Marketing Content Assets – How Valuable?

• Who would watch your company videos? What ideas would grab them? What about cinematic quality?
• How’s your photography? When was the last time you had a professional photographer in for a few hours or a day?
• Does your graphic designer really understand your business and connect concepts visually?
• Are you excited to share links to your website? Do you have landing pages that actually produce leads?
• Is your website found through customer-centric keyword searches?
• Who in your organization can write to convey your value proposition concisely and with flair?
• Does your agency really understand you and what’s important to you, your customers and your team?

Affordable High-Quality

See the Content

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Marketing is all about message optimization because your content is always unfinished. So is everyone else’s. Some content is better than others, and some executions are really great. Your goal isn’t to make your communications perfect but to keep improving them regularly. This gets easier when you have some guidance.

Building Suspense

One of the most common challenges for novice content writers is ordering sentences and paragraphs properly so the information keeps building rather than backtracking and covering the bare spots. When the writer thinks ahead, anxious to get the main point out there, he or she attempts to enhance the message with subsequent details and examples after revealing the main attraction. This makes sense at first but has an anticlimactic effect. The reader may end up bored or confused rather than informed and engaged.

First Things First

Good writers are engineers. They must understand foundations and successive building blocks needed to support a finished edifice for the edification of their audience. They begin by acknowledging their audience as students and their role as the teacher (and builder of ideas). They get to work laying the groundwork that entices the reader to witness the whole edifice take shape and have meaning. They put themselves in the novice’s shoes and know the right path to understanding.

Your Two Choices

The “make or buy decision” comes up all the time. You can “save money” by the do-it-yourself method (while forgoing money-earning time). You can handle the tedious, arduous and sometimes frustrating work of a trained professional, or you can just hire a pro and let him or her have at it while you get important (and profitable) tasks accomplished. When you tell a real pro to “have at it” they take your challenge seriously. Pros aim to please.

Don’t you just love taking possession of a purchase that meets or exceeds your expectations? In my industry, for example, a great new article, website design or advertisement is truly thrilling when first seen by the client and will tend to have a similar impact on it’s intended target audience, especially if they happen to be earnestly shopping different brands.

How optimal are your communications?

You and I both know they’re not perfect. How much better must they be right now in order to reach your marketing goals? Is there one communications area you can focus on that will raise your company’s image in the market? Which building blocks of relevant meaning need to be logically arranged for your market’s benefit?

Remember that life is all about continuously getting better as nobody can attain perfection. But think about another word – optimal. Optimal essentially means the best you can get from what’s available. So get to work on your message optimization. Your audience wants to understand exactly where you’re going. Lead them logically and they will at least be curious. Some will follow your lead, and to those new customers, your information is successfully optimized.

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Forget your friends’ advice. Just Google it!

Do you need a certain product or service about which you know little? If so, Google wants you to ignore your friends and pay attention to their search engine instead.

When it comes to seeking referrals, do your friends have the best resources to help you find what you need? In many cases, yes, in other cases, maybe and in still others, no! When your friends and family come up dry, there’s one place to go; the Internet.

Let the numbers work for you!

Chances are, most of your friends and associates don’t have the right experience or enough knowledge about your industry to make fully informed referrals. It’s even more likely that your current customers and friends don’t associate with enough prospective clients to feed you enough referrals to sustain and grow your business.

Person to person word of mouth still has a lot of business influence but in a hyper-competitive, digitally enabled marketplace like we have today, you need a strong internet search presence to validate verbal claims by individuals. Even if you get a good personal referral, your prospect will go online to check you out before calling. You can be sure they’ll Google you first. What shows up when they do? This is the simplest and one of the best SEO tests you can do.

Google yourself now!

Go ahead, Google yourself! What’s in the first few positions on the first page? Is it your content or someone else’s who shares a name? Is your own website or LinkedIn Profile in one of the top positions? If you do show up on the first page, is the information favorable and complimentary or could it raise questions about how well positioned you are in your industry?

Creating a favorable and growth-oriented presence that is searchable on the Internet is a sustainability imperative today, even if you’re still chugging along on word of mouth. At some point soon, if not already, the default action of most people will be “I’ll just Google it…” instead of “I’ll just ask Larry…”

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Let’s explore the fascinating scientific phenomena that make emails practically delete themselves. It still seems to befuddle a lot of marketers out there.

One of the easiest things to do is make people delete your email immediately, with or without opening it. Simply disappoint them with irrelevant content. That’s all. There’s literally nothing to it… nothing worthwhile in the content that genuinely relates to audience needs.

I’m a big fan of email newsletters. Can you tell? I like reading or skimming newsletters from companies I follow in my network. I’ve learned quite a lot from some of them and done business with a few. I’m never annoyed when people who’ve snagged my email address add me to their email lists. I always take a look if I know who the sender is. You can never predict what legitimate organizations might inform you of, and it’s easy to unsubscribe from any email service provider if you don’t want more to come.

The YOU Attitude or the US Attitude?

A couple of recent emails from familiar firms hit my inbox last week. The subject lines were “Big News from…” and “News from…” Upon opening the “Big News…” one, I found that the news was really very small and mundane from my vantage point. The “News” could only be “Big” from an internal standpoint – to the owners and managers of the company. It was really just an announcement of something you would expect to hear from this company in any given month. They reported that they just accomplished something that they’re in business to do anyway, so the content was a bit of a letdown.

The “News from” email was mostly a long list of things this company would be expected to do. I’m sure there’s some value in the brand impressions, but how much engagement or response do newsletters like this generate? The answer is less than they could if they were instead using an audience-centered approach – taking on the “YOU Attitude.”

With an audience-centered approach, your subject line will resonate with relevance and more likely get an email opened. With a company-centered approach, your subject line will have little or nothing of value to the recipient. There’s really nothing in it for them. So take on the YOU Attitude and give your audience a compelling reason to engage! Instead of talking about YOUR accomplishments, talk about THEIR opportunities and what THEY value.

Relevance and Congruence

Your subject lines and content must not only be relevant, they must align so that your audience gets rewarded for opening your email. The reward can be as basic as breaking industry news, new & innovative technology or a simple solution to a nagging problem. It could even be a call for expertise – giving members of your audience a chance at being recognized for their professional knowledge, offering space in your newsletter or blog to give them direct access to your newsletter/blog community. Whatever it is, be relevant and relatable. Your audience should at least be able to identify with keywords in your subject lines and the general themes of your articles or promotions.

It’ fine to sprinkle employee and company news updates into your newsletters as long as that isn’t the main thrust of the content. In fact, people will be more likely to pay attention to your internal news once they see that you are a purveyor of worthwhile information.

The last thing you want your subject lines to do is promise “Big News” when upon opening your email, the recipient thinks “fake news” or “no news is good news.” When that happens, the unsubscribe link will be the most relevant section of your email.

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Video is replacing much of the content on websites, social media and even blogs these days. Most people would rather watch a short movie or let someone tell them a quick story rather than commit to reading and digesting 500 or a thousand words.

I’m here to tell you that you can use video to your business advantage. Perhaps your industry has reached the point where you need well-produced videos in your marketing mix just to compete effectively. Every kind of business can benefit from video by delivering messages in a more dynamic and entertaining way.

Here are the main ways companies are succeeding with video:

• Broadcasting to reach wider audiences with world class production quality.
• Live event streaming – collaborators and audiences interact in real time wherever they happen to be.
• Testimonials – your customers talking directly to your prospective customers in a genuine and validating way.
• Documentaries – to record and preserve important information; to tell your story with compelling visual evidence.
• Industrial videos provide visual clarity of processes and easily understandable proofs of concept in various manufacturing applications.
• Promotional videos deliver your messages with the power of persuasion. You need to promote your ideas if you want your organization to grow.
• Storytelling is an art form that becomes electrified in high quality video productions. If you really want to captivate and inspire your audience, just let them watch your story unfold on screen.
• Motion Graphics provide that extra touch. Enhance and highlight sections to drive your key points home.

I’m happy to report that the growing prominence of video in marketing has added to our content writing work. Most business and institutional videos require a good script. Narrators and actors need lines, and as scriptwriters, we get to put the fire & sizzle into the spoken words – both acted and narrated.

Whether you need simple talking head videos or full scale commercial productions, the available talent in our little market north of Boston amazes me. I’ve worked with a few local video producers and directors whose work I’d rank up there with the best stuff coming out of LA and New York. In fact, some of their clients are in those cities.

In some cases, you can produce engaging video content, even if a little rudimentary, using your own equipment and the right backdrops.  If you click the image below, you’ll see a great way to incorporate video into a Homepage using a simple “About” video that gives viewers a clear sense of what this business is all about while it introduces the personality of the owner.

In some spontaneous contexts, even your smartphone camera will do. Friendly testimonials for social media come to mind.

Keep your ideas interesting and moving at a speed which people can easily follow along, which is pretty fast. Otherwise you’ll lose their attention pretty fast! Remember that “brevity is the soul of wit.” 30 seconds to 2 minutes tends to be within the attention span of most people as long as the message is relevant.

Are you using video in your marketing mix yet? Feel free to contact us if you need help planning or producing your next video project.

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Social Media

Several months ago I took a sales call from a social media content marketing automation company and the salesman demonstrated excellence in selling skills. He closed me on one call. I reluctantly signed up for the service based in part on the credentials of the company founder – arguably the top social media guru in the world, Dave Kerpen.

Being somewhat of a specialist in social media content, and understanding that it takes serious work to get right, I felt an imperative to learn how a content automation service could work for my business as well as clients.’ How would the quality of output compare with my original, custom (and time-consuming) content development? My initial research is starting to bear the fruits of real data.

My early conclusion is that social media content automation works well for Twitter, but has limited value for Facebook and LinkedIn. I have gained significant numbers of targeted new Twitter followers without even trying. To a small degree, my LinkedIn engagement is up and my Business Facebook Page has remained very quiet, even with all the new content activity. As can be expected, my own personally written posts get more likes, shares and comments in Facebook and LinkedIn. But on Twitter, engagement is about even between the automated tweets and my own.

Twitter is about real-time, high volume, and topic specific conversations. Therefore, higher volume of industry-relevant tweets can gain you some Twitter traction. What about direct new business results? The jury is still out but I believe my brand value is growing nationally as a Twitter result.

Email

Email marketing content subscription services based on your specific industry (IT, retail, home remodeling, architecture, plumbing, accounting, legal, financial planning, etc.) are commonly available. For a monthly fee, they’ll automate and eblast trending articles to your email contacts on a scheduled basis. You simply provide your target audience demographics and product/service category info. They conjure up relevant content for your audience, then blast out third party-produced messages to your email list. It lets you set and forget your email marketing so you can focus on other things.

How well does it work? Ask yourself this. To which are you more likely to respond, a colorful and graphically perfect Hallmark style greeting from a large insurance carrier or a simple piece of critical advice from a local agent you’ve met or heard of?

On the same day of the month at the same time of day, I now receive 3 identical emails from the same large financial services company. The only difference? The individual sender is a different agent for that company. This may be considered sales support but it’s generically canned support. And how supportive can that be?

One of my clients subscribes to a well-established provider of content  for the financial planning industry. What we found after experimenting with email campaigns is that it’s a good service for supplementing our original custom content but could never replace it. The proprietary and personalized articles in our emails proved to be more engaging than the third party-produced materials. Additionally, people found our own email design to be more graphically pleasing than the structured layout offered by the other service. We’ve come full circle with email – full customized messaging with supplemental content from the service provider.

Here’s the best thing about email marketing: When you deliver personal value in your emails, direct replies include requests to do business with you.

Bottom line: Support your own sales efforts with personalized, valuable advice for your prospects and customers! They’ll appreciate you for it and more easily remember whom to call when they need your services.

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