From the category archives:

Marketing 2.0

Make Your Content Work for a Living – 4 Simple Steps to Better Product Marketing Content

by Lilia Shirman on October 30, 2012

in Marketing,Marketing 2.0,Messaging,Writing

This post is by guest blogger, Charles Born:

I could subtitle this “How to Lose at Buzzword Bingo and Increase Sales” but this is not where I whine further about buzzwords and jargon. I did that in previous blogs (Buzzword Bingo and Avoiding the Buzzword Bingo Trap). All kidding aside, there is a time for professional jargon: when you know you’re speaking to an audience that understands you, and you need the extra specificity and precision that jargon can sometimes provide. If you’re using it outside of that then you’re probably not communicating clearly, honestly, or effectively.

In the web and social marketing world, online “conversations” are the perfect opportunity to meet buyers’ information needs with smartly targeted and informative content that buyers consider valuable. Unfortunately, Web copy is often written in less than ideal circumstances by product marketers who do not have the time to do it right.

The good news is that anyone who writes content can ensure that every chunk of text on the web is doing something concrete and useful. Good marketing copy accomplishes specific goals; just touting a product is not one of them.

Let’s look at an example. Here is a chunk of text displayed prominently on one company’s website:

With Product X advanced features, capturing and reporting product sales data in the cloud and in real-time can improve operational intelligence and provide insight that enables more effective strategic, tactical and effective decision-making. With Product X researching your online sales is FASTER!

What do we know about this product from the two statements? Intelligence and insight will be improved by capturing and reporting! And that will enable, among many other things, better tactical decision-making! And we end with a tag line – in CAPITAL letters no less–with an exclamation point, indeed! Here we have a simple example of what happens when the goal of the writing is to fill up a web page with copy.

How do you approach writing product copy and potentially winning buyer attention and sales interest?

Just KIS – Keep It Simple (not stupid)

Most product content needs to answer 4 basic questions:

Who is the product for?
What is the product?
What does the product do for its target user?
Why is the product better than the available alternatives?

The lack of answers to these really basic questions is what frustrates buyers in their journey and wastes marketing money on writing babble. To do it right, let’s look at the questions in more detail.

Who is the product for? Think of your target audience. Can they tell from this copy that you are speaking to them? Can other people outside your audience tell that you are NOT speaking to them?

What is the product? Try to write in conversational tone using short and simple sentences. Make sure you have spelled out, clearly and in simple language, what the product is and that the nouns as concrete as you can make them.

What does the product do for its target user? Be specific in laying out the product’s primary features and benefits in a clear, concrete way.

Why is this product better than the available alternatives? Here is where flowery prose needs to be edited. If you make a claim, give evidence for the claims clearly and without empty language that makes you look like boasting.

Answer these questions, and you’ll communicate more clearly and efficiently than the horde of companies who’ve filled their web product pages with the content equivalent of cotton candy.

Please share your tips and suggestions to making content work.

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Avoiding the Buzzword Bingo Trap

by Charles Born on October 23, 2012

in Marketing,Marketing 2.0,Sales 2.0,Sales Tips,Solutions,Uncategorized,Writing

This article is by Guest Blogger Charlie Born, on of The Shirman Group’s extended network of business experts.

In their quest to solve business problems, buyers are turning to the internet and social media for information. This customer-driven Buyers’ Journey gives marketers a new channel to create valuable information that is discoverable, consumable, shareable and valuable.

Unfortunately, many marketers fall into the trap of creating content flooded with buzzwords, jargon, and marketing pitches. These cause buyer resistance and make you indistinguishable from competitors.

Buyers reward well-researched and believable information packaged into quickly digestible and easy-to-absorb info-graphics, white papers, info-training materials, webinars and blogs. Here are a few pointers for avoiding the buzzword bingo trap when creating your marketing content.

1. Don’t lead with your solution, your product or what you do. Instead start with a narrative about the business problem you are solving. Have a vision. Then lead your reader to your solution. Show how your approach is different before you go on to prove how it is better.

2. To craft the story, listen to your customers. Find out how your customers describe what you do. What words and phrases resonate with them—and which ones do not? See my previous post for how to interview customers about their buyers’ journey to get this information.

3. Listen to how your top sales performers tell your story. This will give you added perspective—particularly from those with strong solution-selling techniques.

4. When you write, ‘speak’ with a natural voice. Use the words you would use if you were speaking to someone you knew. Use short phrases and sentences. Most times, less is more. It just takes extra work to edit things down.

5. Strive to say something relevant, memorable, and different from what your competitors are saying. Just keep it real and not overblown. Be careful not to over-claim. Puffed up claims put most readers off rather than draw them in and can end up being a legal challenge later if problems arise. Make your reader want to learn more – and show them how they can by having additional content for them to pursue elsewhere on your website or blog.

Released last year and written by lexophile Arthur Plotnik, “Better than Great” is a book I have found useful in fixing buzzword bingo. It reads like a funky thesaurus and includes an assortment of over 6000 words and suggestions for describing things—pulling from rare gems, vintage gold, and even phrases influenced by hip hop to present a wide range of fresh superlatives. It is both amusing and vocabulary expanding.

Share with us successful ways on how you are telling your company’s story in a way that genuinely informs buyers, stands out from the crowd and avoids buzzword bingo.

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Buzzword Bingo

by Charles Born on October 16, 2012

in Marketing,Marketing 2.0,Messaging

This article is by Guest Blogger Charlie Born

Online “conversations” are a perfect opportunity for marketing to meet buyers’ information needs with smartly targeted and informative online content that buyers consider valuable.

At odds with this need for “conversations” is the high tech marketing history of using “words du jour” to make our products seem unique and different. Words like “cloud”, “social” and “big data” are just some that are rapidly littering our marketing content and are so over hyped their meaning is questionable. Coupled with over-used words like market leading, one-stop, scalable, easy to use, customer focused, best in class and many others, you have a winning game of buzzword bingo.

Does this buzzword bingo have any real meaning or value for the reader? The repeated use of trite phrases devalues them even if they are true. Furthermore, as marketers we know that when every company make similar claims, buyers struggle to tell us apart from competition. Of course, who wouldn’t claim these things? But more importantly, who isn’t claiming them?

Even if you think you are avoiding the creep of jargon into your marketing content, I’d encourage you to conduct a quick exercise with your marketing team:

1. Identify the most commonly used words and phrases on your website, in your online marketing materials and in your sales tools.

2. Do the same with your leading competitors

3. Compare the two.

If your language is truly distinct from your competition, congratulations! If, on the other hand, there’s an uncomfortable similarity between your words and phrases used by your competitors, then you have some work to do.

Next post, “Avoiding the Buzzword Bingo Trap”

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Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation: Avoiding Becoming ‘1 of 3’

by Charles Born on September 12, 2012

in Customer relationships,Lead Generation,Marketing,Marketing 2.0

This article is by Guest Blogger Charlie Born

Are you generating leads and finding that the buyers who contact you are already far into their decision process, having already identified you as ‘1 of 3’ top but very similar vendors? To prevent the final selection round from becoming a feature-function-price competition and create stronger differentiation, you may need to engage earlier in the Buyers’ Journey. This early demand creation (in contrast to lead generation) requires changing what is in your buyers’ mind, and not what is in your marketing database. That means influencing the early learning process with the right information, presented at the right time, via the right mediums to help decision makers learn about you before they contact you as a prospect.

It is not a surprise that the internet, social networks and online communities are key sources that potential buyers use to search for meaningful information during their Buyers’ Journey. These online sources are largely relationship and not broadcast oriented; this means information that stimulates interaction and response is welcomed and encouraged in a ‘community’ setting while obvious marketing spam is most often ignored. Because of this, information needs to be packaged in buyer friendly content formats that make it attractive, discoverable, consumable and sharable throughout the entire Buyers’ Journey. Think of your information as ‘content as a service”. Provide interesting whitepapers, webinars, blogs, info-graphics and “info-tainment” to engage your buyers and create demand. Be sure to point your potential buyers to sources of information other than your own, which often carry greater credibility.

How can you be sure you are helping buyers discover what they want to learn at the right time in their Buyers’ Journey? Engage directly with the buyers. Meet with current customers, new customers and lost sales opportunities and focus on some of these concepts during your discussions:

Gain an understanding of the customer’s evaluation and buying process by industry and role within the company.
Talk to them about what triggered the need for the solution.
Ask them what they were looking for and where they went to find answers.
Find out who they spoke with directly and who influenced them and how.
And most importantly, find out how they evaluated the information.

It’s been my experience that through these meetings you discover how to align your marketing to the buyers’ information needs and to the content formats and outlets that are most effective for an audience. Your analysis of the information that buyers need, and when, where and how they consume it, should inform the process for creating, packaging, and disseminating information and maintaining consistency across communication channels. That process will likely change your current marketing efforts to emphasize demand creation throughout the Buyer’s Journey, rather than lead generation when that journey is near its end.

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Social Media for B2B Lead Gen – Yes, It Works

by Lilia Shirman on October 23, 2009

in Lead Generation,Marketing,Marketing 2.0,Sales 2.0,Sales Tips

Great discussion last night at the SVAMA event about how B2B marketers can leverage social media to generate leads. Check out the summary by Kirsty Scott of SD Design.

A few points I thought were esp. interesting, insightful, or controversial.

1. Create LOTS of interesting, relevant content. But how, given limited resources? The panelists suggested:

One person can generate a lot of content and a lot of buzz – it doesn’t take an army
You don’t have to be a professional writer. Just get your ideas across.
Give your community a forum for creating content. WD40 fan club is a great example of community-generated content.

2. “The internet is a great medium for experimentation,” Mike Linton.

Its easy to try out different tactics, different language, and different social media hubs. You quickly can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
Its easy to overcome resistance inside your company by suggesting, “Let’s just run it as a test.”

3. The community is there. Deal with it.

If your company thinks its not “doing social media,” its wrong. Users, customers, and probably employees are talking about you, whether you’re there or not. Best to join the conversation than to be ignorant. (Sounds like parenting advice!)
Communities take on a life of their own. Don’t expect to control or even guide the conversation. Instead find an employee most like your audience and ask them to participate in the dialogue.
Develop a thick skin. Even within communities you create, someone will find something negative to say, and chance are, it will get disseminated. Don’t be taken by surprise, and don’t panic.

4. Lead Gen is a process, not an event.

Include calls to action – SUBTLE ones – in your content.
Give people the opportunity to “self identify” as interested though their actions and responses to many different forms of interactions (Blogs, tweets, webinars, emails, facebook fan clubs, LinkedIn group participation, etc.)
Track participation and score interest level based on those interactions. It takes time and experimentation to find the most promising patterns.

5. Traditional PR is in trouble, and reporting is dead (or at least, in the re-animation ward).

If everyone if writing about the latest events, for free, what’s a reporter left to do?
PR’s traditional emphasis on providing access to reporters and providing reporters with story no longer provides the value it once did.

Were you there? Tell us about other great insights from the evening.

Do you agree or are these suggestions off the mark? Share your B2B Lead Gen experiences via Social Media.

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Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 3

by Lilia Shirman on March 5, 2009

in Lead Generation,Marketing 2.0

More ideas on cultivating customer contribution and creating opportunities for interaction by turning traditional marketing into Marketing 2.0

6. In-person events – These are expensive to put on, so why spend the entire time lecturing on information that’s already in your collateral? Third party presenters can be more interesting, but any lecture can get dreary fast. Give attendees lots of time to interact with you and with each other, while you listens and takes notes. Consider a workshop rather than presentation format so that the entire event is interactive.

7. Trade Shows – This seems like a highly interactive event, but most booth staffers are so focused on doing the demos and spewing the spiel, that the opportunity to listen is lost. (I adore alliteration.) To change the mindset, make it clear you’re at the show to interact with and listen to customers, not just to be seen and heard. Set objectives of specific information you want to gather from booth visitors or people attending your sessions. Ask a few questions or give a short (5 questions max) survey before handing out the tchachkis, or organize mixers and events that have information gathering as an explicit objective.

If a widely open a conversation seems too much of leap, try these by first letting a small group of customers you know well contribute and participate, then open further when you’re comfortable managing a broader conversation.

Have you tried these or other ways to engage customers in conversations? Share them in your comment!

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Sales 2.0 conference – day 1

by Lilia Shirman on March 5, 2009

in Marketing 2.0,Sales 2.0

Spent the day at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Lots of insightful speakers including Judy Fick of Unisys, Jeremy Cooper of Salesforce.com, my friend Gail Ennis of Ominture, and David Satterwhite of newScale.

A few noteworthy quotes:

To find the buyer, “find out who will get fired if the problem isn’t solved.”
“If you’re following up on the leads that already have a budget and a time line, you’re too late”
“Never confuse activity with results” – Judy Fick
On the importance of metrics in a recession: “When the tide goes out you know who’s been swimming naked.” – Warren Buffet quoted

The big themes:

Instant information about customer behavior, and instant response
Sales and marketing alignment and collaboration
Value creation as part of the sales and marketing processes (see solutions marketing post that touched on this same topic)
Technology helps create unprecedented visibility and responsiveness – and you need a collection of vendors to cover the entire customer life-cycle. Average # of sales / marketing 2.0 software products shown on presenters’ slides was 8.

A few dozen exhibitors showing all manner of cool software and services for deeper, more detailed, more responsive insight into customers and their behavior. Spoke to some very happy customers of Genius.com, LucidEra, and ConnectAndSell.

More info and some conclusions tomorrow after Day 2.

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Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 2

by Lilia Shirman on February 27, 2009

in Customer relationships,Marketing 2.0

More ideas about how to transform traditional marketing tools into Marketing 2.0 vehicles.

3. Websites – Don’t hide customer feedback and support in a corner of your site. Place feature request and comment links right on product pages, so that customers can respond immediately to the content they see. Asking a question gets the customer more engaged than downloading a white paper. Involve product management and engineering in responding to the queries. It’s a great way to for them to touch the customers they otherwise rarely or never see. Post the most interesting questions and answers or turn them into additional content.

4. Press releases – What if your PR people became your customers’ and partners PR people? Lots of stories would best be told by someone other than a vendor. (And would be more likely to get picked up for coverage.) Build relationships with your customers’ and partners PR departments to understand how and where they want to be seen, and how talking about your relationship can help with that. Have your PR staff assist partners and customer with replying to PR opportunities.

5. Webinars – Yes, by now, this is a “traditional” marketing tool. But many companies tend to make webinars too one-directional. Use all the interactive tools (and the many webinar hosting services that offer them). Polls, chat, and Q&A are the common set. Use surveys both before and after your webinar. And don’t limit the surveys to questions about the webinar like the all too familiar “Did you find this useful?” Instead, ask questions that help you understand customers or that customers will be interested in too. The latter gives you an excuse for a follow-up contact that actually delivers value.

Have you tried these or other ways to engage customers in conversations? Share them in your comment!

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