Browsing Tag

B2B marketing

Develop content your buyer might actually scan…

a kind of magic
Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

There is no shortage of stuff to write as marketers and nearly everyday someone is looking for a new piece, email blast or other “tweak” to content from us as product marketers.  So we either edit, proof or create content daily so it is important we create something which might actually get read.  Research indicates folks have 8 or 9 seconds to grab the buyers attention to keep them reading or get them to click on another web page.

When people are looking to solve problems they are more than likely real busy, just like you, so to get them to read your email, move through your website or to even scan a piece of collateral provided by a sales person is no easy task.

Which takes me back to the 7 Expectations of a Buyer which I’ve been working…. #3 is I don’t want mass communications and generic content.   Even though we probably know this 3rd expectation of buyers intuitively, it’s not what we do.  More often than not, we write to our own personal comfort levels and make sure we feel good about the content – it’s got the right buzzwords, the right images and just the right amount of boxes and arrows to show that we know our stuff.  In fact, we spend so much talking about us, that it’s difficult to get even a couple of sentences in around the needs of the prospect/buyer.

Whether it’s the corporate website, a blog, an email campaign or onsite presentations/demos, buyers want content that allows them to buy your product, but we have spent a good deal of time “optimizing” our CRM implementations over the last decade and processes for OUR needs and we created content which drove the automation.

Yup, we spent the last decade focusing on getting contact information and routing leads automagically which is definitely at odds with content the buyer needs and when the buyer needs that content.   The first attempt at CRM in many companies was to track and automate the sales process.  Another way to look at it was to do everything possible to not have a customer talk to us.

Content as a task.  Asked for, Delivered, Done?!

A equally challenging as developing content for our CRM needs, many of us create a good part of the content we develop as marketers is project based – reactive.  We all get these projects – perhaps you have a web site refresh, a given email campaign or even an all-in re-branding exercise which is lead by a peer or different group all together which need you to complete your tasks by a certain date.

So what do most of us do?   We create/edit/proofread the content as requested and move on to other 75 really urgent items in our inbox.

There are always going to be tasks to do and content which is needed, but finding a way to provide focus for your content is critical.  What is really needed for sales?   Why do some pieces get read and others get tossed/not used by sales?

The main reason for this is the increasing importance of content to how buyers discover you and your products – a search term, a link from a friend or the subject line on the 1 of 400 emails which are unread in their inbox.

Ok, maybe that’s just my inbox….

With this flurry of content available in everyone’s inbox and everything just a Google search away, you can’t see developing your content as check-box tasks which just need to get done, it should be based on a strategy grounded in an understanding of your market’s buyer personas and their expectations.

Curious if your content is interesting or relevant to a buyer?  Here are a couple of tools to check out:

The We We Calculator – An online tool to see if your text is about your products or services or the customer/buyer.

Gooblygook Grader – this is from the folks at Hubspot you created website grader and twitter grader.  This tool analyzes if you’re writing content which is effective.

Hypersocialbility: We need new stories for our products and brands

“Old, linear forms of storytelling are like going on a date and not letting the other person talk.”

Nicke Bergström

As marketers, we have have always been storytellers whether it was looking to get alignment on your strategic roadmap , engaging your the people which buyer your product or looking for more effective ways to influence new markets or buyers.

Year in and year out marketers are equipping sales to tell stories and in general creating content to influence folks and the change in how people consume data and share data means we need to move from novels to nuggets with our story telling.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been tasked with going to new markets or are part of this whole tough economy thing,  new stories for the market are needed.   Mel Exon from BBH Labs proposes that the emergence of hypersocialbility is a critical consideration and I agree.

How is hypersocialbility going to change your stories?

note: while the examples are B2C marketing examples, slide 47 provides an overview which clearly is relevant to B2B marketers.

Useful Drool

I’m not sure why the pitch is centered on Twitter, since the conceptual model can be applied to any media channel today.   The Insipid Drool or Useful overlap exists so long as the content can be searched or consumed at one’s own schedule.   It also substantiates that a given person or a given problem being solved can change the value of any content you might produce as a marketer.   One person’s drool just might be another person’s business case.

19 Feeds for ProdMgmt, Product Marketing and Marketing Operations types:

So I got asked yesterday about what blogs I read and I could only spout out 3 or 4 with fully qualified domain information, which sucks because there are so many good blogs in my feed already which I couldn’t really remember.   So while I was spending some time catching up on my reading,  I’ve also created a lists of  folks continue to influence me around product management and marketing:

  1. Ivan @ The Productologist: www.theproductologist.com
  2. Cranky: www.crankypm.com
  3. Stewart @ Strategic Product Manager: www.strategicproductmanager.com
  4. Paul: www.productbeautiful.com
  5. Steve @ Product Marketing – www.productmarketing.com
  6. @sehlhorst: www.tynerblain.com
  7. CC @ www.christophercummings.com
  8. Cottmeyer @ www.leadingagile.com
  9. David: www.launchclinic.com
  10. Duncan @ www.arandomjog.com
  11. Dr.: www.outsideinview.com
  12. Bob Corrigan: www.thebobcorrigan.com
  13. Dunford: www.rocketwatcher.com
  14. @jbrett – www.jasonbrett.me
  15. Meerman @ Web Ink Now: www.webinknow.com
  16. Web Product Blog: www.webproductblog.com
  17. Carfi: www.socialcustomer.com
  18. DH: www.salesgrok.com
  19. Agile Executive Guys: www.theagileexecutive.com

There are some other resources you can use to find which may be relevant to you as a product management/marketing manager which you may or may not already be aware of: