more stories in the blogosphere raise the question, "What's happening to web content?"

This post on the SEOmoz blog, "Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong." is followed by a long string of comments where quite a few SEO pros argue that content is not king--links are king; quality content doesn't drive traffic.

HubSpot's blog post, "What Google's Launch of Real-Time Streaming Search Means For Marketers" paints a picture of a world where marketers generate content in real time to satisfy real-time demand. The blogger advises:

Keep working to transform your company website from stagnant pages into a mini-publishing house that produces timely, interesting content that your prospective customers are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere out there.

She doesn't advise on how to manage the costs of running such a mini-publishing house. My hunch is that quality may suffer in the race to publish the next tweetable article.

As a purveyor of quality content, I find this trend difficult to ignore but difficult to accept. Underneath the retweets of retweets and rehashes of aggregated blog posts, driving the unwieldy engine of social media, there must be content that people want to read.

(I'm reminded of the old story with the punchline: there must be a pony in here somewhere.)

Without quality content somewhere in the fray, the unwieldy engine will stop turning. (In fact, bloggers are above average in education and wealth; one might assume that many of them have something to say that's worthwhile--not simply laden with search keyphrases.)

Look at TV--the supply of programming includes a lot of crap, but also some ponies. In fact, there's a case to be made that at the high end, the bar is pushing higher. Yes, we have Bromance. But we also have Mad Men.

So my prediction for 2010 is remains optimistic for content. While the average marketer will continue on a downward trajectory, the leaders in 2010 will differentiate themselves by caring less about open rates and page ranks, and more about changing the game. They will be the ones who use content to carry big ideas and to create clever, memorable and useful content that gets read, remembered, shared, and appreciated.

Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, thought leadership

Here's #3 of a 10-part series on the "The 10 Hallmarks of Great Web Content." Read the full white paper, or view all the blog posts in the series.

Hallmark of Great Web Content #3:
Great Web content is aligned throughout all deliverables.
Think of alignment as a security blanket that goes with prospects as they move through the sales cycle. The outbound email features the same value proposition that is reiterated on the landing page, reinforced on the registration form and offered up in informational booklet. And all of them highlight the key word phrases that your prospects are using to find the products and services you’re selling.

A complicating factor of alignment: You’ll need to align multiple paths through the sales cycle, because site visitors are entering the funnel at different stages of the decision process. That calls for different landing pages with different offers and different calls to action. (This Forbes study describes how different decision makers, according to age, require different media and calls to action.)

You’ll need distinct content for less qualified prospects who are still in the nurturing stages. B-to-B buyers, in particular, often require months of nurturing. If they won’t bite on a white paper, offer a newsletter or some other “micro-conversion” tactic.

Prospects deeper in the funnel, on the other hand, have less need for educational materials. A qualified prospect with near-term closing potential may be looking for a quote, a feasibility study, or a demo.

For more hallmarks of great web content, read the white paper.

Labels: content marketing, ten hallmarks of great web content

Forbes has published a study "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information" that is particularly useful for b-to-b marketers who want to reach C-level executives with their content.

The report confirms, with research, several trends we've assumed to be true:

• Younger executives are more likely to use social media than the previous generations.
• The Internet has edged out print media as a trusted information source.
• Text is still king, but online video is on the rise with younger executives. Look for a shift away from KnowledgeStorm and towards YouTube.
  

There are also some surprising findings:

• C-level executives don't delegate research as much as we might think. Executives do perform their own searches, and download white papers and read blogs. That means: decision-makers do find and read good content.
• Competitor analyses are the #1 topic of research executives seek. That means: there's a payoff for companies who take a cue from social media, and adopt a content strategy that addresses competitive differentiation. A rah-rah white paper won't be as effective as one that helps the reader compare apples to apples.

This report will be helpful to marketers who know the age of the executives they want to reach. Articles and white papers will appeal to "Generation Wang," while blogs and video will be effective for "Generation Netscape."

Forbes.com requires a free registration to download the document (name and email address). Download "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite" here. Thanks to Joe Pulizzi for blogging this report.

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing

Custom content is up, and trade publications are down. This week, BtoB Magazine published these two stories, and it is up to me to connect the dots.

Public companies shedding b-to-b media

Incompatibility with volatile ad cycles has big publishers selling off properties

The global downturn has underscored advertising's cyclicality, with ad pages plunging an average 30% this year. The decline's magnitude has left trade magazine publishing a diminished business that appears increasingly incompatible with publicly traded companies.

Custom publishing on the upswing
With corporations competing with media companies, content marketing makes everyone a publisher
There was a time when custom publishing entailed a few pages of “advertorial” in an appropriate trade publication or, more ambitiously, an extended advertising vehicle in the guise of an actual magazine. ... Today, ... companies are turning eagerly to digital content, providing customers and potential buyers with business and technical intelligence that's high on credibility and low on promotion.

It's official. As the trade pubs struggle, the vision of content marketing is borne out. Thought leadership is no longer controlled by publishing companies. Marketers are becoming the publishers. Why wait for a trade magazine's editorial calendar, when you can publish your own micro-site and YouTube channel?

I see the opportunity for marketers--in b-to-b, particularly--to push the "reset" button on their thought leadership content strategy. BtoB published two other articles this week forecasting bigger marketing budgets 2010 ("Making a splash after the crash" and "2010 Outlook survey shows marketing budgets to grow"). The crash of '08-'09 has already forced b-to-b marketers to abandon old habits; with new money to spend in '10, they will be looking for new habits.

2010 will be a big year for content.

Related white paper: Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?

Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, thought leadership