Relevant and Valued

Content: the missing link between search and action

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott is a Relevant and Valued book for marketers who want to harness the power of their content for tangible sales results.

Meerman Scott positions his book within the growing movement that heralds pull tactics rather than push tactics as the marketing currency of the digital age:

'The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption , Web marketing is about delivering useful content just at the precise moment that a buyer needs it.'

He also argues strongly that the worlds of PR and Marketing have become blurred on the Web and that much of the PR profession is living in a rose-tinted world of traditional media focus, ignorant of the fact that marketers need to be where their customers are and the irresistible power of online marketing to reach individual customers directly and efficiently. 
Key lessons of The New Rules of Marketing and PR include:

• Web marketing is about 'understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using and then deploying micro-campaigns to drive buyers to pages replete with the content they seek'.
• Niche markets can be reached profitably online.  Creating messages that appeal to niche marketers can be achieved through the generation and dissemination of effective content.
• Visitors to your website want to solve problems. You need to understand what these problems are and present content that helps them find the solutions they are seeking.
• 'The media have been disintermediated.'  Write press releases but distribute them online to have maximum impact on your customer base who will find them directly through their search activity, especially when you are selling direct to consumers: exploit the fine line between PR and direct marketing.
• Particpate in the debate!  Astute marketers engage and inform by joining conversations online, without alienating by over-selling. 
• Focus relentlessly on buyers and what they're looking for. Create personas and write for these personas.
• Measure and test everything, use results to refine content and improve its impact.

Meerman Scott is convincing and entertaining. The short chapters allow the reader to dip in and out and quickly gather ammunition to use in practice, key points illustrated by engaging and succinct case studies about real world practioners. This book comes highly recommended.

Above all the message I particularly enjoyed is that great content not only strengthens an organization's brand but calls its readers to action: 'on the Web, smart marketers understand that an effective content strategy, tightly integrated to the buying process, is critical to success.'

Or to put it another way, content is the missing link between search and action.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Killer web content drives value for your business

Great website content drives profitable consumer behaviour at all stages of the customer journey, as discussed in Content marketing tactics and when to use them.  And Gerry McGovern's Killer Web Content is a must-read for marketers serious about delivering this in practice.

The premise of McGovern's simple, effective book is that there is value to be exploited for marketers who understand that 'the Web runs on content' and that it's a small percentage of this content that makes the biggest difference to achieving business goals.  McGovern's mission is to convince us that time spent on developing quality, impactful content is a worthwhile investment. The analogy he uses is that we should treat content on the Web as 'a hidden asset, its gold', not as 'coal - a low-grade, low-cost commodity best published in bulk.'  Put simply: Killer not Filler!

As with most successful how-to marketing books, Killer Web Content is packed with infectious, memorable maxims, practical ideas and lessons that you'll commit to memory and find yourself quoting and applying frequently to day-to-day business challenges. For example:

• Readers scan for carewords, not keywords.  'When we see these words, we click, we act. And that is what the Web is all about: tasks and actions'. Lesson: understand what your readers care about, create your content by focusing on these carewords and reap the benefits.
• 'Focus on how people search, not on how search engines work.' Lesson: Search Engine Marketing can be an expensive mistake unless it is focused purely on the customers' informational needs and understanding how they search.
• On the web, people are 'relentlessly task-focused'. Lesson: relevance and clear calls to action, optimized for what customers are actually looking for will move your business with them forward.
• 'Web marketing is the difference between getting attention and giving attention'.  Lesson: great content marketers don't scream at you from the sidewalk like a Las Vegas hustler - they design content that pulls people (or pushes it out only if it is targeted, anticipated and permission-driven).
• 'More = Filler; Less = Killer'. Lesson: valued content that helps your customers reach their goals is significantly better than a proliferation of me-too website content that gets in their way.
• Testing is essential. Customer behaviour on the web is easily measurable and so, therefore, is the value of your content. Lesson: creating and supporting a test and learn environment will help you achieve a culture of continuous development and help you to enhance value.
• Content is not king! The reader and the customer is and 'your reader needs to stand beside you as you write.'  Ban the word 'users' which is dehumanizing and won't help you put yourself in the customer's shoes. Lesson: content is only  worth sourcing, creating and publishing if it's relevant, valued and acted upon by real people.
• Focus on a single idea.  Lesson: niche and targeted is worth much more than trying to meet everyone's needs but delivering on no-ones.

One of the most important ideas on the book is the process of creating personas: building representations of real customers to help frame your website content marketing strategy. For any given business there may be several customer types that your content needs to appeal to - based on differences in needs, motivations, values, levels of knowledge and expertise or on differences in other parameters.  The principle behind persona-building is to identify and name representative characters that a marketer can keep in mind when developing and publishing content.  Ideally, this should be backed up by market research but a lot of the knowledge required to build personas is already known by customer-facing employees and so can be tapped into cost effectively.

Many financial services websites filter different customer types through a simple self-selection process from the outset on the basic lines of professional and private investor (or variations thereof) - see www.fidelity.co.uk for an example. But even once this initial choice has been made, the content needs to appeal to different types of private investor within the main umbrella category. What level of risk is the customer willing to bear, is he/she building a portfolio or interested in a single product to meet a specific financial goal, is this a long-term or short-term play, how much money does the customer want to invest, what level of background knowledge or sophistication does he/she have? The website needs to cater for all these customers within the same pages in order to faciliate the quickest possible path to the required goal, and in the context of very different frames of reference.

The benefit of building personas to bring these different customers and their needs alive to the marketer is clear.  The result: the development of a content marketing strategy that is focused on real customers, not on internalized preconceptions about what motivates action.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com