Archive for the 'Content' Tag

Before you can create a successful ad, website, brochure, direct mail letter or other marketing piece, you must first ask an important question: Exactly who is the target audience? After all, your business most likely has a number of different target audiences, each of which has their own particular hot buttons, needs and wants. The most successful marketing campaigns are those that target the specific needs and wants of a particular market segment.

Identify All of Your Target Audiences

For example, say you manufacture a product that is sold both to retail stores and direct to consumers through a website. Your list of target audiences might include:

• Potential, current and past customers; people who inquired about your product in the past but did not make a purchase at the time
• Potential, current, past and inquiring retail stores and distributors
• Influencers (people in positions of authority who could recommend your product to consumers)
• Media (trade and consumer publications, newsletters, e-zines, radio, TV, etc.)
• And more

Tailor Your Message

Rank your list in order of importance, and then decide which group or groups you will focus on with this marketing piece. Think about the specific benefits that your product or service brings to these groups and tailor your message accordingly. For example, while retail stores might want to know about your product’s compact and attractive packaging, consumers are probably much more interested in your product’s durability.

Finally, make sure that everything about your marketing piece – words, colors, overall layout, photos used, etc. – speaks directly to your chosen audience.

I come from the world of print, when we designed magazines with headlines in particular spots with particular word lengths, because they would sell. You walk into a store, see only the top half of a magazine, and there’s the headline: DEEP SEX, on a Cosmopolitan cover.

The form of media doesn’t matter: print, web, radio, people want a short summary of the story, even if it’s a hyperbole.

How important is it? The New York Post, Cosmopolitan, and other organizations have people that are responsible for creating engaging headlines. The Post, the best tabloid example, was host to the Headless Body in Topless Bar headline. Who could forget that?

Which brings us to Short Form Blog. It hasn’t been around for very long (two months), is taking a concept from another blog (Instapundit), and the design is so Roger Black, Roger Black might have to claim some licensing fees.

Who cares.

He does an excellent job taking existing content, and turning it into compelling headlines. Engaging. Fun. One word exclamations. It works.

He proves several points on why he’s getting traction with his blog, only two months in — he takes his time, because he realizes writing less actually takes more time, because he edits, edits, edits until he finds the perfect match.

Headlines should be tested. Headlines should be crafted. Headlines should be played with.

Why?

Because headlines are the only things that are visible at the top of the page, on most RSS readers, and on email subject headlines. Headlines translate to return on investment, more visitors, more page views, create more engaging content, shall I go on?

Is it 9 or nine? What’s the proper abbreviation for California? When should I use a semi-colon?

These are all questions that might be asked during the migration of a content management system, or writing text for a new site.

How do you establish style? Consistency is another key to effective writing, and readers do notice typos and style inconsistencies (I know, I get the emails from friends when I have them here). There’s nothing that is more glaring than when certain items are used incorrectly. It’s even more frustrating when the defaults (i.e. “am” for instance, for time) doesn’t match a consistent style.

At the very least, run out and buy a few copies of the Associated Press Style Guide. For $10 at your local bookstore, or about the same at Amazon, the book is the bible for style and capitalization (please don’t compare this site to the Style Guide, I’m not getting paid to do this). This style guide is used by thousands of journalists to answer such questions as the proper spelling and usage of punctuation for such terms as Dr Pepper, ball point pen, and Popsicle.

Throw a few copies of this book around, and the authors will at least get close to what it should be. Consistency is the key.

Here’s the top 10 Associated Press tips as stolen from Cubreporters.org:

1. Use a person’s full name and title the first time you mention him or her in an article. For example, write Don Swanson, professor of communication, not Prof. Swanson. Once people have been fully identified, refer to them by last name only. There are exceptions, so always check the AP stylebook.
2. Spell out abbreviations or acronyms on first reference. For example, use Passaic County Community College the first time you refer to the college in a story. You may use PCCC on any references made after that. Another example would be to use DAR only after you have spelled out Daughters of the American Revolution on first reference.
3. Abbreviate months when used with days, and use numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) not ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, etc.). Exceptions are March, April, May, June and July — write them out, don’t abbreviate. For example, write Sept. 2, 2008, not September 2nd, 2008. But, when using only the month and year, spell out the month.
4. Generally, spell out the numbers zero through nine and use numerals for 10 and higher. Note, however, that numbers used at the beginning of a sentence are spelled out. Example: Five hundred twenty-four students attended. It is better, however, to rewrite the sentence so that it doesn’t begin with a number. Example: Attending the event were 524 students from local colleges. Years are one of the exceptions. For example: 2008 was a bad year for investors.
5. But use numerals even for ages younger than 10. This is another exception to the aforementioned number rule. When used like an adjective, say X-year-old, including the hyphens. Otherwise, don’t use the hyphens. For example: the 5-year-old girl kicked her brother, who is 8 years old.
6. Spell out the word “percent” but use numerals for the actual number. Examples: Participation increased 5 percent. Nearly 28 percent of all students don’t like algebra. Exception: use may use the % sign in headlines.
7. To indicate time, use figures and lowercase letters (9 a.m., 6 p.m.). Put a space between the figure and the letters. Exceptions are noon and midnight. Do not say 12 noon or 12 midnight — it’s redundant.
8. Capitalize formal titles used before a name. For example, write Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Very long titles may be shortened or summarized unless they are essential to the story, but the shortened form should not be capitalized (for example, you may use spokesperson instead of Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications). Use lowercase when formal titles follow a name (e.g., Hillary Clinton, secretary of state). General titles, such as astronaut Neil Armstrong and actor Matt Damon, are lowercase.
9. Capitalize formal titles and names of people, places or things to set them apart from a general group. These include proper nouns such as Mike, Canada, Hudson River, and St. John’s Church. But use lowercase for common nouns (i.e. nouns not coupled with a proper name), such as the river or the church. Also, put a word in lowercase when you have more than one proper noun sharing the word. Example: Ocean and Monmouth counties. Capitalize the first word in a sentence. Refer to the dictionary or AP Stylebook, if needed. When in doubt, use lowercase.
10. Do not use courtesy titles such as Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms., except in direct quotes or where needed to distinguish between people of the same name. Using courtesy titles may be polite. And the New York Times uses them in its articles. But it is not AP style.

Writing as a craft has never paid particularly well except for a rarefied lucky few that can sell their words as dollars — I remember thinking in 1992 that I would never earn a good living as a newspaper type, which means I dodged a really large bullet the size of Manhattan — but lately, it’s been taking a real hit, as shown in this blog by Jeneane Sessum.

I write here, but I don’t claim to be a great writer. I do, however, understand the value.

Occasionally I write a catchy headline, but most of my work is long, verbose, and is sometimes off mark. That’s mostly because I write technical documentation and complex use cases, but I have a secret desire to fulfill my Nathaniel Hawthorne fetish with 798 854 949 word blog novels chock full of grammatical mistakes and typos.

Good writing is important not only to usability, but also to telling the story of social media: the best storytellers on the web like Seth Godin have turned those stories into real value, and they spread like wildfire. It’s about catching the reader’s attention, which is even harder on the web because sometimes all you have is a headline’s time to do so. Three seconds and you’re done. Period.

Not only do you use social media to talk to your customers, you use it so your customers tell your story for you. That only comes with a well crafted message that takes real time and real money.

And the next few statements will illustrate why the friends I have who initially chose writing as their profession now reside in other, much better paying careers.

I’m going to quote liberally from her blog because it’s part of my rant:

The first, a woman who uses elance to outsource writing work to folks in India. I was, she explained, overqualified for the kind of work (and pay) she was offering. I did the math. It was pennies a word. She said I was overqualified. I have to think she’s right.

The next was a social media blogging gig, two posts per day minimum, with pay of $200/month, preceded by a testing period where hundreds of interested applicants would compete to get this primo gig. To the company’s credit, they offered $100 for the testing period.

Next I tried another online micro-job site that posts small jobs requiring a tiny bit (and nothing more) of human intelligence. Sample writing work there? 1000+ word product guides. Pay: $5.00. In 1986 I would have made about $1,000 for that job. In 1999 I would have made $3,000 for that job. Today, some one will do it — maybe not well, but they’ll do it and search optimize it — for five bucks.

In several conversations that I’ve had with the resident writer on this site, Linda Coss, good writing means more money. How do I know this? Lately, I’ve been sending out my resume with a spiffy marketing pitch at the very start, and low and behold, I get hits. Lots of hits. Not all of them turn into closed deals (or some go on for months), but they get my foot in the door at consulting gigs that turn into real dollars.

I’ve worked with clients where we would obsess over three separate messages for over a week, and that included A/B testing of the message to see which had the higher conversion rate. When you are working with a company that is dropping close to $4 million a year in Google ad marketing dollars, even the lowest common denominator ad campaign gets attention.

I’ve also spent time as a product manager where the time we spent rewriting help text and marketing emails translated into a very real drop of overtime (to zero); thus, I’ve spend very real time showing very real value for words that we pulled out of thin air.

Back to Linda. I paid her real money (not a lot, but enough to establish the value of her ability to write great marketing copy), we got the message, and it works. I can track a very real return on investment for the money I spent and the leads I generated with that content.

I’ve found it puzzling that no one questions the return on investment of software developer when 70 percent of all software projects go down in flames, most of them because of feature creep or lack of market insight, but if the rate is too high for a writer, suddenly the intern is given a laptop and told it’s time to go to town.

The web is this vast wasteland of content not worth the blog, er, paper it’s written on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a client that thought cutting the content budget was okay in favor of that “shiny new feature.” Or, just because there’s more people on Yelp (not that I don’t like Yelp, I think it’s a hoot) does it mean that real reviews should go by the wayside. They shouldn’t. The reality is that we need better filters more than ever.

Users don’t care about the shiny new feature.

They do care about brands reflecting a certain quality, and I’m not talking User Generated Content like You Tube or MySpace, because UGC is their target audience’s wants and needs. I’m talking about million dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies where the firms in question ask the marketing intern to write the copy because he happens to have Microsoft Word and barely passed American Literature.

Users want precisely the message of why I should should use this product or complete this offer, what makes them stand out. That message takes time, money, and hits the bottom line.

Now if that message were only clear.

Have you ever stopped to think about what it is that you’re really selling?

When it comes right down to it, you’re not selling a product or service. You’re selling solutions to the problems, needs or desires that your ideal clients have. Does your local gym sell hard work, major time commitments and exercise? Of course not! They sell sexy bodies and good health. Likewise, Mercedes doesn’t just sell transportation – they sell status.

Different Messages for Different Audiences

Of course, you’re probably selling more than one thing. For example, a restaurant might sell “convenience” to one target audience, a “fun evening out” to another group of people and a “way to connect with family and friends” to others.

The important thing is to figure out what solution you’re offering to the particular group you’re targeting, and then focus your message on this.

Customers Don’t Buy “Things”

People don’t buy things; they buy what things can do for them. For example, people who buy my book, “What’s to Eat? The Milk-Free, Egg-Free, Nut-Free Food Allergy Cookbook,” aren’t buying recipes. They’re buying a way to feed delicious food to their entire family, including a family member who is on a restricted diet.

This adage is equally true for services. For example, your neighbor goes to the chiropractor to relieve his back pain. The chiropractor is selling pain relief, not spinal adjustments.

To really connect with your customers and potential customers, keep in mind that you’re selling solutions, not products or services.

When a form has been completed, indicate status clearly and not just with a single line of text

I’ve been promoting the blog a bit lately, and that means filling out a lot of contact forms. One of my pet peeves (and this isn’t just the Sharepoint Blogs site) is that many contact forms have a single line of text that reads something along the lines of, “It’s been sent.” Usually, it’s so small, people resend the same message over and over again. My first assumption is, “Did I do something wrong? Where’s the error text?”

I’m going to make everyone a deal — I’ll write a “thank you for sending us a note” page for free if you need that if you promise to endlessly promote me on your site.

Please spend the extra 15 minutes to add a secondary page that knows the message has been sent and confirms it to the user.

Don’t bury content; give your users multiple ways to view the same information

Usability Counts was just recently named as to the Social Media and User Interface topics on Alltop, which is a self-proclaimed “online magazine rack.” While we don’t think we know about as much as anyone else, we’re included in the same page as some of the top blogs out there. So cool. Maybe someday we can can aspire to be Jeffrey Zeldman.

The only issue: we are really, really below the fold. Don’t get me wrong — I like the new design All has launched — but for my own selfish reasons (more traffic, more targeted users, less pooftas), I wish we were a bit higher, and that there was a different way to view content so I could see items by date and not by blog.

How far down is Usability Counts?

Two scrolls down on the 1900 by 1200 monitor we function on for User Interface, and more than five on Social Media. Almost mad dogs and Englishmen tolerance.

Not all is lost: the good news is that AllTop is human-edited i.e. there’s some kind of vetting process on deciding who belongs, and who doesnt. so the spam aspect would be a bit lower, avoiding the torrent of bad posts Technorati delivers to my inbox.

Alltop needs a content view where items are displayed as they are posted (so there’s some encouragement of consistent posting), and maybe a couple others around autority and reputation. 9Rules does a really good job of this, and tends to push more traffic to blogs. A tabbed approach would be a huge benefit to users, and they could set the default of what they wanted to view first.

What do you think?

This is a bit off topic, because it’s of the dead trees variety, but this headline came across: Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs.

The timing isn’t as good as hopped, considering we’re in this thing called a recession, but this happened because a lot of newspapers treated their web properties like their print properties. Sure, the web have some very real expenses — those servers don’t come cheap, and there is that pesky thing called electricity — but it’s much less expensive than paying people to run the presses, a lot less expensive than cutting down a bunch of trees, and don’t get me started on the costs of dropping off one of those newspapers at everyone’s doorstep.

So by charging more, sites like Craigslist.org and Move.com ate them alive.

I like print!

I love print!

But print, as quick as it as happened, is dead as in George Carlin dead.

Companies keep on charging us the same for a digital product as they do for a product that has manufactured (software distributors like Adobe, publishers like the Wall Street Journal). At one point or another, we’re all going to wise up, yo.

They should take a page out of the ESPN’s book. ESPN is one of the most profitable entertainment entities on the planet, and they know how to play in multiple mediums better than anyone on the planet.

ESPN.com is an amazing (and the leading sports site), ESPN the network has about 20 or so properties it seems, and the print magazine has all but killed Sports Illustrated, because they are covering the whole media package.

I pay more for their Insider product than for their magazine, because I get the magazine for free as part of their Insider service. $4.95 a month, and more often than not, I read much more of their Insider content online. They have none of the legacy costs, and they’re able to leverage much more of their content (have you tried fitting a video clip on a newspaper page?), and get a higher CPM from their advertisers.

I imagine there isn’t a single newspaper executive that has thought of any of this, especially the management over at the Tribune, a company that owns many outlets of both video and print content, yet integrate none of that.

The biggest lost art in building websites is building content.

There have been quite a few times where I invested a lot of time coming up with a web design or an information architecture, and at the end of that, the response was, “you’re supposed to come up with the content, right?”

The last thing I am, other than coming up with a few catchy headlines and some grammatically incorrect copy, is a copy writer. There should be a dedicated person to this, and there seldom is. Additionally, good writers that can influence are not only hard to find, but paid well — much better than most people are willing to pay, but not as much as their true value.

My advice to clients: great sites have great content. Create great content, and you’ll get more traffic.

By the time most clients get to the point of writing the copy after struggling with the information architecture and the design they just want the site to be done; unfortunately, that’s usually when the real work begins. If they care about doing it right, they’ll care about putting content out there that isn’t marketing speak but that really speaks to the user. Users can figure out when they are being talked down to. Or, as this article points out, passion sells because it connects.

I think I mentioned this before, but I had a stint as an editor in chief at a local community newspaper (legals paper). I learned a lot there and as the same as a college paper. Writing blogs is much like writing smaller articles for newspaper — you have to make the short seem interesting, and writing less is much, much harder that writing more, especially if you want to make it relevant. Copyblogger has some pretty good tips on what we should be learning from newspapers, and applying to writing for blogs.