High-Tech Communicator

Telling an Impactful Story with Numbers

Numbers are an inherently compelling way to tell a marketing story. Case studies are always more valuable when they include actual number quantifying cost savings, time savings, or productivity improvements. White papers often describe the ROI from using a vendor’s solution. For example, I’m currently working on a white paper that quantifies all the factors that save companies money when they consolidate tape drives.

That’s why it instantly piqued my interest when I ran into several pieces that talked about how to kick the use of numbers up a notch to tell even more powerful stories.

Grabbing Attention by the Numbers

The first piece was a post by Bill Taylor on the Harvard Business Review blog. He advises that anyone looking to make the most of numbers really think about finding the “numbers that matter”—numbers that attract attention, shape perceptions,  and change minds.  Taylor calls these the “Holy S#%t” numbers.

 Here are some examples:

• 70% of teens who abuse prescription drugs get them from home
• 80% of women plan to exclusively breastfeed; only 20% actually do
• 80% of people age 45 + consider changing careers; only 6% actually do

These numbers tell a story because they’re simple and easy to understand. They’re human and easily relatable. Perhaps most important, they surprise us and/or capture the gap between intentions and actions.

Using Numbers to Drive Action

In his Occam’s Razor blog, Avinash Kaushik tells a story that illustrates how the right numbers can drive action. The story centered on how Kaushik used his Nexus One Android  phone with the Cardio Trainer application one day to track his efforts riding his bike. The application shows all kinds of neat data—including cool maps of his biking route, minimum and maximum speeds, distance travelled, calories burned. While this data was interesting, it didn’t inspire him to do anything different.      

 Until he hit save…..Up popped this information: “You burned 200 calories. That’s two pears.”

 “All that work for two pears!” Kaushik thought to himself.

 And with that, Kaushik became determined to increase the number to four pears.  

The point is that marketers need to find their “two pears”—in other words, the need to find a way to present numbers in a way that will inspire action.

Improving Your Marketing Materials

Marketers are always looking for numbers to convey the scope and magnitude of a problem and the results that can be achieved using a particular solution. By uncovering numbers that are truly surprising and conveying data in a manner that instantly inspires your readers to act, you can dramatically improve the impact of your marketing materials.

How do you use numbers to dramatize your story and create more compelling marketing materials?

How to Choose Customers for Case Studies

Case studies are extremely powerful marketing tools. But how do you choose the right customers to profile for case studies to make the most of limited marketing dollars?

Here are some of the criteria companies use to identify the most strategic case studies:   

Star Power

If the customers you’re going after Fortune 500 companies, you’ll certainly want the legitimacy that having case studies from big name customers will provide. Certainly, I have plenty of clients chasing after these big names.

However, beware that these are the most difficult to line up and can result in wasted resources. Many large companies have policies that prohibit them from endorsing other vendors’ products—thus be prepared to expend much more time and effort finding big companies willing to do a case study. Even if a company says they do case studies, approvals may be withheld at the last minute, often with no explanation. This can result in wasted money for stories that are never approved. You can minimize (but never completely eliminate) this risk by determining in advance the company’s policy on case studies, who’s in charge of the project, and ask their permission before beginning the process.  

Target Industries

Often, customers are concerned about whether you understand their specific industry—whether that’s manufacturing, retail, or life sciences. Creating case studies about customers in all of the industries that constitute your target markets will ensure you have the right materials on hand to alleviate those concerns.   

Product Line

Clearly, you’ll want case studies for each product in your product line so you can demonstrate your success in delivering promised benefits for each product.

Geographic Area

Some companies target case studies geographically. For example, one client that markets to physicians  highlights customers practicing in each region of the country.  

ROI

ROI can be extremely difficult to quantify. In many cases, companies that want a lot of case studies will produce some that highlight qualitative benefits. Still, make sure that some of your case studies demonstrate strong quantifiable ROI. 

Momentum

In many cases, quality will be more important than quantity. If resources are an issue, you don’t really need dozens of case studies that illustrate the same point. It’s better to make sure you have at least one case study for each key product, target market, or other initiative. At the same time, some companies find it very important to demonstrate momentum and adoption in their marketplace. One way to meet these requirements is to create customer press releases; short and sweet descriptions about your new customers and why they’re choosing your products and release them on an ongoing basis over the wire services. 

Miscellaneous

Every once in awhile, I’ll come across a unique reason to create a case study or customer press release. For example, one company produced customer press releases and case studies specifically about customers who had come to them after defecting from their main competitor. This was an interesting exercise because no customer will allow you to directly say that they dumped a previous vendor in your favor.  What you can do is produce a standard case study or press release about these customers. And presumably, the sales rep can fill in the missing details in one-on-one conversations.

Another customer had come from a business that had evolved over time from a document printing company to one that automated document processes. A prize case study for them was one that covered the entire automated process, rather than individual automated capabilities.

Companies produce case studies for many reasons. When you’re looking for customers to profile, chose the ones that are most strategic for your business.

How does your organization select customers to profile with case studies?

 

When Content Experts Aren't Expert

In the past, I’ve written about how interviewing content experts can give you the content you need to flesh out marketing materials. But what do you do if the so called “content expert” you’re relying on to help craft a marketing piece isn’t quite the expert they claim to be?  Here’s the true story of one bad experience with a bogus content expert and what I learned from it.

Many years ago I was asked to create a marketing white paper targeting the life sciences sector as they related to a particular IT solution for a vendor that made a specialized type of ERP software. I was paired with a content expert from the company.

Just prior to this particular project, I had interviewed this same content expert about relevant business challenges for a piece that talked about how the vendor’s product could help pharmaceutical companies better manage contract research. The end result of our collaboration had been very well received within the company. I figured this guy knew what he was talking about.

For our second paper, I interviewed my expert—this time about the challenges facing the life sciences industry and created the paper based on his experience. This time the paper bombed. Someone who was an expert in the subject pulled the plug on the paper because the business drivers my expert had described that I wrote about were incorrect. Clearly, my expert knew pharmaceutical companies, but wasn’t such an expert on the life sciences market as a whole. 

Since that early experience, I’ve learned a great deal about how to ensure that a piece truly reflects the issues facing a particular industry. Here’s what I’ve found:

Do a lot of background research.

When you do research, it’s important to realize that any one article you come across will reflect one single topic or slant. That means you need to do considerable digging to piece together the complete story.

For example, as I write this post, I’m working on a industry solution guide targeting the life sciences industry that talks about the R&D Tax Credit. Some articles I’ve found talk about what constitutes a qualifying R&D expense that firms can deduct from their taxes. Others discuss how the IRS stringently scrutinizes deduction requests for this credit. Others describe how Republicans in the Senate are blocking an extension to the credit—which expired last December. One article mentioned that the credit has often lapsed but that the act has been extended 13 times since the credit was first adopted in 1981. Another details how the types of activities companies can deduct has changed over the past 7 years. Previously companies could only take the deduction for a groundbreaking new products or processes, now it’s acceptable to take the deduction for R&D that involves incremental improvements, as long as they rely on experimentation.

The point is that any one article presents just one piece of a story. It’s like the blind man describing the proverbial elephant. It only provides a very limited view. As a result, I might need to read 15-20 articles to piece together all the facts necessary to give me the background I need to produce a 2-3 page solution guide.

Talk to more than one expert.

You can often get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in any particular area by doing research. But usually you’ll have to supplement that research by speaking with experts. This is particularly true when you’re writing about a new area that hasn’t yet been covered extensively. For example, while today, you can find considerable information about social media, five years ago, you would have had to hunt down and interview the few people who were pioneers in social media. 

Writing about the business trends impacting customers of a company that produces highly specialized products, or products overlooked by other vendors, will also require you to interview experts.

The only way to make sure your expert really knows what they’re talking about is to interview several experts. Many people can think they know something, and sound like they know what they’re talking about when in fact they don’t. This is one reason why, in journalistic circles, information is not considered a fact until it has been verified by three independent sources. If nothing else, you’ll quickly get an idea of the general consensus on an issue and what views represent the outliers.

Overall, the key lesson I learned about researching unfamiliar topics is to always do extensive research, including reading a number of articles and talking to several experts.

 What are your experiences with content experts?

 

Content Marketing: The Power of Pain

When I create marketing content for B2B companies, I’ve long advocated that the pieces describe solutions to a customer problem that the company’s product solves. My clients are usually happy with the results, but I’ve rarely been in a position to see firsthand how their customers respond to the materials I’ve created. My clients are either too busy to give me customer feedback or they fail to track it themselves.  

Now with this blog, I have a tool that allows me to test some of my theories for myself. Although I can’t test the actual marketing materials I write for my clients, nor is the testing scientific, the fact that I get immediate click-through information has allowed me to see whether some of my long-held theories about the best ways to create marketing materials are valid. My experience with blog posts—which are, after all, marketing materials for my own business—has illustrated the power of addressing real customer pain points. 

Let me illustrate with a few stories.  

Exhibit A

This first anecdote is about a customer problem I uncovered by talking to actual customers. When I came back to posting my blog this summer after a 5-month hiatus, I didn’t have time to research potential blog topics. I wanted to start posting quickly to get back on the radar screen. So I decided to write a post about questions that kept coming up when I spoke to companies about writing projects.  

One of the most frequent laments from marketing vice presidents and directors was that they really needed the extra bandwidth that an outside writing resource could provide, but that they’d had bad experiences with outside writers. They’d then proceed to ask me about my process and ask to see my writing samples. From the conversation, it was clear that their real, underlying question was, “How do I find a really good marketing writer?”

So I wrote a blog post with that title that provided some answers. While my earliest posts in the first iteration of my blog got a bare trickle of hits, that post received a torrent of hits and a number of comments—not only on the blog itself,  but on the Linkedin groups on which I publicized it—without the benefit of time to build an audience for the blog.

Exhibit B

My next example is a post about a problem that was uncovered by a market research study. My idea for my recent post, “Creating Compelling Content: Tips from a Journalist,” was taken from a recent survey that found that creating compelling was one of the biggest problems facing content marketers. (The report also mentioned that the vast majority of technology marketers use content marketing.) When I saw that problem I thought, “I can address that concern.” Once again, the response was much higher than average. 

Exhibit C

Still another post came from first-hand observations of marketing vice presidents and directors.  I’ve long been aware that marketing vice presidents and directors devour market research about their markets and about marketing in general. Clearly, they’re always on the lookout for new ways to solve their marketing problems.  That’s why when I ran into a raft of new research about content marketing, I wrote a post about it, “New Research Describes the Most Effective Ways to Market with Content,” which garnered considerable interest.   

Exhibit D

In contrast, when I write posts based simply on observations of phenomenon that I find interesting, such as my recent post “The Age of Micro Targeting,” the response was much lower than that of the posts described above.

One Major Exception

Clearly addressing a problem with a blog post, and with any other type of marketing communications, is highly effective in gaining attention from your target audience.

That said, my most popular posts of all are the ones referenced by MarketingProfs. Now this particular post, which I wrote because I found it interesting, did not pull especially well when I first published it. However, the hit rate went through the roof after MarketingProfs sprinkled it with its fairy dust. Clearly, having the endorsement of a well recognized name and a much broader distribution list can trump the results of a blog describing a solution to even the most pressing problem. But that’s a topic for another post.

 How do these observations jibe with your experiences?  

New Research Describes the Most Effective Ways to Market with Content

Three major new studies have been published about content marketing over the last few weeks. Among the most interesting findings are the fact that today’s marketers fully understand that content is a critical component to their marketing efforts and that white papers remain the most influential types of content—but only if they’re well written and compelling.

Here are some interesting highlights:

Content Really is King

“B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” by MarketingProfs and Junta42 has found that content is now recognized  a critical aspect of marketing. Nine out of ten B2B marketers are using content to grow their business. And the computing/software industry has the highest rate of adoption of content marketing strategies (94%).

Content must be High-Quality, Compelling  

A survey from Vocus and Brian Solis concurred with the notion that content marketing is now a critical marketing tactic. But the content must be compelling. Fully one-half of surveyed marketing execs say creating, posting, and sharing compelling content is the single most important action people or brands can take to increase their influence online (50%). Quality of content is an important contributor to making a person or brand influential (55%) and the top reason people follow others on social sites is that content is relevant (62%).

The Most Influential Types of Content

What types of content are most effective? White papers are the most influential type of collateral. Eccolo Media’s third annual B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report found that white papers  remain moderately to extremely influential in helping customers make a purchase decision for 83% of respondents. However, the influence of white papers depends on the size of the customer. Both decision makers and influencers from enterprise and mid-market companies are more likely to pay attention to a white paper than their small business counterparts.

 The B2B Content Marketing 2010 benchmark also found white papers to be highly influential—although somewhat less so than the Eccolo study. More than half of the respondents to this study preferred white papers.  

 According to the Eccolo study, case studies are also valuable content with 67% of respondents using case studies to make technology purchases. 78% of respondents also use brochures and datasheets. However, these rank behind white papers and case studies in terms of influence.

 What Disappoints

Eccolo asked what disappoints people when reading white papers. The most disappointing quality in white papers was poor writing quality. Other disappointments include papers that are not technical enough, and those with no real-life cases.

 What Confuses

These studies also show that marketers remain confused about how to best use social media. The B2B Marking 2010 Benchmark found that while 79% of respondents are adopting social media (excluding blogs) only 31% feel it’s an effective tactic.

 Surprising Results

It’s a well known fact that different people absorb information better using different methods. Some people are more visual, others prefer sound. Marketers are beginning to use this knowledge to provide the same information using different media in the same marketing piece. The Eccolo study found that an emerging trend in marketing materials was embedding audio and video files into digital versions of written documents such as white papers and case studies. Moreover, when these media are included, 93 percent of respondents clicked through to these embedded files. 

How do these findings match your experiences?

 

Creating Compelling Content: Tips from a Journalist

One of the biggest issues that flummox marketers is how to come up with compelling content. To create great content, it pays to think like an editor or journalist. After all, a magazine’s stock in trade is creating interesting content month in and month out for a particular audience. When I was an editor at PC Magazine, PC/Computing Magazine, DBMS Magazine and several others, here’s how we came up with compelling content.

Define Your Audience

Successful magazines are razor focused on an extremely well defined audience. For example, during it’s heyday, PC Magazine focused on the people who had the most influence on purchase decisions in the IT departments, mostly in larger companies. DBMS Magazine targeted database programmers. As a marketer, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to.

Understand Their Pain

At most magazines, the advertising and editorial departments will perform extensive research on their audience and surveys of their interests. Some publications even do focus groups to get audience response to various article ideas and/or existing articles as well as on the overall design of the publication. Similarly, marketers need to talk to customers and find out what they care about, what issues keep them up at night, and what they want to know in order to make a purchase decision.

Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a high level plan that maps out the list of topics that you need to cover over a period of time, typically the next six months or year. At PC Magazine, the editorial calendar usually included a list of the most important types of PC technology on the market—from printers to spreadsheets to LANs—since that publication focused on testing the key types of PC products that an IT department was likely to purchase.

 The purpose of the editorial calendar is to help editors come up with coverage that hits on the key areas of interest for their audience. It also helps the sales people know which advertisers to approach for which issue, since advertisers often like to buy spots in issues that include editorial relating in some way to their products.  

 For marketers, an editorial calendar will map out the key areas the company needs to communicate about. These areas might include future directions or a product road map; the range of product lines that company needs material for; and the various stages of the buying cycle they need to produce materials for.

Find an Angle

Only after you  have a high level understanding of your audience, their key pains/areas of interest, and the areas that you as a company need to cover can you come up with ideas for relevant individual pieces.

Say you determine you need thought leadership pieces for various vertical markets. In this case, people won’t know who you are or why they should care about your product. You need to grab their attention by addressing topics that are pressing problems or issues that they think about every day. The following are ways to come up with a topic of interest for this type of piece:

1. Find a topic in the news that’s of interest to the role or industry you’re trying to reach, then shape your piece around that topic. For example, with the recent BP explosion and the Chilean mine disaster in the headlines, a thought-leadership piece that targets the energy industry will get attention if it talks about worker safety. 
2. Talk about how current economic conditions are impacting your customer’s industry or role. The Great Recession and fitful recovery are concerns for any industry. However, their meaning will differ for different industries.  For example, as the economy recovers and companies of all types look to grow their markets, financial services firms will need to regain customer trust to garner new customers. 
3. Find out about what problems keep your reader up at night—particularly ones that your product can address. You can address longstanding issues that don’t qualify as news, as long as they’re sufficiently critical to your customer. For example, the pharmaceutical industry faces longstanding problems of rising costs for research and development and increasing FDA regulation. While these problems are not especially newsworthy, they are grave concerns for the industry. 

Once you get further along the buying cycle, what constitutes a compelling topic of interest will change. As customers look more deeply into possible solutions, compelling topics often include case studies of customer that have solved typical problems, buyer’s guide comparisons of products and even technical discussions of how your solution works.

The key is to clearly define who your buyers are, what their problems are, what they want to know as they select a solution—and then design pieces that address their key questions. Just think of topics from your customer’s perspective at all times and you’ll never go wrong.

How have you created content that’s compelling to your audience?

The Age of Micro Targeting

In my recent series on buyer personas, I wrote about how some technology companies are beginning to employ buyer personas for use in targeting their marketing materials but are having trouble developing and using them. Technology companies have much more experience and success in targeting their marketing pieces to specific vertical industries. Today, I’m seeing companies increasingly targeting their marketing to much narrower niches within vertical niches.    

For example, a few years ago, I did a white paper that targeted retailers—but a single piece covered all retail markets from large department stores such as Macy’s to mom-and-pop grocers—even though my client knew that the concerns of these two markets were significantly different.

In contrast, just the other day, I spoke with a company that also targeted retailers. But this time, the company was looking to separately target lawn & garden and nursery retailers, independent pharmacies, hardware stores and seed stores for farms and ranches.

These are hardly isolated examples. In the healthcare industry, I recently targeted different pieces specifically to medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, large group medical practices, and OB/GYNs.

These examples demonstrate that technology companies do understand the importance of knowing and speaking very specifically to a tightly focused audience. While my recent series on buyer personas shows that many companies have even more to learn about their customers, this focus on highly targeted markets is a step in the right direction.

Here’s why I think micro targeting is such a positive trend:

• Different industries have different challenges. If you want your audience to think you understand (and can solve) their challenges, you need to be very specific in stating and addressing those challenges in your marketing materials.
• Even if the challenges are very similar, many customers want to know you can address people “just like me.” This is especially true in highly risk averse industries. For example, physicians have traditionally been very reluctant to adopt electronic health records. In recognition of this fact, one vendor went so far as to create case studies that targeted different specialties (e.g. obstetrics and gynecology, dermatology, pediatrics, etc.) in different geographic locations (e.g. the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast and so on).
• You can speak their language. Different industries use different jargon. If you want to appear to be an insider, you need to use that jargon.
• You can tailor your product benefits to your customers. That same product may provide different benefits to different audiences. The best marketing materials will adapt your messaging to the needs of the particular target market. For example, if your key messages are improving productivity, reducing costs and minimizing compliance risks, pieces targeting highly regulated industries such as financial services may spend more time emphasizing compliance while those targeting the construction sector might emphasize cost cutting.

Years ago, technology companies often spoke about their product features while neglecting to explain product benefits. Many (though hardly all) technology companies have come a long way since those bad old days of marketing. While companies can always do more, particularly in terms of using buyer personas, micro targeting is a giant step forward for technology marketing.

What are your experiences with micro targeting?

Taming the Toughest Interviews

In previous posts, I wrote about how to interview customers and content experts. If you follow those tips, most interviews will go off without a hitch. Most people are flattered to do interviews and like to talk about themselves.  But if you do enough interviews, you’re bound to find exceptions. Here are the three most common types of challenging interview subjects and what to do if you encounter them.

The Strong Silent Type

The most common interview challenge I’ve run into is the person who simply doesn’t like to talk—even about himself or herself. When you ask a talkative person an open-ended question, such as “How does your company benefit from using our product?” they’ll talk for 10 minutes about which features they like best, why, and how they benefit. In fact, they may cover most of my questions without my even having to ask. But when you ask an open-ended question to a taciturn type, he or she will respond with the minimum-length sentence.

How do you get the contextual information you need from close-lipped types to help your readers understand the significance of what you’re trying to explain?

Take a step-by-step approach. For example, if you’re interviewing the person for a customer story, go through the entire list of features in your product. For each feature ask, “Do you use this feature? Do you benefit from this? How? What are the implications of that? How did you do things before? What do you do differently now?” While these are the same questions I’d ask anyone, the taciturn type requires a lot more hand holding through the process.

Although many interviewers and journalists warn against asking people leading questions, I find that leading questions actually help in interviews with the strong silent type. Don’t get me wrong, my purpose isn’t to get someone to say what I want them to say. I simply state my theory in a non-threatening manner in order to give them something to react to; the goal is to get them to agree or disagree and then tell me why.   

The Wanderer

The wanderer constantly goes off on tangents. You ask them about X and before you know it their off to the races on Y.

To keep the wanderer in line, be very clear from the outset about what you need from the interview. Prepare a list of questions and a pre-approved outline. When necessary, gently remind the person of your agenda and pull them back to the task at hand.

The Arrogant #$%^*(!@

I don’t run into arrogant interview subjects as often as quiet types or wanderers—but you do find them on occasion. Most of the time, they’re very technical people who look down on marketers as a lesser species. Whereas most people don’t mind the occasional dumb question (although you should always do your homework so you’ll ask as few questions that appear dumb as possible), the arrogant interviewee will go out of his or her way to comment on a dumb question and make you feel stupid.

How do you avoid the scorn of these interviewees? Do your homework, learn your topic and be as prepared as possible. When you ask question, make clear that you’re asking for clarification for something that’s unclear to a reasonably intelligent person. Restate their answers in ways that bring in related information that shows them you’ve done your homework and know a fair amount about the topic at hand. A few well-placed, well-stated facts is all you need to appear knowledgeable.

You Never Know Who You’ll Get

When interviewing content experts, customers, or anyone else, you never know in advance what your subject will be like. Always prepare for the worst by doing your homework, having an outline and a list of questions, and by keeping a bag of tricks up your sleeve for dealing with difficult interview subjects—just in case.

How have you dealt with difficult interviews?