A Content Marketing Haiku

Promotion blizzard? 

People like gentle snowfall.

 

 

 

Engagement bubble.

 

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What say you, marketers? If you were to boil down “Why content marketing?” or “What is content marketing?” to the spare 5-7-5 syllable format of haiku, what would it be? Comments in the form of haiku welcome. And thanks to my friend @bondatomic for crowdsourcing an extra syllable out of my original post.

I Survived a Content Marketing Desert (and lived to blog about it)

Look around your business. Better yet, conduct an audit: Where in your sales, marketing or service continuum do customers or potential customers get stranded in a content desert?

Where in your marketing continuum is the content desert?

What do I mean by a “content desert”? 

Think about the process of providing relevant, useful or entertaining content as cultivating an “engagement oasis” for the audiences you wish to attract and serve. A welcoming place where they can derive value and feel nurtured by your business and brand.

Now think of doing the exact opposite, either purposefully or unwittingly. Allowing a place on that continuum where your organization makes little or no effort to provide information, interactions or experiences of value. Or, perhaps worse yet, where you bombard y0ur audience with purely promotional, “let us tell you more about us” messages.

A content desert.

Please Continue to Hold While We Fail to Engage You
I survived 10 minutes in a content desert this past weekend, when it was my misfortune to have a malfunctioning dishwasher. When I called the manufacturer and service company (in this case, one in the same) to schedule a repair, I was placed on hold because, according to the automated voice, “all of our representatives are assisting other callers.”

Now, let’s examine this commonplace scenario from the corporate marketer’s perspective: A person who bought your product is having an issue with that product. They reach out to you. You’re about to have five, eight, or in this case 10 minutes of one-on-one, uninterrupted communication with that customer.

What will you do to engage them during this special time? What can you offer that might leave them feeling better informed, entertained, or in some way more connected to or empowered by your brand?

Take thought and care with those 10 minutes, and the potential benefits are clear: That person on the other end of the line is more likely to become a brand advocate and referral source. More likely to buy your products and services in the future.

But here’s what this manufacturer and service provider chose to do with its 10 minutes of uninterrupted communication:

• Invite me to visit them on Facebook. Why? No reason given in particular. No promise of an entertaining video, helpful information, or even a cheesy contest or sweepstakes. Just a flat invitation to “visit us on Facebook.” Sorry. You’ll need to do better than that.
• Invite me to join them in online chat. OK, that might be a good idea. And I’m somewhat impressed that they offer this feature. But in this case it meant I’d need hang up the phone and go boot up my computer, surrendering my place in the phone queue, a place I’d already invested some time to earn.
• Cross-sell another service. In this instance, a free estimate on a particular home improvement service. Not the worst offer or call to action in the world. But how much better would it have been if that service were presented in a value-adding context? Perhaps the recorded message could have spoken to issues and challenges I might be experiencing with my home, rather than merely promote the service the company was trying to cross-sell. Or it could have invited me to visit a website to learn more about financing options that would make the service being offered more affordable. Or a series of videos that showed how other consumers have improved their lives and homes by using the service.  Instead, all I got was an offer to buy something else from a company that was already causing me some grief because of the last product I’d purchased from them.
• Thank me for my patience, and for remaining on the line. You’re welcome. But then again, what choice did I really have?

Where’s Your Content Desert?
As content deserts go, this wasn’t exactly Death Valley. Probably hundreds, maybe even thousands, of on-hold messaging scenarios play out like this every day, from businesses large and small. The marketing “sins” here, if any, are more of omission than commission.

The larger point is this: If somewhere in your marketing, sales and service continuum you can expect to have a few minutes,  maybe even 10, of direct, uninterrupted communication with customers or potential customers, what will you do with that opportunity?

Subject them to a content desert? Or cultivate for them an engagement oasis?

Where in your marketing, sales and service continuum is there a desert you can transform into an oasis?

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Photo credit: www.freenaturephotos.com

7 Steps to Smarter Collateral in 2012

Why in the name of Ebenezer Scrooge do technology marketers rate collateral as their top content-marketing priority for 2012?

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this two-part post, please give it a quick read now. You’ll discover that surprising finding from a recent survey by IDG, the technology media and research company. You’ll also find a couple of theories around why high-tech marketers might be focused so intently on what some might consider an old-fashioned, outmoded marketing tactic.

If you’ve read Part 1 and are looking for the 7 collateral planning considerations it promised, here you go.

How can your organization take its collateral to another level of effectiveness and efficiency in 2012? Try building a New Year’s Collateral Resolution around one or more of these ideas. 

“In 2012, I resolve to start making our organization’s
collateral more _____________.”

MEANINGFUL
Start with your core sales presentation. If the first few slides, or first dozen, are all about your company — tenure in business, employee headcount, hyperbole around being “biggest, leading, largest” — either delete or move them way to the back. On second thought, just go ahead and delete them. Then create fresh content that synthesizes what’s going on in your customers’ world. What’s causing businesses in their category to flourish or fail. What’s making people like them get promoted or fired. Carry that mindset over to sell sheets, putting benefits and features in proper order and balance. Instead of making your organization the hero of case studies, make the person who hired you or bought your product heroic.

MESMERIZING
Collateral doesn’t have to sound, look or be dull, dusty and corporate. That’s just the way we’ve chosen to create it over the years, assuming that credible and convincing content is one thing, while entertaining and engaging are something different. If it’s been a while, consider hiring an outsider to take a crack at telling and visualizing the story in a fresh, unconventional way. Not necessarily your story. THE story. The one that will grab and resonate with your target audience, as they look for a solution to whatever nagging need or untapped opportunity your product or service solves.

MOBILE
If you’re betting against mobile devices becoming more prominent within the sales process — on your side and the customers’ — you’re going to lose that bet. In the past week I’ve spoken with marketers and sales reps from three Fortune 500s that have made the move to tablet devices as a primary sales support tool, or plan to do so within six months. Will you be among the first in your category to optimize collateral for mobile in inventive ways — or will you bring up the rear?

MODULAR
If Lincoln had asked a B-to-B sales rep to deliver the Gettysburg Address, she would have done some quick rewriting to make it suit her speaking style. Rumor has it that when God handed Moses 10 commandments, Moses suggested some quick rearranging before they were set in stone. In other words, even the best sales presentation or collateral kit won’t fit every sales user just right. Focus on ways you can provide brand-approved, on-strategy content building blocks and templates, while allowing users some freedom to create and personalize.

MATRIXED
Are you creating the same parts and pieces of content over and over within multiple silos? Your collateral system gets smarter as soon as you find ways to create the same piece of content once, then redeploy it from a central repository into multiple applications — website, collateral, proposals and more. Collateral gets even smarter when you can update all those implementations automatically each time one of those core pieces of content gets changed at the central library level.

MULTIMEDIA
Video is the logical next big collateral step for many organizations, but don’t forget calculators, generators, custom mobile applications, widgets and other tools. Remember, content isn’t only information. It’s also interactions and experiences. Whatever it takes to move a customer or prospect forward in their engagement with your brand.

MEASURABLE
Make 2012 the year you begin marching toward a point where you no longer send a package of print pieces, or even e-mail attachments, as follow-up to customer or prospect inquiries. Instead, you empower sales reps and customer service agents to quickly compile custom website experiences for customers and prospects. As your audience visits those sites, you track content consumption patterns and plan future follow-up accordingly. Turning collateral into a navigable, measurable online experience truly makes it part of an overall, strategic content marketing continuum.

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Thanks for taking the time to read Touch Point City’s first-ever two-part blog post. Did it make a difference in how you’re thinking about collateral going forward? Have you already substantially reinvented what collateral is, and what it does, for your company and its customers? Please share your thoughts and best practices in comments.