What should you do instead?

1. Get creative. Treat each new campaign as if the whole world has changed since the last one (because it has – even if the last one was yesterday).
2. Be aware of your competitors, but don’t imitate them. Be better. Work harder. Add more value (yes, your marketing should deliver value to your prospects).
3. Social media ‘likes’ are a good thing, but they aren’t the point. The point is to nurture prospects with useful and relevant content. Useful and relevant content builds trust. Trust sells.
4. Fancy ad shoots are fun, and sometimes they’re worthwhile… but do a cost/benefit analysis before spending your client’s (or employer’s) money.
5. Partnering with any affiliate who will have you is lazy and risky. Be selective. Have a good reason for linking your product/service/brand with another company’s, and research them for potential liabilities.
6. Don’t spam. Just don’t.
7. Everybody enjoys a pat on  the back, but awards should be a byproduct of your efforts… not their objective.

Do you have a reaction to Tom’s cartoon you’d like to share?

‘Pretty good’ isn’t good enough. The only way to have your marketing messages ingested and digested is by baking them into exceptional content – what I call ‘Gourmet Content’. People find Gourmet Content because they seek it out. They consume Gourmet Content because they WANT to. It’s extraordinarily good.

Gourmet Content

A gourmet is a person with a discriminating palate and a deep knowledge of fine food. Gourmet Content is information that isn’t designed for mass consumption. It’s researched and developed with a specific audience in mind – an audience that has been carefully targeted and finely detailed. The developer of Gourmet Content knows what his audience is interested in… what fascinates and delights them.

The word ‘gourmet’ can also be used to describe meals that have been prepared with inordinate effort and art. Gourmet Content must be made from the freshest ingredients (text, animation, audio, charts, infographics, video, or other elements). It isn’t quickly thrown together and shoved through a ‘To Go’ pickup window. It is thoughtfully formulated, comprised of congruent ingredients that support a coherent message. It’s allowed to marinade overnight so the flavors mature and ripen.

Presentation is key. Where the content is placed, how it’s contextualized, the tools used to develop and display it – all must be carefully selected and expertly manipulated.

Your target prospects are much more likely to consume your marketing messages if those messages have been prepared and presented to gourmet standards. If you’re a B2B IT company, contact me to learn more.

I know there are marketers out there who will disagree with my basic quality vs. quantity premise. Please comment. Let’s have a lively, yet civilized, debate.

I think the Content Chasm is actually comprised of several types of gaps, each needing specific strategies and actions for resolution.

The Capacity Chasm

At its most basic, there’s a lack of enough fresh, quality content. In order to generate leads and nurture them properly, new (or repurposed or curated) content must be continuously developed to attract and retain prospects’ attention.

The Customization Chasm

What’s useful and relevant (and, therefore, likely to be consumed) by one person, may be irrelevant and useless to the next. So content must be customized to the target audience (or personas).

In B2B, this means that different versions of content must be developed for consumers who have different business roles and titles. For example, a CFO and a VP of Sales each have different questions that need to be answered, and objections that need to be overcome, so the content you deliver should speak to them individually.

Also, someone making or influencing a buying decision for a complex, high-ticket B2B product or service will need different information throughout the different phases of their buying cycle. At the beginning of the cycle, they may be interested in company reputation and basic product functionality. As they get ready to make their buying decision, they might be more interested in integration issues and contract terms.

It’s helpful to develop a message map to identify what information each persona needs based on what stage of the buying cycle they’re in.

The Consumption Chasm

As your prospects’ content habits evolve, you need to keep pace with how they want to consume your content. It’s typically the case that as new media formats become commonplace, traditional media and formats remain. Even as we add new media such as video podcasts, and high-tech devices such as tablets, people still read books and listen to the radio. New media doesn’t replace old media – it extends the available options.

So what’s a marketer to do? Obviously you can’t (and shouldn’t) reformat every piece of content to fit every type of media and device; but you can make informed choices by studying your message maps and considering which formats best fit a specific piece of content. For example, video works well for telling success stories, while technical specs aimed at engineers might work best via text-based media.

The major trend, however, is toward multimedia. People prefer a more immersive experience. And, as marketers, we can communicate more information more quickly through our targets’ eyes and ears. Fat fiber optic pipes capable of transporting torrents of digitized audio, images, video, etc., are becoming the norm. And our devices are becoming more proficient at processing and displaying sights and sounds. Delivery concerns that once surrounded multimedia are fading away.

Busy executives (personas who most likely have the authority to make a buy decision) expect to be educated about complex products and services online. They no longer have the time or patience to read a 12-page white paper. So choosing to deliver multimedia experiences can help you package your information and marketing messages for quick, convenient consumption. We need to augment our tightly written copy with infographics, charts, bulleted lists, pull quotes, Johnson boxes, frequent subheads, voice over narration, etc. to communicate our messages, including value propositions and product benefits, succinctly. Make it fun for that busy executive to consume your content, and you’re well on your way to a sale.

Context, Content, Conversation

I think we’re going to be hearing much more about the Content Chasm over the next several months. Meanwhile, review your marketing content development and delivery processes by answering the following questions:

• Do you have resources in place to develop a steady stream of fresh, relevant and useful content?
• Are you creating, repurposing and curating content customized for the different personas who influence your buy decision, and for the different stages of your buy cycle?
• Are you researching, testing and developing multimedia capabilities so that you can deliver persuasive content in a format that your prospects prefer?

How about you? What kind of Content Chasms are you experiencing? And how are you meeting the challenges?

This is adapted from an original post I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute.

Bob: Scott, many business people don’t really understand all the three letter acronyms that seem to proliferate around you. How about we start with your definitions?

Scott: OK. Let’s start with the more common ones. Most people these days know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are. SEO is the development and structuring of website content in such a way that it earns high search engine rankings for chosen keywords (or search terms). SEM is similar except that you pay for text ads to be placed in search results for your chosen keywords. It’s also called Pay Per Click (PPC) because you pay when searchers click on your ad and visit your site. SEO and SEM are about getting prospects to your website or landing page.

But what do you do with your visitors once they’re on your site? You want them to Convert. This has nothing to do with religion, Bob. Conversions often mean sales. You want to convert lookers into buyers. In our case, though, a conversion can be a number of things, but usually not a sale.

That’s due to the nature of the products and services our clients sell. acSellerant works exclusively with B2B vendors, so a typical sale might cost $300,000. Not exactly an impulse buy.

That’s right. So a conversion might be registering with their name and email address to receive a case study, or to attend a webinar. To get back to the three letter acronyms, the next one would be CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). This is where the rubber meets the road and where we can really make a significant impact on our clients’ revenue. Through various means – changing the wording of headlines, changing the graphic on a page, changing the offer (what we give them for registering), we can tweak a web page to constantly increase the number of conversions. These conversions represent a step further along the buy cycle, a step closer to a sale.

So that introduces the concepts of analytics and testing.

Yes. We have to know what visitors are doing so we can interpret their behavior and draw conclusions. I set up Google Analytics. The software is free and very comprehensive. It captures and reports mountains of data. So we need to determine which data points are relevant to conversions, and separate those out from all the noise. Then we test by changing the different components and seeing how those changes affect conversions. This really is the holy grail for marketing. It used to be extremely expensive and time consuming to test different elements to maximize response. Today, online, it’s very economical and the ROI can be enormous.

Yes. David Ogilvy would jump for joy. When he ran tests in the 60s and 70s, they had to shoot different versions of commercials, and actually buy air time and run them, to see what worked and what didn’t. Millions in today’s dollars and we can do the same thing for one tenth of one percent of the cost. Of course, we’re not working with Procter and Gamble budgets either.

It’s not only the cost that’s so much less. The time needed to make changes and test them is also greatly reduced.

OK. We have time for one more acronym. How about CMS?

That stands for Content Management System. We use the industry leader, WordPress. It was originally designed as a blog platform, but it’s evolved well past that. We build websites with it, and it solves a major issue for our clients. It used to be that whenever a site owner wanted to change the content on their site, they had to hire a programmer to make the change for them. WordPress and other CMSs give users a Word-like interface so they can build web content without the help of a programmer.

Not only does that save time and money, but Google LOVES fresh, relevant content. Google rewards, with high search rankings, websites that consistently add fresh and relevant content. And that brings us back full circle to SEO.

Before we go, Scott, how about you share some SEO, SEM, or CRO tips with our readers?

OK. I’ll give one tip for each acronym:

• SEO:  All signs are that Social Media is playing a much larger role in search engine rankings… remember, Google rewards relevance, and a great way to beat the scammers and gamers is to make sure real people actually value your content.  So… get in the Social Media game with a smart strategy.

• SEM:  You don’t have to outbid the highest bidder with your PPC ads – ranking at #2 through #6 for key terms specific to your niche will get you similar results as a #1 ranking. Be specific, using three word key terms. Always keep testing different ad copy and headline versions.

• CRO:  Foster a culture of testing. Start with well conceived A/B tests and also Visitor Behavior testing (heatmaps, etc.). Adjust your content and your value proposition accordingly. Remember… you’re not optimizing your site, you’re optimizing visitor behavior at your site.

How about you? Are you analyzing your online traffic? What have you learned? What have you changed as a result? Do you optimize for conversions?

Bob: Paul, we’ve talked about how many business people don’t really understand what graphic design is, or what you do. Can you tell us a little about it?

Paul: A lot of people confuse graphic designers with fine artists and illustrators. Although many designers wear these hats as well, a graphic designer is trained primarily in how to communicate persuasive messages visually, not how to draw pretty pictures. An Art Director is a graphic designer who partners with the marketing consultant, creative director and the copywriters. He or she develops concepts regarding how best to tell the story visually either online, or in print, or both. The point is to let the images and graphic design do a good portion of the work.

A professional designer will not only be interested in the content, but will design for optimum readability. There’s been a lot of research on how to optimize readability through typography: fonts, size, leading, weight, bold, italic, colors, etc. It should lead the eyes where you want them to go. People who aren’t trained in typography often overuse effects. They end up with too much on the page or the screen. It’s confusing to the reader. Just because people have the tools to do sophisticated typography effects, doesn’t mean they know how to use them.

We’ve had conversations over the past few years regarding the role of graphic design in B2B marketing. So much has changed… how do you see your role evolving?

While marketing strategy and ‘the story’ drive the bus, graphic design has steadily grown as a means to amplify the messaging and tell the story online. B2B marketing requires the communication of complex ideas. Graphic elements, images, layout and design, even the color palette, should work together with the words to ensure the messages are communicated rapidly and accurately, and support the branding. When designing print materials, it’s important to think about how they’ll translate to online applications or vehicles like PDFs, jpegs, email and banner ads, or website content. The reality is that even pieces primarily meant for print will end up being posted online, so the designer needs to take that into account.

There are several forces at work today… prospects are busier than ever; expectations have changed; and the media and technology have evolved. I need help in making my content as palatable as possible… making it enticing enough so people actually read it, or at least skim and scan it online.

True. Even for highly technical B2B products and services, people won’t read a 12 page text-only white paper. Graphic design can be hugely helpful in this… a picture is worth a thousand words, infographics can easily communicate complex information, etc.

Let’s take an email newsletter for example, instead of displaying all the text for the articles, we’ve learned to display shorter snapshots of articles accompanied by graphics. These quickly tell readers what the article is about. If it interests them, they can click through to read the full text. Of course, that means that you have to use your talents to write enticing teasers.

I see your role expanding as we evolve to multimedia production. Can you explain how you help to manage the storyboard, audio, video, etc.?

The look of videos – sharp or soft, bright or murky, colorful or monochromatic; the tone and pace of voice overs; plus other audio effects, background music (if any); all of these affect the whole and play a part in how the information is being communicated. The more congruent all these facets are, the more likely people will accept the messaging. That’s part of the art of persuasion.

OK, Paul. I think we covered it. Do you have some parting graphic design tips for our readers? Some rules of thumb that you like to keep in mind?

Sure. I’d start with looking good is only half the battle. If the graphics don’t support the message, no amount of cool design or eye-catching images are going to increase your revenues.

Second, less is more. In an age where we are bombarded with information, it’s a good idea to leave some white space. Don’t crowd copy and design in. It’s overwhelming to people and they’ll click away.

And, finally, honor your brand identity. Hold true to the look you’ve developed to represent your business. Over time, it makes an impression on your target prospects… giving a tacit stamp of approval.

How about you? How do you view the role of graphic design in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace?