The definitive science of creating "EFFECTIVE Marketing Content"

For your business to be successful, you need to manage the relationships that you have with your prospects, customers and stakeholders. While managing these relationships at different levels right from a suspect stage till the contract closure stage, you will need different forms of ‘effective marketing content’.  What is this ‘Effective’ marketing content then?

Content comes in different forms and takes the shape of different marketing artifacts (e.g. Flyers, Brochures, Articles, White papers, Blogs, Website content, email newsletters, Press releases, Case studies, Customer testimonials) at different points in time. For it to be effective, it should meet the objectives and the purpose at different levels in the buying cycle.

Here are some characteristics of great & effective marketing content

1)  Compelling & Engaging

With the initial few paras/words/subject headers/abstract, it should feel compelling to go through the details included. It should engage the attention of the reader and arouse enough curiosity.

2)  Relevant & Fulfilling

Having generated the curiosity, the promised value should be delivered (fulfilled) by the content. This avoids the negative effect of disappointing the reader and also increases the chance of the content being further distributed / recommended amongst peer communities.

3)  Convenient and user friendly

Content should be simple, convenient and in an appropriate format. Content should be designed, specifically for print or for electronic views.  

How do you go about generating such kind of content then?

It takes a lot of efforts and planning, but here are some things you can do: 

1)    Research

a.  Research your target audience, who is going to consume the content

b.  Understand the objectives, that you need to achieve with the content

c.  Research your competitors to understand what they are talking about

d.  Research your target industry to look for any signs of any trends/implications developing and how these are going to be affecting your target audience.

2)   Generate content repositories and filter

a.  Gather all reference content that you feel can be re-used in some way to meet the above objectives.

b.  Do Intelligent Tagging and maintain your content repository well, so that you can get to the content that you want, when you need to.

3)   Write, Refine, Package & Publish

a.  Define your content headers and start populating content. If you keep looking at your repos, you may never be able to start. Focus on your objectives

b.  Refine content in line with the objectives

c.  Package, as appropriate for the format in which it is going to be used. Use Design effectively

d.  Publish content

Let me know your thoughts !

Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686

Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Key ingredients of a good website

It is an all too common comment. Friends, business associates calling/writing to you and telling you that you have a good website, but,, what is a good website?

The definitions are varied and differ by individuals that you ask this question to. Some would say that well designed is well built, some will say that content is king, for some, usability is of utmost importance and of course others will say that it needs to be engaging and should have the glue to keep holding your customers and prospects. For me, defining what you want to achieve from the website would be the first step to solve this puzzle. Aiming too high or too low, both will have its own problems.

For a software product company,here are what i feel, are key ingredients of a good website
1) Engaging content with clear business value for defined categories of target consumers for the defined inward links (or home page)
2) An easy C2A (Call to Action) with minimal commitment. This will ensure that your subscriber lists swells in size and feeds into your opportunities pipe. Examples could be free downloads, free tour, trial version etc.
3) An opportunity to get into the details for the detail oriented persons (these should be sidelinks and the FAB(feature/advantage/benefit) statements should not occupy too much real estate in the premium pages (inward links or home page)
4) An easy understanding of how purchase can be made, and what does it commercially involve. Getting involved with a sales guy for every transaction can put off most visitors
5) High level of sales enablement maturity with detailed documents like data sheets, technical manuals, white papers, tips n tricks and a mature FAQ in place

With all this in, your website is ready as an infrastructure that can engage with your potential clients, the next thing you need to focus on is to drive that traffic into your website.. more later.

All the best. welcome comments and feedback
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting