Take aim, fire!

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Perhaps another way of expressing this would be, “Who are you targeting?” Are you going after the department head, division head or the C-suite? Are they a business—or technology—focused audience? What do these individuals care about? What are their motivations? What are their pain points, and how can you elevate these?

You can’t please all the people, all the time

Chances are, you’re not going to hit every nail on the head, and that’s perfectly OK, provided that you hit the right nails. If you’re diluting your content down to try to encompass the widest possible audience, ultimately, you’ll end up dumbing it down to such an extent that it will no longer be interesting or valuable to the intended target audience—the decision makers.

Getting your content strategy right

On the other hand, if you’re worried that your content is too targeted, the answer is simple: you’re not producing enough content. Again, you can’t be all things to all people, but you can be different things to different people through different content approaches.

Content marketing: the Jedi Master approach

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It’s time you told a Star Wars story. And by that, I mean you need to take your prospects along a content marketing version of the mythic hero’s journey:

  • The prospect starts off in the ordinary world
  • The call to adventure is an unsolved problem or unfulfilled desire
  • There’s resistance to solving that problem, until…
  • A mentor (your content) appears to help them proceed with the journey

Your prospect is Luke. You are Obi Wan

When you put your prospect in the position of the main hero (Luke Skywalker), and your content as the mentor who guides or assists the hero on their journey of transformation (Obi Wan), it’s extremely powerful. You allow people to identify themselves within the context of an enduring mythical structure that also makes a hero out of your brand.

Some of the most effective advertising campaigns have tapped into the power of the monomyth that Star Wars adopted, thanks to Joseph Campbell.

While content marketing doesn’t require multi-millions in production costs, it’s helpful to see examples of how the hero’s journey has been used in the past to grow revenue. My favourite is….

Apple’s “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”

Apple has done a phenomenal job of storytelling throughout the years. Their Think Different television ad (the “Crazy Ones” commercial) is one of their best. It says nothing about selling computers, or even computers themselves. But what is does do is connect with a potential Apple user, by comparing them to the great geniuses of modern history.

The call to adventure to change the world is front and center, amplified by a powerful sense of identification with cultural icons such as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., plus business leaders like Richard Branson and Ted Turner. It highlights the feelings that many people feel; the same feelings that these widely successful figures felt.

It leaves you feeling inspired, understood, and more connected to Apple computers.

Content marketing storytelling: the hero’s journey

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Everybody loves a hero! Think of any of your favourite stories and you’ll realise that there’s a hero in it that you identify with. Or, look at Britain’s love affair with football: the strong association with a team of ‘heroes’ and the chance to be part of their journey to victory creates an emotional connection and loyalty that can last a lifetime.

This is the connection that we, as marketers, actively pursue by creating a brand story based on ‘the hero’s journey’.

The hero’s journey story structure has been around for a long as stories have been told.

The basic formula is:

  • the hero embarks on a journey
  • the hero encounters and deals with obstacles
  • the hero is changed

We all hope that the hero wins at the end, and in brand stories, we want our product or service to be part of a positive change as the hero wins the day.

Who should be the hero of the story?

In a hero brand story, our hero can either be the customer or the brand. If the customer is positioned as the hero, the product or service is the helper—the sidekick or the mentor (the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the story)—that makes victory possible. If the brand is the hero, the product or service arrives and saves the day for the customer—who, at the end, identifies with, is inspired by or is influenced by the hero.

Who’s the hero in your stories? Let us know with a comment…

Make your content better by following the hero’s journey

Whether you decide to have the customer win by choosing your brand and becoming the hero, or you ride in and save the day, to take advantage of this connection with your customers, all you have to do is identify the number one obstacle your product or service helps your customer overcome.

Take that information and plug it into the simple formula of journey, obstacle, change, victory. Your brand story will position you in the customer’s hero journey, resulting in an emotional connection, potential conversion, and loyalty.

What are the most common copywriting sins?

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Well, five pop into my mind instantly. All of which can be easily avoided:

Don’t be selfish:

Your audience have a choice. And if they sense that your content is all about you (‘me-oriented’ copy), not them, their choice will be to go somewhere else.

So don’t focus on the ‘I’, ‘we’, or ‘us’. Instead, construct sentences using ‘you’ and ‘your’. You-oriented copy attracts readers, keeps them interested, and cues them for action. It’s not about you, it’s about them, so focus on what your readers want, rather than simply what services you offer.

Don’t be self-absorbed:

You don’t buy from you, others buy from you. Your customers don’t really care about your business and your troubles nearly as much as you do— so keep you content focused on their business challenges. Keep it customer-centric.

Don’t be deceitful:

See selfish, above. If you don’t tell customers the truth, it’s probably because you’re selfish. How urgent can your needs be that you would sacrifice your future to get something now? Developing long-lasting and profitable relationships with customers is all about building trust.

Don’t be inconsistent:

Your customers are bombarded by information, daily; so they’re not paying that much attention. But when they do, it helps if you’re communicating in a similar way to what they have heard from you before—in terms of facts, messaging, tone of voice, language etc.

Don’t be lazy:

You should make your copy easy to read, and sometimes that means using the proper mechanics of English, such as when to end a sentence, when to use commas, dashes, colons and other punctuation. You should understand sentence structure, such as the need for a subject and a verb, how to use prepositions and conjunctions and phrases. Given that, don’t feel compelled to follow every rule of English composition. While you should not try to impress readers with your brilliance, you don’t want them to think you are illiterate.

Building personas and understanding your audience

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Good content means you have to anticipate what your audience wants. But how do you do that? Ginny Redish, in her book “Letting go of words”, suggests seven tips for getting and using information about your web users. We think it can be as simple as three:

  • Collect: Who are your major audiences? And what are their main characteristics? What else do you know about them? Gather your audience’s questions, tasks and stories.
  • Create: Use this information and customer insight to create personas. After all, it’s far easier to communicate with your audience once they stop being strangers—and start being someone whose interests and motivations are more familiar to you.
  • Conceive: Use your information to write scenarios for your website; journeys and stories that would capture the persona’s interest, using language and analogies that would be meaningful to them.

 

So what information goes into a persona?

You need to go beyond the crude segmentation that’s often all that’s available in the B2B space: company size, vertical, geography, demographic, job title and weave in more personal elements so the character takes shape. These 1-2-page descriptions cover aspirations and goals, patterns of behaviour, values, skills, attitude and the constraints and opportunities of their environment.

For example:

RICHARD

  • 55 years old
  • Finance Director
  • Lives in London
  • Married

Richard and his wife work full-time. They make six-figure incomes, and they put in the hours that requires.

Richard uses email but doesn’t get on the web much at work. His web use is mostly personal, at home. That doesn’t mean he has time to waste. He’s impatient at home, too. Time is very precious for Richard and his wife.

He wears contacts; his eyes aren’t what they were when he was younger. He hates websites with tiny print; they make him feel old.

When it’s time to renew his phone contract, he’ll try online this year and save himself some paperwork—if it’s easy to do.

“The web is a tool to get things done. Fast”
“If it doesn’t work right, I move on. I don’t have time to figure it out.”

Typical web tasks

  • Reads news
  • Checks sports sites
  • Buys things for their weekend house

 

Now, instead of talking generally, you can talk specifically about whether Jane can find the information about Big Data (for example); will this help Bob fix his problem? When Jamie knows the fee what will he do next?

And, you’ll also know how best to address their questions—a quick read, an audio description, an explanatory video.

Which is more effective: the carrot or the stick?

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Marketing communications is all about persuading people to take action—to change something about the way they do business, buy something new or try something different. In most cases, encouraging them to act will involve both positive and negative drivers—what we might call the ‘carrot’ and the ‘stick’.

Dangling a carrot in front of your audience can entice them to act in the way you want based on the promise of the benefits they can achieve; brandishing a stick focuses on the pain or the penalties that can result from inaction.

So which do you lead with?

Well, that depends. A carrot-led piece will be more optimistic, with a more aspirational and positive tone overall. On the other hand, a stick-led piece will be more hard hitting—but if you’re not very careful, it could risk sounding negative, patronising or even accusatory.

So it’s always better to lead with the carrot, right?

Not necessarily—you’ll need to consider a number of factors. Of course there’s the topic itself, the context, the target audience, and the company tone of voice—but don’t forget that for marketing there’s the overwhelming need to get people to act.

However big and juicy the promised carrot, change is hard and always costs something, whether that’s time, effort or money. Most people would really rather not bother if they don’t have to. If there’s nothing obvious to be lost by not changing, the carrot may not be enough to give people the impetus to change—the reader may be content simply to maintain the status quo. Failing to gain an advantage is something many people can live with.

So persuading your audience to take action may sometimes depend on convincing them it will be more painful not to act—even if acting is painful in itself—by leading with a big stick. Especially if you have limited time or space to get their attention.

Extracting more value out of your content

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We’re all attracted by the bright lights of ‘new’ and it’s certainly important to keep things fresh and appealing. But every piece of material you create has hidden value.

Have you squeezed all the worth you can from it?

For example, when you invested in interviewing a customer for a case study, did you explore what else you could get out of the meeting? Did you uncover the sales strategy? Writing up a separate piece with vital hints and tips for conversation starters and objection-handling can improve salesforce effectiveness. Did you gather additional sound bites? Quotes add substantiation and credibility to direct mail and brochures. Have you prepared a shortened version to include as a synopsis in a new product brochure?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s just common sense to make the most of the time and effort you’ve invested in assembling that lovely content. Right?

But this is more than just content repurposing; it’s about having a pre-planned and executable content strategy.

Will your content get the Panda’s vote?

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How many of you have felt the impact from the launch of Google Panda back in February? By now, the analytics should reveal just how this exciting change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm is affecting traffic to your site.

Panda update: the results

Reportedly, some 12% of all searches are feeling the change. Following the launch of Panda, news sites reported a surge in the rankings while sites with large amounts of advertising, fell. Thing is, the machine-learning algorithm, made possible by and named after engineer Navneet Panda, is trying to do the right thing for web users and rank pages according to the quality of their content and user experience.

Changing the best practice of SEO

Panda aims to reduce the position on results pages (SERPs) of websites that have thin and duplicate content when Google responds to a search. It also downplays sites that come up short on other site-quality metrics such as high advert-to-content ratios. Conversely, Panda up rates sites with lots of high-quality, unique content and from trusted brands. And puts on the podium sites that go further still: pages that offer anecdotes, humour, great photos, history or insight; pages that tell a story and make the visitor love and want to share that page.

It’s hard to imagine the complexity of the maths that models the behaviour of the thousands of human testers that Google worked with to create Panda, but not so hard to imagine what you need to do about it.

Want to know more?

There is some great insight from SEOMOZ available. This article talks about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

The seven levers of online content strategy

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In the online world as much as in the ‘old’ world, marketing best practice tells us that we need to define our target audience and how we want to change what they think, feel and do in order to move them along a buying cycle. So if a company that sells anti-virus software is setting up (or refreshing) its website, it needs to be clear about the fact that the objective for the site is (for example) to persuade small business owners or managers to order its product directly from the site.

What are the ‘4Ps’ of online content strategy?

At this point we’d switch from our customer focus to look at what we can directly control in order to influence our defined audience in the way we want.

The traditional marketing strategy framework for doing this is the good old 4Ps: ‘product’, ‘price’, ‘place’, ‘promotion’. So we asked ourselves: if we’re developing an online strategy aimed at getting our audience to arrive (at our site or other online presence), engage (with us or our content) and then act, what’s the equivalent of the 4Ps? What are the relevant ‘levers’ we can control in the online world that create a complete high-level content strategy?

The seven online content levers

We think there are seven content levers we can pull to ensure that we meet our objectives for online marketing. Not as snappy as ‘the 4Ps’, we admit; do tell us if you’ve got any ideas for turning these into a memorable acronym—or if you think there are different levers to consider:

AccessibilityHow do we help our targets to discover, find, arrive at our site/ online content? Includes: traffic generation; SEO; on-page strategy; site optimisation for mobile devices.
Messaging and toneHow do we address our targets (content and style) to make them feel and act in the appropriate way?
NavigationHow do we give our targets a clear path to where they want (and we want them) to go? Bearing in mind that they may arrive at different places.
Content refreshHow often does this content (and this and this…) need to be updated to keep the experience fresh and relevant for our targets?
Look and feelWhat design principles will attract our targets and how do we ensure that design and navigation/usability work together?
ShareabilityHow do we encourage and facilitate visitors to share our content (or share their own or other content with other visitors, as appropriate)?
Interactivity How do we encourage and facilitate targets to interact with our content, other visitors and us?

Context is king

As with the 4Ps, clearly these need to be considered together and applied to meet a well-articulated objective. Not ‘what should our site’s navigation do?’ as an isolated question but—if we go back to our software company example—’how can we organise the navigation so that it presents small business managers with a clear, relevant path through their buying cycle to the placement of an order for our product?’

Of course determining the right answers—or answers that work (there’s no one right answer)—might be very challenging. And complicated by the fact that in practice you’re likely to have multiple target audiences and multiple objectives. But that’s always the challenge for marketing—in this respect online is no different from offline.

Content repurposing best practice

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Sometimes clients come to us and say, “We’ve got this great piece of work. We want to make more use of it somehow.”

Their instinct is absolutely spot on. We’ve written before about the value of repurposing or extending the reach of good content. It’s just common sense to make the most of the time and effort you’ve invested in creating it. Right?

Repurposing takes time and money

Right. Except that reusing content is not usually just a matter of waving a wand and, hey presto, you’ve got a new result. Occasionally it’s not far off — if you’ve done a really good job creating a presentation script that stands on its own, it can be pretty straightforward to turn it into a paper. But most of the time it’s not as simple as that.

Typically it takes some effort and expense to turn your video into a paper or your sales guide into a customer presentation. Even writing a short blog using existing content takes some time and thought.

What return will you get from reusing content?

So while the instinct to reuse content is a good one, it’s not enough on its own to justify doing so. As with any activity, you need to be clear about the return on your investment to get it done. Against the time and money it takes to complete an activity you need to consider how far it will shift the attitudes or actions of your identified target audience to achieve your stated aim for the activity (eg, to raise understanding, close a deal, increase loyalty, encourage advocacy, create a partnership).

Of course you also need to consider the activity in the context of other activities and their goals. The impact of any single blog may be low, but the cumulative effect of your blogging activity might not; or you might have other good reasons to blog.

Finally, one thing that is definitely true about reusing content is this: if you already have good, independent reasons for creating some content, always consider whether you already have content that the new activity could tie into, repurpose, adapt or use as inspiration. Doing so will usually make the new activity, which you’ll be doing anyway, more efficient or effective.