High-Tech Communicator

Establish the Right Tone for B2B Advertising

I’ve always felt that a factual, journalistic tone is most effective for B2B marketing materials, and that buyers want a straightforward description of the benefits of purchasing a particular solution. Technology buyers are very smart and very skeptical of anything that smacks of hype.

I recently ran across an interesting study by Harte Hanks that backs up this view. “Mapping the Technology Buyer’s Journey” looks at how technology buyers purchase products. One of the questions the study asks is, “How effective are the following marketing ‘tones’ in initially attracting your attention to technology product advertising?”

• The most effective (87%) in attracting attention was a factual tone.
• Next (83%) was cost/value-oriented.
• Also highly effective (79%) was benefit-oriented.

Humorous (17%) and edgy/cool (15%) received far less favorable ratings. Moreover, the study found that the higher the level of the responder in the organization, the less effective these two tones become. If you’re going for an executive level audience, it pays to avoid a humorous or edgy tone.

It’s nice to see my opinion validated.

How does this research reflect your results?

The Difference between a Feature and a Benefit

Twenty years ago, few in the technology industry knew the difference between a feature and a benefit. As a journalist at the time, I was bombarded with vendors who visited the magazine to do product demonstrations that showed all the cool features a particular product offered without explaining why anyone would care about that capability. The result was I was always mentally falling asleep. Friends who were software developers sneered at the idea that anyone would need to actually have the benefits explained. Surely any smart person would “get” the benefits instantly upon seeing the features.

In many technology companies, that attitude has changed. Many marketers today understand the need to carefully and precisely explain why a particular capability is important to customers and how it can benefit them.  

Nonetheless, I continue to run into marketers who explain benefits by describing features. In other words, they don’t really understand the difference between a feature and a benefit.

Drills and Holes

So here it is in a nutshell. The feature is the drill. The benefit is the hole.

Here’s a technology example. The feature is “an intuitive user interface that uses Web-type navigation with forward and back buttons.”

One benefit is that the user interface “reduces training and support costs by using a familiar interface that people can learn quickly.”

One Man’s Benefit is Another Man’s So What?

Another point to remember is that benefits are in the eye of the beholder. As you attempt to determine what a benefit is you need to determine the benefit to whom? After all, not everyone receives the same benefit from a particular feature.

For example, if you’re talking to a technical support person, the benefit of an intuitive user interface is that it “reduces annoying calls from stupid users.”

For the end user, the benefit might be that it “allows me to do things myself without having to wait on hold for tech support for 45 minutes.”

So remember, when determining features and benefits think of drill versus hole and that all benefits are in the eye of the beholder.

How well does your company distinguish between features and benefits?

What’s Your Philosophy of Writing?

The other day, I was talking to a marketing manager at a large technology company about a potential writing project. Usually, in an initial get-to-know-you phone meeting, marketing people will ask what types of projects I do and how I work—all  very tactical questions. But this woman asked instead, “What’s your philosophy?”

“Wow! That’s refreshing,” I thought. “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

Her question gets to people’s perception of writers. Often, people look at writing as a tactical task where the writer strings together sentences and polishes up the grammar. But when that’s all a writer does, marketers are invariably unhappy with the results and become distrustful of all writers. As one content expert recently noted, “Many writers seem to just not understand the topics, so while they may be grammatical experts, they destroy the message.”

By asking me my philosophy, this woman was saying that she understood that writing is a complex and strategic function that goes beyond stringing together sentences.

So What’s My Philosophy?

My writing philosophy centers around the type of writing I do and the process of writing.

Writing Types

With the idea of content marketing spreading like wildfire, marketers are actively looking to create content that describes how their solution helps people operate their businesses or do their jobs more effectively. The idea is that customers are actively looking for solutions for problems on the web and it behooves marketers who want to attract customers to give them what they’re looking for.

I come from a background of service journalism. In other words, I started out writing articles for niche publications that in some way, shape, or form provided information that helped people operate their businesses or do their jobs better. Whether it was a case study that showed how one business solved a particular problem, a comparative review of multiple products in a single category, or a trend piece that described changes an organization needed to be aware of, all of the articles I wrote always had a service bent. The white papers, case studies and other materials I write typically reflect that focus.

Writing Process

To create the type of materials I focus on, the writing process comes down to gaining a true understanding of the message the client wants to disseminate and then translating that into a piece that has meaning to the customer. The process is sort of like translating poetry from one language to another. This is more complex than it looks. After all, think about what would happen if you ran a poem through translation software. You’d get gibberish.

Why?  

Most poems are chock full of obscure references. If you don’t understand the references, you don’t understand the poem. But when you get a good professor to explain the poem, a whole new world opens up.

Similarly, pieces about technology contain all sorts of jargon, acronyms, and obscure references.

So for papers where the content is well defined, such as a white paper based on a sales presentation, the job of a writer is to be the poetry professor and translate the “poem” (in this case the technology) into language that students can understand. Since I’m not really an expert at any one technology, I do deep background research looking up obscure articles explaining the technology until I “get it” enough to explain to someone else.

But for many white papers, the client only has a 30,000-foot view of what they want to say. In that case, I need to come up with most of the content from scratch through interviews and research. I then shape it into something that meets the client’s criteria and that readers can understand.

So to summarize, what’s my philosophy to create value?

1. Create service-type pieces that help customers do their job or run their business better
2. Find out in a deep way what the client is really trying to say.
3. Make sure I get all the background I need to truly understand the message.
4. Learn what the customer wants to know and translate the message in such a way that the customer understands the value of my client’s message.

And that’s how writers add value to content during the writing process.

What’s your philosophy about producing marketing materials?

 

What B2B Content Marketers Can Learn from Niche Publications

When the personal computer industry burst onto the scene, so did a raft of new trade publications. And IT buyers scoured their pages for help with their purchase decisions.

Today, many of these publications are struggling, not because IT buyers don’t see incredible value in their pages, but because they’ve failed to find ways to monetize their services in the Internet age. Yet, buyers remain as hungry for content as always. And marketers that provide valuable content —especially when they do so for free—are reaping the benefits.

According to a recent study by ITSMA, “How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2010: The New Buyer Paradox,” nearly 60% of respondents said that idea-based content plays an important or critical role in determining which providers make it into their short lists. And if providers go farther and use thought leadership to help companies clarify their business needs and suggest solutions, 30% of this group said they would consider sole-sourcing the deal.

Since marketing departments are new to content creation, they can learn valuable lessons from the pros of content creation—those niche publishers. Here are some tips from the pros:

Find out what readers are looking for.

Publications are obsessed with what their readers think.  When I was at PC Magazine in the late 80s, our mission was to help companies make purchase decisions—so we could sell ads to the companies trying to reach those decision makers. We did extensive surveys of readers to determine how they made purchase decisions, and we made sure that each page helped with that process. As a result, the editors shifted the focus of the magazine away from general interest articles about the new (at the time) technology and began doing hard-core comparative product reviews that would directly help companies make their decisions. Other publications surveyed readers on their interest level in various topics. At still others, we conducted extensive focus groups on readers’ interest in various types of articles.

Draw the reader in.

Publications understand that if a piece doesn’t immediately pique a reader’s interest, the reader simply won’t read further. Therefore, they always work to make sure each article has an enticing headline, subhead, and lead paragraph that would pull the reader in. For more information on what makes a headline enticing, see our six-part series on headlines.

Make sure your content is easy to read.

At PC Magazine, we had vast armies of writers and editors intent on making sure all the copy was conversational, easy to understand and error-free. Once a writer turned in an article, a so-called “line editor” often completely rewrote the copy to ensure it made sense and flowed logically. An executive editor then reviewed the text. Next, several “copy editors” looked at each individual line of copy for clarity, style consistency, spelling, and so on. Finally, at least two proofreaders would review each article for typos.

Write for scan ability.

Each article in publications always contain attractive elements that help the headline, subhead, and lead paragraph pull the reader in. These include interesting pull quotes, lots of charts and graphs, and captions. At PC Magazine we also created fact files about each product, which were short summaries of our reviews. These elements allowed readers to skim the article as they quickly flipped through it and still come away with the main points. If readers were intrigued by any of these elements, they would read the article to learn more.

By stealing these techniques from trade publications, marketers can better fulfill the information needs of their customers. And as research shows, by giving customers vital information, companies are more likely to land on the short list when it comes time for customers to purchase a product.

Has your company adopted publishing techniques?

So You Think Your Content is Customer Centric

While many technology marketers continue to create self-promotional, beat-your-chest marketing, many others realize that it’s more effective to create marketing content that addresses issues from the customers’ perspective. But while companies understand the idea of customer centricity in theory, they sometimes fall down in practice.

Recently, I was asked to develop a white paper explaining the value of a particular type of software application. The marketing manager sent me a list of value statements upon which the paper should expand. 

Yet when it came time to flesh out these value statements, the content owner kept veering back to a discussion of the product’s features and capabilities. After digesting my notes, I had to go back and re-pose two questions, “What exactly is the strategic business problem that your customers want to address? And what is the benefit to the customer of solving the problem in the manner you describe?”

I was finally able to extract the answers to these two questions by taking a stab at answering them myself based on information from the company’s competitors (some of which applied and some didn’t) and then running my answers by the content owner. Once the content owner saw what I was looking for, she was able to tweak and correct the areas I’d gotten wrong.

I learned several lessons from this experience:

1. Because they’re so focused on cool technology, companies think that the reasons one should adopt the technology are self-evident. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the lackluster economy, companies are looking to align their IT solutions with their strategic business objectives. In other words, no matter how tactical a product may seem, companies want to know exactly how that product will help them address their strategic business goals—whether those goals are to reduce costs, increase revenues, minimize compliance risk, enhance productivity or some other objective. It’s the job of marketing to make a compelling link between their product and how it addresses customers’ business goals.
2. There’s still confusion about what it means to be customer centric. Many knowledgeable content owners (and other industry experts) persist in thinking that talking about product functionality while sprinkling in a dash of benefit sounding language means they’re customer centric. Instead, you need to be able to elaborate on exactly how the customer benefits from the product.
3. Many companies still don’t know what a benefit is. Many companies simply describe their features and think that’s the benefit. It’s not. What is a benefit? As they say, the “feature is the drill and the benefit is the hole.”
4. Concrete examples are more powerful than abstract statements. When I first asked the content owner about the benefits of specific products, she kept going back to a discussion of features. When I prepared examples of what I meant, she was able to give me what I needed. For example, instead of describing all the whiz bang capabilities of the product’s user interface (e.g. graphical process flows, automated alerts, point-and-click, forward-backward navigation), I ran by her a benefit: “The intuitive user interface improves ROI by reducing training costs and by getting people to use the product to improve productivity faster.”

So, to make sure your marketing content is really customer-centric, see if you’re addressing the key strategic business problems the organization faces (as well as the tactical ones) and be sure to describe benefits instead of features.

How well does your company address your customers?

 

Why Content Marketers Need a Good Editor

Recently, Joe Pulizzi wrote a post in his Junta42 Content Marketing blog called “10 Reasons Your Content Marketing is Killing You.” Number 9 was editing. As Joe said, “Editing may be the most underrated piece of the content marketing process. Sometimes we as brands don’t understand that the first draft of a piece of content is called a good start. Enter the editor. Get one or hire one.”

Given the sizable amount of poorly written content, many content marketers may not be aware of the value an editor adds to your content-marketing efforts.

A good editor will read through a piece of content a number of times looking at it from various angles and will play several important roles:  

1. A sounding board. At the highest level, a good editor will look at the ideas you present, question them, challenge them, and even play devil’s advocate to make sure you’ve thought them through. For example, I recently edited a series of three white papers—all expounding on different aspects of a single theme. As I reviewed the content, it quickly became apparent that each paper did not make a coherent argument, nor did the series as a whole. Once I interviewed the author to determine the argument he was trying to make, it became apparent that certain sections did not make sense in the paper in which they appeared—they made more sense in another paper or section. Other sections did not support the argument at all. A good editor will question everything you’ve written to make sure that everything that appears on the page makes sense.
2. A voice of logic.  Not only must a good piece of content make an argument, the argument must flow logically. A good editor will look at every paragraph to determine whether it advances the argument, whether it’s in the proper location, and whether the transitions between paragraphs make the reason the paragraph appears in the paper apparent to the reader.
3. An advocate for the reader. The other day, my husband and I were booking airline tickets on the Delta website. At one point during the booking process, they asked, “Are any of the passengers above fourteen years or younger.” Because there was no context to explain why they were asking the question, it took us both several minutes to figure out what they were talking about. If one of your readers has to puzzle over something for several minutes, you can be sure that they’ll simply stop reading. Why does this happen? Often the person writing the content will understand it so well that they don’t know what other people don’t understand and will leave out important details and explanations. A good editor will look at content from the perspective of a reader who is not an expert in the particular content area and determine what sections of copy are likely to confuse people.  
4. A parer-down of words. When I was first starting out, I once asked an editor the secret to good writing. He said, “Cut your copy in half.” I recently edited a piece that was about 4,000 words long—and such major surgery was just what the doctor ordered. By the time I removed all the asides and other extraneous text, the copy was half as long and twice as strong. Extra words get in the way of the reader’s clear understanding of ideas.
5. An enforcer of consistency. Marketers that want to reinforce their brand need to describe it in consistent terms. For example, a supplier of workforce management software always talks about how its solutions improve productivity (not efficiency) and minimize (not reduce) risk. Not only must the messaging be consistent, you need to use consistent grammar conventions and spelling to avoid confusing readers. This is the job of an editor.
6. A preventer of embarrassment. How many times have you seen a typo trumpeted on the back page of Consumer Reports? Talk about embarrassing. Even if your typo doesn’t make it to Consumer Reports, you certainly don’t want a typo in your white paper headline.

When you create content, you need a good editor to keep your paper intelligent sounding, logical, consistent—and to avoid embarrassing typos.

What’s your view of the role of an editor?

White Paper 2.0: Everything Old is New Again

A few months ago, I started getting lots of questions about whether we write “White Paper 2.0.” I quickly figured out that they were referring to the type of pieces Jonathan Kantor describes in his book Crafting White Paper 2.0: Designing Information for Today's Time and Attention-Challenged Business Reader.

Basically, the book presents ideas for incorporating a number of graphical components to make white papers more engaging and readable. White Paper 2.0 includes elements such as:

• Executive summaries and conclusions
• Callouts
• Graphics
• Bullet lists
• Shaded text boxes
• Descriptive subheadings

The use of these elements is designed to correspond to the way today’s busy readers want to approach the text. People tend to first skim the text by looking at summaries, callouts and other elements, and then decide whether and which sections to delve into more deeply.

I couldn’t agree with Kantor more. But looking at his book, I was struck by the idea, “Everything old is new again.”

It’s true. White Paper 2.0 concepts are new for white papers. White papers did indeed get their name for a reason—they were printed on white paper and have historically looked like term papers.

But looked at from another perspective, White Paper 2.0 is really about applying age old concepts from magazines and other publications to the white paper medium. Magazines have long used every single element Jonathan Kantor talked about to engage readers and keep them reading.

I can recall many an editorial meeting at PC Magazine 25 years ago where editors spent a lot of time critiquing headlines, subheads, captions and pull quotes. Those were the first things people read and were critical for drawing them into an article.   

What White Paper 2.0 is really about then is recognizing that, as the number of special interest publishers declines, B2B vendors are taking on the role these publishers once filled. As they do so, B2B vendors need to become more sophisticated about using techniques that have long been proven to work in engaging busy readers. As I said, everything old is new again.

How have you used White Paper 2.0?

How Do You Define Thought Leadership?

Clients ask me to write thought-leadership articles and white papers all the time. The majority of these pieces define a business challenge and talk about a solution to that challenge that’s basically a generic description of the vendors’ current solution. But recently, I ran into an exception.

I was asked to write about an emerging market segment for a technology vendor. This particular segment is undergoing major, rapid change as a result of new federal guidelines and regulations—as well as a general perception that this industry needs to improve quality and reduce costs.

President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste—and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could before.” IT vendors in this space are certainly taking this advice to heart.

A number of vendors are racing to introduce technology solutions to address the issues in the aforementioned industry. However, it takes time to build brand new solutions. The vendor faced the dilemma of whether to write about the capabilities of existing solutions vs. writing about what a long term solution should look like (and keep its fingers crossed that the solution it brings to market matches somewhat with its early thought leadership).

Ultimately, my client decided to produce true thought leadership, a future-looking view of what a solution should look like, rather than sticking to a description of their current solutions. In this way, this company is helping their customers make their decisions based on a long-term view of what could be, rather than limiting their solutions simply to “what is” and what they can sell customers today. To this I say, “Bravo!”

How have you defined thought leadership?

What Makes Content Spread Virally?

B2B marketers increasingly understand that in the early stages of the buying process, customers today find them through internet searches. Vendors realize that they can be found by providing content that addresses customers’ business challenges. And the brass ring for vendors who provide this content is for their content to go viral—and then be passed along from reader to reader so that readership grows exponentially without any effort on the part of the vendor. The question is: Can you control whether something goes viral?

I once worked with an editor who seemed to know the secret. Whenever he wrote his column, he always got tons of reader response. When I asked him his secret, he said he made sure to write controversial opinions—even if he didn’t necessarily believe what he wrote.

Now, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, both assistant professors at the Wharton School, have come up with research that puts some science behind what this editor instinctively understood. In conducting research specifically on what makes content spread virally, they found that after controlling for all other variables, “Content that evokes emotions characterized by high arousal (i.e. awe, anger, and anxiety) is more viral.” While other factors also influence how viral a piece of content becomes, this effect enhances virality even after you take these other factors into effect.

Furthermore, Berger and Milkman found that “The most powerful predictor of virality…is how much anger an article evokes.” After all, the emotion of anger motivates people to act. Clearly, it invoked the readers of the columns from the editor I mentioned. Politicians and cable TV pundits have also long understood the impact of evoking anger both in the polls and in the ratings.

But, of course, anger is probably not the emotion marketers are likely to want to evoke to make content go viral.

So what’s a marketer to do?

Luckily, the Wharton study, which looked at which articles from the New York Times were most likely to be passed along, and then tested these findings with experiments of their own, found that other factors also caused articles to go viral. Some of these are more likely to prove useful to marketers, including:

• Information that invokes awe—invoking a strong, positive emotion can both make something go viral and reflect positively on your product.
• Informative articles that are useful—this validates many arguments that content marketers make about the need to provide informative content.
• Surprising articles—marketers can easily capitalize on this finding if they can find an angle for their content that’s unexpected.
• Placement of the article—while in the New York Times, this refers to an article that appears on the front page or one that’s the lead article in its section. For a marketer, this could refer to high profile placement on a popular content aggregation site, blog or online magazine, or even on their own website.
• Longer articles—the authors of the Wharton study assumed that longer articles are more viral because they contain more useful information. This is in interesting finding and appears to contradict the belief among many marketers that people are looking for shorter content.  
• Articles by more famous authors.
• Articles written by women.

Overall, content that evokes strong positive emotions, as well as anger and anxiety are most likely prompt people to pass along content virally. However, you can also provoke virality by creating content that’s useful or surprising and making sure to place it prominently.

What have been the characteristics of your most viral content?

What to Put Into—and Leave Out Of—a White Paper

In my last post, I talked about why it takes so long to write a white paper. Specifically, I discussed the need to provide context in order to get readers interested in the white paper. In this post, I’ll talk about what you need to put on the page in order to make all this research and context compelling to a reader.

I’ll start with a story. I just finished editing a white paper about the future of business application software over the next decade. The author was an industry expert. The paper contained tons of industry background (in other words, lots of the great context I described in my last post). Every section included a wealth of background references. And yet, as I read through the draft, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the paper was trying to say. While interviews with the author indicated that he had clearly thought about what he was writing and why he was writing it, none of that knowledge made it onto the page.

(Note: I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper or author. I see this problem repeatedly when editing papers written by content experts who are not professional writers.)

This takes us to the second time-consuming aspect of writing white papers. You need to be able to assemble that contextual information in a way that makes sense for the reader and compels them to read further. Here’s what it takes to make sure your paper incorporates the context in a manner that does this:

1. Tell a coherent story. You can’t just include blobs of content. People want to read a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Usually for thought-leadership papers that educate potential customers at the awareness phase of the sales cycle, the story will need to include the following:

• A beginning that describes a problem that our fearless reader needs to solve. In a white paper, this is usually a business condition that the customer must overcome if he or she is to succeed in meeting business goals. For example, the business challenge might be an uncertain economy that is leading the CFO to clamp down on IT budgets.  
• The middle will often describe obstacles in the way of our fearless reader solving that problem. For example, say your paper is on tape-backup consolidation. Here’s where you can talk about why current tape-backup systems contribute to inefficiency in the business.
• The end is where the reader is introduced to a solution to their problem. Here’s where you talk about all the ways tape-backup consolidation improves efficiency. 

2. Tell the reader why you’ve included each section of the paper. Not only must the paper attempt to tell a story, it must make the different parts of the story obvious. You need to include an executive summary telling readers up front what the paper will be about (so they can decide whether or not they want to read it). You need to come out and introduce each section. As I draft the rough versions of my papers, I often use subheads that state the purpose of each section—problem, obstacles, solution, benefits etc.—so I keep them clear in my own mind as I’m writing. Only when the draft is 95% complete do I change the subheads to more clearly represent the actual content of the paper. I might change a section called “The Challenge” to one called, “The Need to Improve Efficiency.” (I may employ more elegant phrasing but you get the idea).

3. Eliminate anything that does not contribute to the story. One risk of doing a lot of research is that while you’ll gather a great deal of information that’s important as background, but that won’t necessarily apply to the topic at hand. When you go to write the paper, however, you need to be ruthless about cutting anything out that doesn’t directly contribute to your story or the reader will get confused. For example, in my white paper-editing example, a key topic was the future of business intelligence. Yet, in many places, the paper wandered into a discussion of the Internet. While it’s fine in this context to talk about how the proliferation of Internet use will impact business intelligence, I cut out all references to how the Internet impacts telephony.

To summarize, the reason white papers can be time consuming to write is that you must do your homework to get the context necessary to explain the issues thoroughly and then you need to craft a single, coherent story that includes only relevant information.

How do you structure your white papers?