The 6 People Your Content Needs to Convince

When marketing a product such as a new perfume to an individual buyer, you generally need to persuade only one person to buy – or two, depending on how your prospect’s spouse feels about gardenias. In B2B marketing, by contrast, you have a constellation of important decision-makers to impress. While it’s important to speak to everyone in your audience with your content, these six influential people are the ones who will ultimately make the choices. Impress them, and you’re well on your way to a good relationship with a new customer.

Research Assistants

They may be in the middle of an organizational hierarchy, but the researchers who get the order from higher-ups to comparison-shop or gather information about your product line are often the first to see your website. They rely on search engines for their initial foray into their fact-finding expedition, and if your content team has done its work, your site will be on the first page of Google results. That first page is where 80 percent of search engine users stop; give researchers what they need on the first page, and they won’t need to dig deeper. Give them white papers, case studies and infographics they can take back to their supervisors to win them.

R&D Supervisors

Researchers report to someone, and often, it’s the person in charge of new ideas, especially in tech sectors. People who succeed in research and development are typically analytical, linear and fact-oriented in their decision-making process. If you want your products to become a part of their number-crunching decisions, give them enough raw material to chew. Present factual data, spec sheets and statistics to help them choose you. If your company offers services or products that are harder to quantify, focus on straightforward content with a minimum of sales copy.

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The Five F’s of Developing a Great Blog

Having a blog and knowing what to do with it are two different things, as any cursory look around the Internet can attest. Neglected blogs that have a few paltry posts before disappearing, pages containing nothing but one-sentence entries and posts rife with spelling errors are common. Others exist solely to push a product line instead of engaging with readers. There’s no single recipe for the perfect blog for every industry, but these “five F’s” are a good place to start building better content.

Frequent

Updating your blog frequently is one of the simplest and best ways to improve it. Search engines and human readers alike crave novelty, and frequent blog posts keep them coming back to see what you say next. Because Google pays attention to how often a page updates, regular posts help push you to the top of the heap. Once you’re in the spotlight, other bloggers may link to your site or invite you to write a guest blog post, widening your circle of influence and establishing you firmly on search engine front pages.

It’s no coincidence that some of the busiest blogs are also the most frequently updated – often multiple times daily. Niche and industry blogs don’t need to be updated quite that frequently, but posting no less than once a week is a good plan. When your content team is starting your new blog from scratch, publishing two to four times a week to build up a library and establish a following is an even better idea.

Fresh

It isn’t enough to post often; you also have to have something original to say. Posting the same information multiple times doesn’t earn you Google juice and could even cost you if it’s mistaken for duplicate content. This is why it’s vital for your content creation manager or professional blogger to produce original material with every post. “Original,” in this case, means custom-written content, not necessarily revolutionary ideas or Pulitzer-worthy journalism. Blogs are great for pieces under 1,000 words, but if you have an idea you want your writing team to polish to lapidary brilliance, make it a white paper or feature article.

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Are There Magic Words in Content Marketing?

From the Harry Potter films to the movie version of “The Hobbit,” magical realms are big in Hollywood right now. Harry and Gandalf could change reality with a wave of a wand or staff and a few magic words, but content creation teams don’t have that luxury. As much as the marketing industry would like to have a list of words that guarantee high open rates, click-throughs and conversions, they don’t exist. While no “open sesame” will make readers reach for their wallets, some words have a little more magic in them than others.

“Free”

One of the oldest marketing words is still one of the most potent. People love getting something free, and studies such as this one from the University of Miami have proven repeatedly that the word is a major motivator for conscious buying decisions. Interestingly, surprise free gifts – those offered without being advertised – were good emotional motivators, but with content marketing, you may not get the chance to sweeten the deal before your prospective customer has bounced away to another site. If you have a gift for visitors to your blog or social media channel, tell them up front; they’ll appreciate it.

“You”

In content marketing, “you” is one of the most powerful words you can use. Businesses that spend all their time and effort talking about their features are missing the point; their customers also want to know about the benefits they provide. “What’s in it for me?” is the tacit question every reader presented with an offer asks, and that includes your content marketing audience. Why should a visitor pause long enough to read your blog post or find out more about your new product line? One way to make that clear is by addressing readers directly and specifically. “You” also creates a connection between the reader and the writer; you aren’t just a face in the crowd but an individual who’s being addressed directly. Once you start looking for it, you’ll notice how much online content is written in the second person – including this blog post.

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Publishing to Impress: the Six People Your B2B Message Needs to Reach

Business-to-business marketing has its own set of rules. Typically, just one person decides on the purchase of a pair of shoes, and only a few make buying decisions on the family car, but corporate purchases can involve dozens of decision-makers and multiple steps. Entire teams discuss whether they’re going to go with you or one of your competitors, so it’s vital to make an impact on everyone involved in the process.

Content can be powerfully influential well before your prospective B2B customer has reached out to you. Whether it’s a review of your latest product line, a blog post linked by a colleague or an article unearthed via a Google search, your prospects already know plenty about you by the time they pick up a phone or send an email. Knowing how to connect with key influencers with your content is pivotal to closing the deal.

Researchers – the First Wave

In the earliest stages of decision-making, team leaders may assign research duties to lower-level employees to see what’s available. These initial window-shoppers aren’t experts in the field yet, and they may be fairly unfamiliar with the products or services you offer. They’re looking for something valuable enough to bring back to their supervisors yet easy enough to understand at a glance. Accessible information is a strong selling point for this first wave of browsers; they’re still searching broadly rather than in depth. Give them a clear, well-designed site that offers a white paper or useful article to show to the higher-ups, and you’ve done much to win them over.

Users – the Front Line

The people who will use your products and services almost always have a strong vote in purchasing decisions. They’re knowledgeable about their own pain points and the solutions they expect you to provide. Experience and industry knowledge typically matter most to them; they aren’t as concerned with cost as they are with effectiveness at addressing their needs. Give them industry-savvy blog posts, newsletters and webinars to get their stamp of approval.

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What Wine-Tasting Can Tell You about Content Writing

Wine aficionados flock to tastings to discover some rare gem of a vintage or sample the best bottles from a little-known winery, but numerous studies suggest that many aspiring oenophiles have trouble telling white wine from red by taste alone. In his New Yorker article, “Does All Wine Taste the Same,” Jonah Lehrer describes an experiment at the University of Bordeaux – an epicenter of wine knowledge – in which a white wine was served with just enough food coloring to masquerade as a red. The same white wine that was described as crisp and light in its natural state was perceived as “jammy’ and filled with “red fruit” notes when it wore its red disguise. These results aren’t uncommon, either; time and again, experts presented with blind taste tests do little better than chance when ranking a flight of wines from least expensive to costliest.

Here’s where the data gets interesting for SEO content creators and marketing teams: Tasters may miss the mark on expensive versus cheap wines and even red versus white, but they unerringly use a different vocabulary to describe their top and bottom picks. Inexpensive wines, or at least those that tasters believe are inexpensive, get generic descriptions; “light,” “crisp” and “sweet” are terms that crop up frequently. Wines perceived as high-end, by contrast, draw specific and evocative praise that appeals to the senses.

The same wine that got a token “crisp and fruity” description when poured from an inexpensive bottle becomes “as crisp and cool as autumn’s first apples” when a taster believes it’s an exotic and costly vintage. Tasters will expend extra effort to savor a red wine they see as valuable, delving deep into its presumed complexity and pulling out notes of coffee, chocolate or cherries to describe the richness of flavor they detect. They note the wine’s legs, its color and its body – things no one bothers to notice about a merely adequate table wine.

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How to Blog Like a Pro – Or Just Hire One

Setting up a blog is fairly straightforward, but most of those homemade blogs will have few readers. If you host a blog for hobbyists and feature posts on your model train collection or your pet hamsters, that’s probably fine. You’re doing it for the love of sharing information with like-minded people, and your blog will thrive in its niche as long as you maintain it. Business blogging, though, needs a professional look and feel that makes the most of your inbound marketing efforts while engaging readers enough to keep them coming back. Continue reading

Do Content Writers Need to Be Experts?

Experts in a field have a wealth of valuable information to share. An actor who has been in the business for decades can write volumes about creativity and pleasing an audience. The CEO who has built multiple successful businesses has more valuable information to impart than most graduate-level courses. Everyone from metal fabricators to musicians offers specialized knowledge that others are eager to discover. How, then, can a writer outside the field create rich, well-informed content about it and do justice to a specialized website?

In many cases, professional content writers do have a background in specialty fields. They may have worked in an accounting office or medical center in the past and now gravitate to articles about finance or health care. For others, writing is another phase of a career that has already spanned decades. The chef who chooses not to spend hours on the line with knives and fire still has plenty to teach as a food critic, culinary writer or restaurant content creator. Sometimes, writers have an educational background that suits them well for niche fields. Continue reading

Tell, Don’t Sell: Giving Back to Your Customers

The hard sell has its place, but it isn’t on your blog or in your feature articles. Your customers see hundreds of ads in just a few hours on their computers, and if you focus on selling, your message becomes part of the cacophony. Telling, not selling, gives your current and future customers a break from the constant flow of advertising. Ads eventually get tuned out, but information retains its allure.

One reason that “tell, don’t sell” content works especially well in an online context is that your customers already know what they want and are actively seeking the solution to a problem. They most likely found you through a search engine or through word of mouth on social media channels. If they weren’t looking for what you offer, they wouldn’t have Googled you. Because they’re already in the market for your product, you don’t have to give them a push into your virtual storefront; you only need to showcase what you have and let your customers do the rest. Continue reading

‘Content Is King’ vs. the Emperor’s New Clothes

If you’ve spent even five minutes searching for a business content provider, you’ve seen this phrase: “Content is king.” Everyone from article spinners to ESL writers uses it, but if the aphorism is true, not everyone is an equally loyal subject to the monarch. Content means more than filling space with the requisite number of keywords and just enough surrounding text to stitch them together, yet content creators that cling to old SEO rules about keyword counts and simplistic back-linking strategies still hold out their wares like the finest cloth for the emperor’s latest robes. Continue reading

The Bane of Business Jargon

Every profession has its own vocabulary. Physicians are used to mixing Latin terminology with their English, and physicists studying subatomic particles ascribe different meanings to “charm” and “strange.” The business realm is no exception, but some business jargon needlessly alienates or bores its readers. You can’t communicate effectively with your staff or customers if you rely on business content that contains more style than substance. Continue reading

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