Like Dr. Seuss Says: The Shorter, The Better

The writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
― Dr. Seuss 

I’ve written a lot about blah blah text, marketing buzzwords and the fact that in business-to-business communications, less is truly more. 

And here I go again!

Concise text makes it easier for readers (prospects) to comprehend meaning, since most folks scan marketing-related content and rarely read every word.

Especially on a website, web visitors are impatient and don’t wade through overly promotional text.

The following is a fictionalized example of website copy which might be rewritten for  a client project.  This example might seem over the top, but it is a common scenario.  While the actual wording has been changed to protect the innocent, the essence of the rewrite is authentic.

Each version shares the same message – but one version is nearly 100 words longer. Is shorter better?  You decide.

ORIGINAL "About XYZCleaners" – 132 words:

Since 1998, XYZCleaners has provided comprehensive custodial services to help the area’s leading financial institutions, retail stores and education institutions access high quality custodial care.  With a unique perspective on custodial services,  XYZCleaners was a pioneer in bringing improved custodial services to their regional market.  Meeting the rising demand of companies looking for new and better ways to serve their customers, XYZCleaner’s vision and commitment to customer service and custodial innovation have helped the company become an industry leader in custodial care. Today, with over 120 employees, XYZCleaners provides the largest selection of services of any custodial service provider in the area. Our team of highly trained custodians and cleaning professionals are proud to offer a diverse set of janitorial services and customized programs for all building, retail and office cleaning needs.

Revised "About XYZCleaners" – 38 words:

XYZCleaners provides the largest selection of quality custodial services in the XYZ City area. For over a decade, leading financial institutions, retail stores and education institutions turn to XYZCleaners for customized services delivered by highly trained cleaning professionals.

The B2B Summit Recap Part I: It All Starts with a Unique Value Proposition

It’s been a few weeks since I returned from the MarketingSherpa BtoB Summit in Boston. 

What a worthwhile event – a great way to be in the company of experts from MECLabs, Marketing Sherpa, MarketingExperiments and of course all the interesting and marketing-focused attendees, many facing similar b-to-b marketing challenges.  I left charged up and equipped with actionable ideas to put into place at a variety of clients.

The Kick Off

One of the more interesting presentations was from MECLab’s leader Dr. Flint McLaughlin who kicked off the two-day event with a fundamental, central question… in business to business marketing, has the team taken the time to develop the company’s value proposition?

How telling that before the conference even delved into specific tactics such as social media marketing, web optimization, email marketing, campaign management, content management or other programs, the kick-off presentation focused on the issue of finding a compelling value proposition.

Here’s how Dr. Flint put it to those gathered that morning:  “As a marketer, if your value proposition isn’t rolling off your lips, you already have a problem.”  

WIIFM?

This reflects back on the old “What’s In It For Me” perspective I’ve written about many times here in this blog.  As Dr. Flint noted, the overarching question is:

If I am the “Ideal customer” why should I purchase XXX product/service rather than a product from your competitors?”

The question involves a deep dive into a company’s “ideal customer profile” and a customer-mindset. It involves taking a close look at the competition, and importantly, how messages are created, to see if they answer the most compelling force inherent in a product/service, a unique appeal to each segment.

There must be a compelling value communicated in each piece of content (web, email campaign, postcard, etc) and a way to differentiate a product/service from the competitor.

Don’t Start with a Logo

This approach takes work.  And frankly, sometimes it isn’t fun.  It can be easier to get caught up in tactical pursuits when kicking off a marketing program, like designing a new logo, brochure or website.

Dr. Flint provides us with a great reminder. It isn’t enough to be a tactical expert. It isn’t enough to focus on a new brochure, the number of form fields in a landing page, or the length of a direct email subject line.

It all begins with a customer mindset, and what would bring true value to that customer.  Then, using various tactics and messaging, finding a way to identify what motivates the ideal customer to make a purchase choice over all those other options out there.

Learn More

Fortunately, the team at MarketingExperiments has made this content available to those willing to take the time to review.  

Check out their resource for more wisdom from these great marketing thought leaders at MECLabs, MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments.

Next time, a review of Kristin Zhivago’s day two kick off: cultivating a customer mindset, and her book Roadmap to Revenue:  How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.

5 Reasons to Consider the One-Sentence Press Release

I stumbled upon an intriguing online news distribution tool recently called

http://muckrack.com/   It is a curated news aggregator that organizes Twitter content for journalists and other visitors. 

The site offers the ability to post a “one sentence press release” here http://muckrack.com/press_releases/submit

For PR pros working on behalf of b-to-b clients, this looks like an interesting service to try.

The site also forces one to examine the worthiness of the “One Sentence Press Release” which is more than a headline.   

Telling an entire press release story in one sentence? Really? Is such a strategy a good one to pursue?

After mulling it over, offered here are five reasons to consider the One-Sentence Press Release.

1) Forces Brevity:  A one-line release serves as a headline and body all in one. Interested readers quickly scan this content in search results, Google News, Tweet streams, Facebook, news aggregator sites like infinigraph.com, RSS feeds, etc.  The one-liner must tell a story all by itself.  Yes, provide more information in the longer, more traditional press release copy, but most folks will only make time to scan the one-liner.

2) Facilitates Sharing: A well-constructed one-line press release is effective when shared by others. When written with keywords, those within the client’s niche are better able to find and share news around social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and post about it on relevant blogs.

3) Makes it User-Centric: A well-crafted one-line press release should answer the age-old question  “what’s in it for me?”   Stressing the reader’s benefit contributes to the likelihood the one-liner will be shared among an end-user target audience.  Remember to bring the user benefit front and center.

As an example, here’s a business-to-business one-line press release that addresses the “What’s in it for me” focus:

Last Chance to Register: Learn How to Cut Employee Turnover at Free “Best-Practices in Hiring Seminar” Held at Next Week’s XXX Conference

4) Helps Engage Key Influencers: Trying to reach a certain blogger, reporter or media outlet? These key influencers search for intriguing angles on timely subjects, an interesting point of view, new information and other content of value to their audiences. A one-line release makes it easy for this key group to find relevant content.  Getting the entire story in one line takes the time and effort out of the process for key influencers. As muckrack.com notes, http://muckrack.com/  “Journalists are busy, so they appreciate brevity.”

           

5) Leads with the Lead:  Most communications pros are familiar with the well-worn adage “Don’t Bury The Lead.”   A one-line release stands on its own, stressing the main point of the story.  Readers statistically only read beyond the lead about twenty percent of the time.  It makes sense to make the effort to communicate the main point (lead) concisely. 

Intrigued?  Horrified?  Is this the “slippery slope” as all business communications boil down to 140 characters?  What do you think?  

Visit www.muckracker.com to see the one-sentence press release in action. 

5 Lessons Learned from Blogging

The more I read about social media marketing from those many pundits out there, the more I see the following types of content:

• blog posts that cover blogging
• tweets that talk about using twitter
• blog posts that share tips for using twitter
• tweets with pointers about blogging

Goodness knows this B-to-B blog you are reading right now takes this well-worn approach with several recent posts about managing Twitter for business-to-business marketing.   It’s clear to see that Twitter has captured my attention over the last year, in fact I’ve several more Twitter related posts in the hopper.

And in much the same spirit, let’s turn our attention to blogging.

Yes it’s a blog post that covers blogging!

Through work with my own blog, and client work for other corporate blogs, presented here are….

 5 Lessons Learned from Blogging

Lesson 1: It Pays to Be Consistent

The beast needs to be fed.  That means starting a blog is the easy part, keeping current by creating updated posts is much more difficult.  Case in point:  this blog has the goal of 4 new posts per month.  Take a look on the left side index and you’ll see I’m averaging less than 4 posts per month.  It’s effective to “post when you have something to say” so be sure that the main thrust, focus of the blog sufficiently engages and inspires you to “keep on talking” and posting.

Stuck for ideas?  Those smarty pants at Hubspot give some great pointers on keeping business-related content fresh and “feeding the beast”. (warning, lots of food analogies so best to read on a full stomach)

Lesson 2: Take Time to Engage

No matter what the blog post topic, asking pointed questions, soliciting feedback and engaging readers is powerful.  A recent client project involved inserting an online survey into a blog post, which was an effective way to turn a passive reader into a participator.   There are many great tools out there but Zoomerang is an especially easy and powerful one.

Lesson 3: Consider SEO

Folks write about this topic in much more detail so it’s worth a look at their insight.  For our purposes, be sure to make yourself familiar with SEO best practices like using keywords.  Within a post, be sure to embed links to your website, other blog posts, or other key websites. In the world of b-to-b marketing, a blog is a powerful way to improve search results. Post titles and content should contain the keywords that your customers and prospects search. For instance, this is a blog about marketing, business-to-business marketing communications, and marketing strategy.  Those are words that should be tagged and used as much as possible.  It is worth it to take the time to know which keywords are more relevant to you or your clients.

 SearchEngineLand.com is the premiere source to check for other tips.

 Lesson 4: Remember Nobody Reads

Web users are overloaded with content – and social media posts are getting shorter and shorter.  The Twitter 140 character limit has trained web users to scan, and take short “information snacks” instead of digesting lengthy, complex content.

Keep this in mind when creating blog content.  Chunk out information in easily digestible segments.   Develop information-carrying subheads.   Break out titles into lists, top lessons learned, etc. to make it easy for your blog readers to digest your information.

Lesson 5:  Share  and Share Alike

Blogging is a powerful way to elevate you or your client’s brand, showcase industry leadership, and raise overall visibility of products and services.  Don’t just post, though.  Share!  

Use Twitter to link back to the post.  Showcase the blog post content on the home page of your website.  LinkedIn offers several ways to share links to blog posts by topic, either on your profile or within LinkedIn groups. Add your blog post to directories like technorati for maximum exposure.

What are the lessons you've learned from blogging?

If More is Better, Then Less is More

I recently attended a Marketing Roundtable event at Ann Arbor Spark.  The group is a gathering of marketing and online communications professionals that provide useful business information.  

Google Analytics

This particular “Roundtable” focused on using Google Analytics to track web visitors, time on pages, conversion rates (how many of your web visitors take an action like download a paper), and other important metrics that indicate how visitors behave on your website

As you likely know, Google Analytics is a free tool that delivers web traffic reports in the form of easy dashboards, summarizing page views, the most visited pages, trends showing time on site, referring websites, etc.

Does Your Website Work?

The event was a great reminder that in marketing, if the purpose of a website is lead generation, the most important consideration is to keep tabs on how folks behave when they visit your website. 

Google Analytics is an easy way to ask: are you getting web visitors to “do something?”

Q&A

At the conclusion of the event, one of the most interesting questions from the gathered attendees came from colleague Jen Jendo of IPD Solution, who asked the panel a great question about the significance of watching the behavior of web visitors when a business-to-business sales cycle is extremely long (12 – 18 months).

With such a lengthy sales cycle, she asked, how can a website support the sales process?

The presenters made the case that, even with lengthy cycles, a website is a useful marketing tool for prospects in the early stage of discovery.  Complex purchase decisions can be supported with white papers, online demos, case studies and other collateral. 

Make it Easy

The key is to make it easy for the prospect to scan over the resources, select what is of interest, and download.   

Don’t overwhelm visitors with highly technical information that folks won’t even read, since people only spend seconds scanning a website. (very hard to keep this focus with some projects I can yell you!)

Instead, provide summary titles of materials in a Knowledge Center. Make the content easy to scan and digest.  Let the visitor select the material of interest, to get to the next level of detail.  

Then be sure to follow up with a call or other outreach to move those folks to the next stage of the buying cycle.

In this way a business to business website supports the decision making for those early in the cycle, and moves them along in complex decision making.

Less is More

What hit a nerve with me was when one of the panelists made the case  “if more is better, then less is more” – don’t overwhelm with information on a b-to-b website.  

Marketers need to choose carefully how much content the website delivers, then be sure to follow up with those visitors who have taken the time to request additional levels of detail.

It’s tempting to slap a bunch of content on a website, especially in-depth details about complicated business software solutions for instance.  

Research and analytics prove otherwise.  

The best way to help your prospect is to present digestible bites of information that lead to more complete content. 

Five New Year’s Resolutions for B-to-B Marketers

B-2-B marketers are a busy group of folks.  For many marketing departments, the to-do list seems never-ending. There’s always another marketing campaign to generate; tradeshow to plan and attend; eNewsletter to write and distribute; prospect database to build; Adword campaign to launch; and so on.

Before this first month of 2011 ends, it might be useful to commit to a set of resolutions as a way to give focus to efforts.  This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, just a way to place priorities.  Hope it is helpful as we start the New Year of business-to-business marketing. 

1) Test your marketing programs, when you can.  If you have a CRM solution, split direct email marketing messages into A/B groups and test one element at a time.  Test the placement of a download button; test a subject line for the best open rates; test design elements like photos; test headlines.  Use Google Optimizer tools to A/B test two pages of a website. See which message or page gets the largest open rate or conversion rate.  This approach is truly liberating and focuses effort on the optimized, best performing elements.

2) Ask somebody else outside of the organization to review your content.  This is a favorite subject, as my colleagues likely know.  Did you just write a web page, brochure or eNewsletter?  Let somebody outside the organization, who is in the same general industry, read the content and see if resonates or hits the mark.  Getting feedback from folks outside the organization is a low-cost, high impact strategy for improved marketing communications.

3) Make campaigns as relevant and timely as possible.  Here’s a resolution to put into place as much as possible.  Just yesterday President Obama signed a new food safety bill into law, and a Markit Strategies client sent a notice reminding our team of the news.  We quickly sent out a direct marketing message to food industry folks in the prospect database addressing how the client’s products help meet the new mandates.  The message was emailed that same afternoon (subject line: Food Safety Bill Signed Today. Now What?)   The timely nature of the subject line and content helped garner a nearly 8% open rate (that’s pretty good!) and very high conversions responding to the offer, plus a few direct calls right into the sales team.  The timely nature of the message was a big part of the success.  Let’s do that again!

4) Make measurements meaningful.  Measuring success in b-to-b marketing is critical, as long as you choose the most meaningful metric. In the case above, two measurements helped us gauge success: open rates -- the number of emails opened by recipients of the email; and conversion rates --- the percentage of email recipients who visited the website or downloaded a form by clicking on a link in the email.  Likewise, when measuring social media engagement on Twitter don’t concentrate on number of followers, but analyze the type of followers (do they fit a certain profile?), along with their level of engagement in terms of mentions or retweets.  Measuring engagement is pretty significant in terms of social media programs.

5) Keep learning! Try something new!  That means attending webinars, participating with professional groups like IABC Detroit, or attending conferences such as Usability Week conferences by Norman Nielsen Group to keep skills fresh.  Resolve to keep abreast of current thought about social media marketing, SEO and online marketing. Learn a new skill?  Try it out to see if it garners results.

Happy New Year, all! 

Meaningless Words and Blah Blah Text: Three Buzzwords to Avoid

“”When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’” L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

As another year comes to a close, folks are taking stock of the year in buzzwords – especially pertaining to business-to-business marketing communications.

It can be fun reading posts about “PR Buzzwords” or “Overused Words in LinkedIn profiles” – but it can be painful, too. 

As a marketing communicator, I’ve written a fair share of content with words like  “Value Add,” Award-Winning,” “Industry-Leading,” “Mission Critical” and “Thought Leader.”

Beware the Blah Blah

Granted, these are useful concepts in PR or marketing communications.

Yet terms like these and others quickly become meaningless and instead of adding “more” they start to mean “less” as so aptly put by Humpty Dumpty in the quote above.

In fact, they become “blah blah” text, and are best deleted.

The Long and Short of It

Mark Twain once said about an essay or a letter he had written, “I am sorry this is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter.”

It takes time to write concise and compelling text.  One must first capture the essence of the idea, write an initial draft, go back and reorganize, then return a third or fourth time to “slash and burn” meaningless blah blah that adds no value. 

Top 3 Offenders of 2010
In the spirit of “slash and burn,” here are my suggestions for the top 3 offending blah blah terms of 2010.

• Transformative – This isn’t a word.  Using the word in a proposal or marketing blurb does not make it so. Exactly what does "transformative" mean anyway?  This is a major blah-blah word. Best avoided 
• Deep Dive – I hate hearing this term in a meeting when it means, “to explore an issue or subject in-depth. "We should meet to do a deep dive on this issue." What’s the converse – a “shallow dive”? 
• Going Forward – This is “filler” and of no value.  It means “looking to the future” and can be deleted anytime you see or hear it, as in the following sentence:  "Going forward, we anticipate earnings improving in core industries, with even better results in the expanding diversified markets."   Simply remove “Going forward…” and the meaning of the sentence is not impacted.

Additional Resources

As for additional reading, here’s a suggestion for going forward. Visit these transformative websites to take a further “deep dive” into the subject:

BuzzWhack - demystifying business jargon & buzzwords - check out the funny warning on the home page! 

The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary - the most complete A-Z "blah blah" resource there is! 

Happy Buzzword-Free New Year!