Inbound Marketing

How to Solve Your Customer's Problems and Make Money Doing It

Emma Ruehl — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 19:51:54 +0000

How to Solve Your Customer's Problems and Make Money Doing It

Emma Ruehl Mon, 07/31/2017 - 2:51pm

You’ve invested the time and effort to craft a solid sales message and marketing campaign. The offer is great, the price is right, and people should be flocking in your doors and email inboxes to purchase. You’ve even paid a company to help get your website to rank in the top five of Google’s search results page, and your site’s traffic has soared as a result. But somehow, the sales aren’t rolling in.

Turns out, ranking #1 in Google doesn’t directly get you sales. Helping people does.

Back to the Drawing Board

At the heart of every potential sale is a person with a problem. Is your business the right solution to the problem? Does your prospect feel understood, cared for, and compelled to partner with you to work towards a solution? Before you sell, it’s imperative that you understand the person and the problem. Otherwise, you’re marketing blindly. Here’s where to start.

1. Stop Trying to Think For Your Customer

Instead of developing products and messaging around inferences and feelings, ask the consumer directly. Start with a simple survey asking about their pain points (there are a ton of great chat bots and survey tools out there right now), interview people as they use your site to uncover frustrations, and read through your reviews and testimonials.

Photo via Olark.

Uncover why your prospect went looking for a solution and other approaches they’ve tried. Why have your customers chosen you? What almost stopped them from choosing you? Before you prescribe the solution, flush out the problem, and observe it from multiple angles. It’s your goal, as the Master of the Solution, to better understand the problem than your prospects and customers.

2. Build Content that Resonates with Solution-Seekers

Your prospects and customers don’t want content shoved down their throat. They want to encounter messaging that speaks to them and their problems. Have a conversation that brings them to the conclusion that you are the right fit and worth their dollars.

Screenshot via Hubspot

Much of the best content comes directly from the mouths of your customers, which is another reason why surveys and interviews are critical. There is no better way to help someone feel understood than to translate their very own thoughts and feelings into helpful messaging. Did a prospect express frustration around cost? Include messaging about value, or offer a free trial. Even better: when you know their pain points, include a list of features that directly addresses those pain points.

3. Rid Design of Disruption and Trend

So many brands are latched on the heels of the latest design trends. Heard of parallax? Ghost buttons? Hero rotator images? Perhaps you’re not familiar with the terminology, but no doubt you and your competitors have toyed with one or all of these design trends.

Look familiar? Screenshot via ABC.

It’s rare that businesses choose design elements based on actual research; typically, design is dictated by a template you purchased, or someone on your sales team saw an effect on a competitor’s site and thought it would be “cool” to implement on yours. If everyone else is doing it, you should be too, right?

The problem with trend is that it’s often broken from its original context and applied to a million different projects, despite relevance and suitability. When design dictates development and content, you end up with a pretty portfolio site that is irrelevant to your target audience. And all your money goes to making a piece of art that no one buys.

The best design adds to, and doesn’t detract from, user experience. It’s a supporting player that should be the last thing people notice. It should help logically guide users through your site architecture, keeping interest up and building trust in your brand.

Easy to digest and navigate site via Ted.

At the end of the day, your content is the star of the show. It is what resonates with your customers at their core, communicating that you can solve their problem and solidifying the connection that supports a lasting, mutually-beneficial relationship.

4. Invest In an SEO Strategy that Seeks to First Answer a Query

At the heart of SEO is simply being the best answer to a particular query; it’s inherently about solving problems. No doubt, you’ve searched yourself for product or service pricing, clicked on one of the top search results that you expected to contain pricing information, and much to your disappointment found no pricing but a barrage of CTA popups and contact forms.

Screenshot via Google

What happens when people don’t find what they’re looking for? They’ll exit your site. They’ll delete your email. They’ll go somewhere else because there will always be someone else who is actually solving their problem.

Be a smart marketer and lead your team to new thinking. If your business has been stuck in a rut of one-sided communication and has no idea what your customers and prospects actually want, be the voice for them. Seek to understand pain points and solve the problem; don’t add to a million other voices trying to tell consumers what they want. If you put in the effort to understand your prospects, they will reward you.

Right-Sizing Your Marketing Infrastructure

Mark Figart — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:42:45 +0000

Right-Sizing Your Marketing Infrastructure

Mark Figart Thu, 06/29/2017 - 1:42pm

Go big or go home. (- ubiquitous)

I first heard the quote above in 2001. It was a company mantra introduced by a new CEO who had been brought in to save our ailing company, one of the many beneficiaries, and subsequent victims, of the dot-com bubble. Four months later the firm shut its doors. We went home.

If the major marketing automation software companies had their way, you’d be convinced that until you invest in a robust and comprehensive automation platform—until you "go big"—your firm isn’t serious about B2B marketing. But investing heavily in any infrastructure to automate processes that do not demand such automation can be putting the cart before the horse. And so it goes with the entire ecosystem of marketing infrastructure—from content management systems (CMS) to social media management and monitoring solutions to analytics packages.

Companies like HubSpot—an indisputable heaver hitter in the world of marketing automation software—have done an incredible job of educating the masses on the potential benefits of inbound marketing. But there's an indisputable, albeit understandable, bias in the propaganda of just about every software maker out there that their tools are your starting point for success.

The Often Overstated Value of “Big”

I can tell you from experience that technology is not alone a solution for less-than-stellar marketing results. What's more, shiny tools can even distract marketers from high-value activities like content development.

Can marketing automation help make a good program more effective? Yes. Can a CMS upgrade help improve the efficiency and output of a good team? Right again. So don’t get me wrong. Technology can not only, in the right circumstances, increase marketing ROI, it is at times indispensable for company growth.

The problem I often see is that technology—and the market hype cultivated by the tremendous resources that are spent by the companies who sell highly-evolved and full-featured software platforms—lead many to think that it’s somehow fundamental to modern digital marketing. I disagree.

A Review of Marketing Fundamentals

What’s fundamental to effective digital marketing is compelling content. And great content is a product of leadership’s dedication toward leveraging resources inside and outside of the firm to better understand its audience and to creating content that speaks to that audience's needs, consistently, over the long haul.

What’s fundamental is reaching an audience. And reach, in a digital marketing context, is in part a product of thoughtfully planned and executed keyword inclusion and basic SEO best practices.

What’s fundamental is the conversion. And online conversions are a product of well-placed offers, clear and concise copy and effective calls to action.

What’s fundamental is the follow up. And following up with interested prospects is more a product of organization and discipline than it is dependent on automated lead scoring and integration with CRM.

Too Big, or Too Small?

The obvious point is that some companies have no business biting off big powerful software to support their marketing effort. Likewise, professional services firms who seem to have mastered the fundamentals, who have through years of dedication managed to transform their website into an effective source of new sales leads, should not avoid committing to an investment in automation because they can’t stomach spending money on software that they don’t understand. While I commend and even relate to the skepticism these firms' leaders exhibit, infrastructure that fits poorly—whether "too big" or "too small"—carries a cost.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

As I've recently articulated in Digett's Disruption Roadmap, there's a natural evolution to digital transformation of a professional services firm. Tier 1, often a firm's first foray into digital marketing, doesn't depend on full-featured marketing automation tools. Rather, there's an emphasis on the fundamentals of a sound marketing strategy incorporating basic tool sets. What some may not understand is just how much power a number of inexpensive tools can provide to support an effective content marketing effort. CampaignMonitor and Mailchimp, two of Digett's most beloved choices of email marketing platforms, do not try to tackle lead scoring, a potentially valuable capability for improving effectiveness related to signaling when prospects who have demonstrated interest in a firm's services warrant some sort of personal contact. But lead scoring is most valuable when there are too many sales leads to manage with a spreadsheet. This is likely not the case in the early stages of a digital marketing effort.

As internal marketing competencies in a professional services firm mature, so grows the potential for improving overall marketing ROI through leveraging more sophisticated technology. The automation suites Digett is most familiar with—HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo and Act-On, for example—offer advantages related not only to breadth of features, but to how they consolidate marketing activities—which may otherwise be spread across four or five SaaS-based services—into a single interface. Email marketing and nurturing, lead scoring, landing page creation and testing, and social media monitoring are examples of different capabilities that could each be handled by a different individual tool, or which could all be handled by any one of the automation offerings mentioned. Consolidation results in increased convenience, efficiency, and in some cases better data about your prospects' behavior.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

With power comes complexity, and some firms just aren't prepared for the learning curve presented by these capable tools. Managing the marketing technology stack is one area where agencies like Digett can provide great value. Not only can an agency hit the ground running to immediately leverage the extensive feature sets of sophisticated martech (please pardon the jargon) tools, quality agencies understand just how such capabilities can be employed for their greatest gain.

The bottom line is that professional services marketers should focus first on fundamentals, and consider employing newer or more powerful technology only when there is a clear advantage to be gained by doing so. Despite technology hype, there is wisdom in a "crawl, walk, run" philosophy.

Don't Build Things Differently. Build Different Things.

Emma Ruehl — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 17:08:40 +0000

Don't Build Things Differently. Build Different Things.

Emma Ruehl Mon, 10/26/2015 - 12:08pm

You don’t need Millennials to tell you that mobile sites matter. Mobile usage is slowly taking over desktop, and there are no signs of slowing down. Just this year, we saw the scales significantly tip towards mobile, taking 51% of the digital media time pie, compared to a 42% share for desktop. Some best practices from desktop web design carry over to mobile principles, but it would be a mistake to treat them as the same animal. As Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled, said, “Don’t build things differently; build different things.”

Stop Trying to Fit Mobile into a Desktop Box

Mobile site design shouldn’t be an afterthought anymore, and many developers even argue that you should start designing for mobile first. It’s a different experience than desktop, and people use each platform for different things. When you’re trying to find the hours of operation for a local restaurant on your phone, you may give up and go somewhere else if you can’t easily find them. Perhaps the hours are embedded in a paragraph on a less-obvious page, easier spotted on the desktop version of the site. This matters more than annoying a user; you might just be missing out on a potential sale.

4 Mobile Musts

Simple, simple, simple. Keep your content clear and focused. Users won’t take the time to search for what they’re looking for on your mobile site; they’ll go somewhere else. Navigation menus should be easy to spot and manageable in size, and for the life of me, do not make users scroll to see the whole menu.
Function over form. Performance is king on mobile. Your visitors will appreciate a site that runs fast (see earlier about winning an argument). This isn’t the place for impressive, detailed graphics that take ages to load.
Less is more. Less copy, images, and form fields. We’re talking bare essentials. Your site should feel more like a basic outline than a detailed term paper.
Build it for sharing. Be sure to give mobile users many opportunities to share content on social media (when appropriate). Chances are, when someone is looking at your restaurant menu, Facebook is open in another tab. An overwhelming 50% of Facebook and Gmail users are on mobile. Let’s give them some bragging opportunities.

A Final Note

Even if Google Analytics says you don’t have a sizable amount of mobile users who matter, don’t ignore them. Your site may not be built for a great mobile experience that encourages mobile users, which means you’re losing out on that 50% of users who could share your content on social media. More mobile users equals more shares, which could cause more mobile users, and then more shares (and potential sales). It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.

Submitted by digett-admin on Mon, 09/26/2016 - 9:12pm

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Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

Amy Peveto — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 17:08:41 +0000

Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

Amy Peveto Fri, 03/13/2015 - 12:08pm

Content marketing is not easy. It’s not fast, either. But as Van Delden Wastewater Systems learned, it can be one of the most effective ways to increase your company’s online presence and lead generation — provided you begin with a solid strategy and a willingness to adapt it as you go.

Meet Van Delden

Van Delden Wastewater Systems is a family-owned and operated company specializing in the design, installation, maintenance, and inspection of all types of septic systems in South Texas. The company is currently owned and run by the third and fourth generations of Van Deldens.

Background

Van Delden originally approached Digett seeking assistance with driving more traffic to their website. After a brief assessment, we knew there was greater opportunity. The company had existed for more than 70 years, but their digital presence was minimal.

Their legacy website was not designed to encourage inquiries. Driving more traffic to the website was a worthwhile goal, but we believed few of those visitors would be persuaded to pick up the phone and call.

At the same time, Van Delden was right; they did need more traffic. After deployment of a website designed to entice visitors to take a desirable action, we would still need to help people find that website.

Our strategy

Through conversations with Van Delden we knew what we had to pull off to deliver a positive return on investment. We began by developing a holistic content marketing strategy incorporating email, paid advertising, blogging, and social media outreach, as well as an editorial calendar to guide our execution and a new website that operates as the hub of Van Delden’s marketing efforts.

Challenges and readjustments

While we experienced some great results quickly — the new website received more than 50% more visitors the month after launch than the month before, and the number of conversions doubled — it has demanded an ever-watchful eye for opportunities to drive consistent growth over time. Here are some of the efforts we’ve executed and lessons we’ve learned in the last two years.

Challenge 1: Few conversion opportunities

Van Delden’s legacy website offered no opportunity for prospects to convert online. If they wanted to contact Van Delden, they had to pick up and dial a phone. We knew we would need to develop multiple conversion opportunities on the website at all levels of the sales funnel if we were going to help Van Delden generate more online business. We came up with this plan of attack:

Add a contact form - We added a page to the website where visitors can fill out an online form, asking Van Delden for assistance with their septic needs. Prospects have more ways to reach out for assistance, which reduces conversion friction.
Make it even easier to contact Van Delden - We embedded more contact forms in the sidebars of the website’s most-visited pages and blog articles so that visitors could contact Van Delden without having to navigate to the main Contact page.
Capitalize on existing conversion opportunities - Van Delden has always offered free phone consultations, so we promoted that offer with messaging throughout the website and an optimized landing page.
Offer downloadable content - We created landing pages that offer educational whitepapers to different segments of Van Delden’s audiences, and promoted that content through the blog, social media, and paid advertising.
Build an email marketing list - At the bottom of every conversion form we promoted an opportunity for visitors to sign up to receive Van Delden’s quarterly newsletter.

Results: 175% conversion increase

Between its launch in December 2012 and December 2013, the Van Delden website saw a 175% increase in conversions — from phone calls alone. By 2014, Van Delden was receiving an average of 80 conversions per month from forms and phone calls.

Their next-biggest converter is the audience-specific whitepapers, which are downloaded dozens of times per month and are responsible for most of the newsletter subscriptions. Van Delden’s quarterly newsletter goes out to thousands of people and has an average 35.5% open rate and 24% click-through-rate — in an industry where the averages are 20.16% and 7.36%, respectively.

One area we still see room for improvement is in our promotion of Van Delden’s free phone consultations. The landing page hasn’t generated as many leads as we’d like, and we are re-evaluating our promotional efforts.

Challenge 2: Small local reach

Blogging was slowly improving Van Delden’s presence in search engine results, but local consumer awareness of the company remained low. We needed a way to rapidly build their brand’s visibility in the Hill Country while we continued the gradual organic search growth through blog content. Our plan was three-fold:

Send special offers to local prospects - We mailed postcards with special offers to residents in Van Delden’s service area.
Target local Facebook advertising - We developed a branding campaign and ads designed to reach local prospects while they browsed on Facebook.
Develop educational videos - We worked with Van Delden to script, shoot, and edit eight educational videos that we’ve incorporated into existing marketing campaigns, both on-website and across social media channels.

Results: Expanded brand awareness

The first direct mail campaign was a success, and still brings in new customers more than a year later. The educational videos have been collectively viewed more than 15,000 times, and targeted Facebook ads are responsible for hundreds of visitors and dozens of conversions every month.

Looking ahead

It’s been amazing working with Van Delden these past two years, and we’re excited to implement more improvements and tackle more tough questions.

How can we better promote the company’s free consultations offer? Is it even a good use of our marketing budget, or is there another, better opportunity?
What can we do to better track our efforts’ results? Measuring marketing results is a challenge for everyone, including us.
How can we continue optimizing, maintaining, and growing our existing positive momentum?

“We came to Digett looking for help with SEO — we never expected to get almost three times as many leads through our website by the end of the first year. Digett has made the complex seem simple; they show us every month exactly what results we're getting for our money.” — Courtney Van Delden

Build your brand in 2015

Content marketing is a never-ending challenge, one we love tackling head-on with our clients. If you’re interesting in building your brand and generating more online business in 2015, we’d love to hear from you.

Rebranding: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Gabrielle Kinderknecht — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:19:47 +0000

Rebranding: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Gabrielle Kind… Tue, 10/22/2013 - 9:19am

Today companies are making sure they keep their brands up-to-date and fresh. Many ask why they want to change their current brand, brand essence, logo, packaging, etc. There are several factors that are considerable when thinking about changing a brand identity.

For example, the brand may be outdated, the strategy and communication has changed or their brand and products are being overlooked. Companies are always looking for new ways to market themselves, challenge their competitors and come out on top. Rebranding should always focus on the company’s communication to their target market.

You can re-design logo, brand identity, packaging and/or essence

Redesigning can be an extensive process in trying to figure out how to relate to the current culture, but also stay true to what your brand is and overall what your main communication is to the consumer.

First step, like every design process, should be research. Understanding the company’s goals and positioning can really help guide the designer to approach rebranding in a specific way.

Second would be to create a Creative Brief. A Creative Brief includes a background of the company and their products or services, a mission statement, specify who the target market is, who the competitors are, and the style and tone that will be communicated. Most importantly it also includes the reasons for the redesign and how this will improve the company's brand identity. Here’s some good information on mastering the creative brief.

Third, start designing new concepts. The concept should remain the same and build graphic vocabulary throughout all designs and mediums. The brand logo should be cohesive with the packaging, tagline, interior design, website, stationary system, etc. This creates a brand essence and keep consumers connected with the overall communication.

Starbucks rebranding

In 2011, Starbucks decided to rebrand their identity by updating the logo to fit their company’s needs. As a consumer, I think redesigning Starbucks logo by taking out the type “Starbucks Coffee” helped improve the overall image. They kept the same branded colors, as well as their circular shape to contain the logo.

Today, since Starbucks is so well known the design seemed old, with its bold heavy text making the composition compact. The black color did not help add to the design, instead only giving the image contrast since the female is intricate. Consumers did not see black as a branded color for Starbucks. Discarding the black helped simplify and clearly communicate their brand.

The simplified version of the logo really helps focus on the embellishments of the woman, which fits with their brand essence and target market; most consumers who purchase Starbucks are men and women aged 25 to 40 who “tend to be urbanites with relatively high income and have professional careers,” says Renee O’Farrell. Starbucks’ rebrand is a great example of how the brand identity remains cohesive throughout its packaging and essence.

Be careful! rebranding can gain negative responses

Although many companies have been successful in rebranding, there are several companies who have failed in re-creating a brand image that represented the company as well as its consumers.

Let’s look at Tropicana, a large company who has struggled to maintain their image.

(The carton on the left is the old Tropicana packaging and to the right is the redesign by the Arnell Group.)

Many consumers were unhappy with the new redesign, and many stopped purchasing Tropicana when Tropicana changed their packaging. According to AdAge, Tropicana’s unit sales decreased by 20% in less than two months of their package being displayed on shelves.

After two months of sales decline, Tropicana announced that they were dumping the new redesign and switching back to the old design. Watch CEO Peter Arnell Defend Tropicana's Redesign.

Why Tropicana failed

In the old packaging Tropicana focused on three main pieces of information: Tropicana, No Pulp, and Pure and Natural Orange Juice. The old packaging helps consumers easily find the product that best suits them by using a large colored band at the top.

The hierarchy seems to be unclear in the new redesign; the composition and size of the text does not help the customer easily find the important information that helps them decide which container to select. The main focus on the redesign is “100% Orange,” and the thin label at the top of the box makes the package less user friendly.

Although the typography looks more modern on the redesign, it does not relate to what Tropicana sells. The old packaging uses typography to its advantage by creating a typeface that has nice curves and is smooth, resembling the product. They use a serif small caps typeface that creates an elegant and professional feel. These variations of typeface and size are consistent throughout the design.

Tropicana has always used the orange with a straw as their imagery. The redesign completely dismisses this and chose to display what is inside the orange — its juice, which they are selling. The imagery is not cohesive with the text that reads “100% Orange Juice” because many consumer prefer to see the real orange reiterating that it is natural.

Even the brighter colors on the redesign do not help create that “natural” feel to the consumers. The old package uses more rich, bold colors that help remind the consumer of nature.

Don’t be scared to rebrand your company

Companies should decide to rebrand not just to “update” their brand, but also to make it better. They should look at the positive aspects of how the consumer relates to their current brand and the negatives. Then they should improve on the negatives instead of changing the brand image completely like Tropicana chose to.

Content Marketing for Those Who Don't Have Time for Marketing

Amy Peveto — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:47:20 +0000

Content Marketing for Those Who Don't Have Time for Marketing

Amy Peveto Wed, 10/09/2013 - 8:47am

Content marketing requires enormous effort, and the pressure to do everything and be everywhere can lead to a paralysis in which nothing gets done. But have no fear — you don’t have to do everything! All you have to do is these four things.

Keep up with LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn profile is your digital resume, and it doesn’t take much time to keep it updated. Complete your LinkedIn profile by adding an image, job history, etc., and then take time every month or so to log on, update your info, add connections, and see what people are talking about.

And if you feel adventurous after a few months, the power of participating in LinkedIn groups cannot be denied.

Have a clean, simple website

You don’t need to have a gigantic, unnecessarily complicated website — but you do need to make sure that any site you have is:

SEO-friendly - Your potential customers are going to search for you online, so you need to make sure you show up in search engines.
Easy to edit by yourself - If you don’t understand HTML, CSS, etc., you’ll need to build your site on a content management system that makes it easy for you to make changes.
Customer-focused - Clearly explain your products and services, and keep your contact information prominent.

This last point leads to the third requirement…

Blog routinely

Most research indicates more is better when it comes to blogging, but let’s be honest: it can be a huge time-sink. It’s not something you get great at overnight, and the pressure to produce helpful content every day, or even every couple of days, can be overwhelming — especially to smaller businesses where there just aren’t as many people who can contribute.

So forget about every day — start by posting just once per month. And don’t worry about writing the next Great American Work: just focus on writing something that your prospects and customers will find valuable.

Strapped for ideas? This should get you started.

Send out newsletters

This can be as simple as a quick email to your customers that contains links to your recent blog posts, or as complex as a professionally-designed and printed document mailed via post — as long as the content is valuable to your customer base and comes to them routinely (say 2 - 4 times per year). This keeps you top-of-mind with your audience.

You can do it!

Content marketing is powerful, but you shouldn’t let the fear of not being able to do it all keep you from doing something. Think strategically, start small, and don’t worry that it won’t be perfect. Dip a toe in and see what content marketing can do for you.

Apple: World’s Worst Content Marketer?

Michelle Kafie — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 14:07:54 +0000

Apple: World’s Worst Content Marketer?

Michelle Kafie Thu, 09/12/2013 - 9:07am

One of the main things I’ve learned at my internship so far is the importance of content marketing. Apple is one of my favorite companies, and I expected them to be amazing at content marketing. But guess what? They’re not. Does Apple deserve the title of "world’s worst content marketer"?

Prepare to be surprised

Apple does not do content marketing because consumers do it for them.

Well, isn’t this quite interesting. Wouldn’t we all like our customers and other consumers to do the content marketing for our business too? Here are some of the ways consumers are doing Apple’s job for them.

Apple consumers as “Mactivists”

Over the years Apple has created a cult, a group of fanatical people who are insanely loyal to the company. They go around spreading the word about how great Apple products are and Apple gets more customers from this (I do not consider myself an Apple fanatic, but many times I’ve caught myself trying to convince my friends that have PC’s to change to a Mac.)

As Mactivists we carry product messages ourselves — we are like free brand ambassadors for Apple.

Blogging vicariously

Content marketing tells us that we need to have a blog where we solve our customers’ problems. We have to become a reliable and trustworthy source of information for them, showcasing our expertise and helping them become potential customers.

Apple doesn’t do any of this. What they use as a blog is just a section on their website called “hot news.” They post links to blogs people have written about them or blog posts they write themselves. All you can read in their blog are boring descriptions of their products, or achievements they’ve had lately.

Wouldn’t it be great if Apple had a blog where they could show consumers how these products can solve their everyday life problems? Think of the infinite opportunities they would have to talk about this. Their iPod, iPad, iPhone, and Macs have revolutionized the way people live their lives. Thanks to products like the ones Apple makes, life is simpler and communication is more effective.

Lack of control can be dangerous

So there’s actually a lot of content marketing about Apple, it’s just that they are not the ones doing it. The biggest problem with this is they cannot control it.

People may be devoted to them now, but there are signs that devotion is failing (the iPhone 5c and 5s did not get a warm welcome) — and when people start saying bad things, it will be harder for Apple to control it.

If I were Apple, I would like to have control over what people are saying about my company and my products. Whether it is good or bad, nobody knows the story better than Apple. They have more credibility than any other blog written about them, and not everything that consumers write about them will always be positive. That is why it is always more effective to be in control of the information out there about your company.

Take control of your marketing

If you want to learn how to build your brand and use content marketing to boost your business, download our Digital Marketing Guide to Growth. This free whitepaper gives you all the information you need to starting creating your content marketing plan.

Get my whitepaper

Submitted by Rohit on Fri, 09/13/2013 - 5:11am

Great info....!

Submitted by Michelle Kafie on Fri, 09/13/2013 - 11:50am

Thank you, hope it was helpful.

Finding Writers for Your Content Marketing

Amy Peveto — Tue, 28 May 2013 13:59:06 +0000

Finding Writers for Your Content Marketing

Amy Peveto Tue, 05/28/2013 - 8:59am

If you decide that outsourcing content creation is your best option for keeping your content marketing rolling, the next step is to find writers. There are many ways to do this, but there are several high-level things to keep in mind while you search for and vet your writer network.

Writer resources

While you may be able to rely on personal networks to float some names your way, chances are good you’ll be starting from scratch — fortunately there are lots of online platforms where companies can post a single request and receive applications from dozens or hundreds of interested writers. Digett has had great success with sites like Ebyline and Elance.

Alternatively, there are many agencies with whom you can partner who have already done this kind of searching and have created a network of writers. This adds more middlemen—since you’re often working with the agency instead of directly with a writer—but can cut down on some of the upfront work (we’ve got a great article on hiring an agency versus hiring freelance for content creation).

The process

Once you know where you’re hoping to find writers, you need to outline to applicants the scope of work and the kind of content for which you’re looking.

The name of the game here is “setting expectations.” Tell people:

Your company’s industry and a quick description of what you do
What kind(s) of content you need (articles, whitepapers, etc.)
Content amounts/frequency (one article a day, a whitepaper per month, etc.)
Whether or not you already have an editorial calendar
Whether or not the writer can contribute topics
What you intend to pay per piece of content

And so on. You want to give writers (or agencies) as much information as they need to decide if they are a good fit for you.

Whether you work with freelancers or an agency, each should be able to provide you with a description of their work, writing samples, and pricing. Then it’s a matter of deciding which writer you like best.

Bonus points: Interview potential writers on the phone or in person if possible. This gives you a better feel for their personality, and makes it easier to ask follow-up questions or go into more detail about the project.

Lastly, remember that the devil’s in the details. Pay close attention to the writer’s location — it’s always easier to work with someone in the same country and in the same time zone. That writer from Australia may be great, but if you’re in Texas it’s going to create a lot of unnecessary hassle.

Start slow

One thing I recommend is to make any long-term agreement tentative until you’ve worked with the writer for a given period of time. It’s great if you’re looking for someone to write eight blog articles a month, but don’t guarantee that agreement until you’ve collaborated on the first two or three.

I know it can be frustrating to go through the entire hiring process only to have to start all over again, but it’s a bigger misuse of time to have to work with a writer who isn’t as close to ideal as possible — whether it’s a knowledge, skill, or personality issue. Taking time to find the best writer will make your life so much easier.

Money matters

No writer worth their salt works for free, and you should embark on this process with the expectation of paying at least $100 for a blog article (whitepapers and other bigger projects will be priced higher).

The more niche and/or technically complex your industry, the more you will need to pay for content, and the fewer exceptional writers there will be. For example, it’s much easier to find a great writer for a blog about fashion or home decorating than it is about Electronic Health Records or IT services.

It’s certainly possible to get a blog article about a highly technical topic for $30 or $45, but remember that you get what you pay for.

On a more nitty-gritty level, most sites like Ebyline or Elance allow you to pay a writer through their system, or through the writer’s PayPal account. Some writers may want to manage their projects on the platform on which you found them, or they (or you) may have another site that is standard.

Whether you conduct your business on the original freelance writer platform, on a different platform you or the writer prefers better, or via email or phone or even in person, is up to you — whatever process works for all parties involved is the one you should follow.

Collaboration is key

It’s both exciting and a little depressing to consider that finding writers is just the beginning of a content marketing engagement. You’ve taken the burden of writing off your shoulders, but as I’ve written before:

You also still have to be involved in content creation. The best freelancer in the world, one who knows everything there is to know about your industry, is still not a company insider. They don’t know your company’s values, objectives, or customers, and it’s up to you to stay involved and make sure that the content he or she produces adheres to your mission and properly serves your audience.

It’s a tough road, but it can be a rewarding one. Build a solid network of great writers, work together to take content to ever-higher levels, and enjoy the journey!

[Image: Erica Cherup]

Outsourcing: The Lazy Marketer’s Secret to Success?

Amy Peveto — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:37:09 +0000

Outsourcing: The Lazy Marketer’s Secret to Success?

Amy Peveto Tue, 05/14/2013 - 8:37am

While content marketers agree that content is critical to success, the debate around outsourcing its creation continues raging. Some say it’s laziness or a lack of commitment, while others argue that sometimes it’s the only way. So who’s right?

Content = Customers

You’re probably sick of hearing HubSpot’s statistic that companies that blog get 55% more website visitors. But what about this gem?

56% of companies that blog once per month have acquired a customer through their blog; but for companies that blog daily, the statistic jumps to 78%.

If your goal is to obtain new customers more frequently, posting one measly article a month just ain’t gonna cut it.

Note: HubSpot studies are conducted among a small customer base, so take these numbers with a grain of salt. If they’re even remotely true, however, they make a compelling case for frequent blogging.

Creating content isn’t easy

Writing quickly and clearly is not an innate talent, and for a lot of people it’s downright intimidating. The “write a blog post” concept can feel eerily similar to “write a term paper,” reminding many of stressful experiences in high school English classes.

It’s also time-consuming, and often seen as less important than most other tasks. If an employee has to choose between slaving over a blog post and completing support tasks or making sales calls, guess which gets done?

Outsourcing is 100% fine

We’re past the point of arguing over whether or not blogging is effective — it is.

If it’s a choice between never or rarely blogging and routinely posting compelling, relevant, helpful content, do it — even if you’re not the one doing the writing.

But it’s not really any easier

Once you’ve decided to outsource your content creation, it’s tempting to think that you don’t have to worry about or pay attention to it anymore. That’s a mistake.

First you have to find writers. You can find tons of them on sites like Elance or Ebyline, but choose wisely — hiring a fashion writer for your IT company is a bad idea.

Need help? We've got a great article on finding writers for your content.

Then there’s the matter of budget — great content is not cheap, and you have to decide if you’re willing or able to spend what it takes.

The choice is yours

Many companies outsource their content because they think it will be easier. But even if you’re not writing, you’re still hiring, editing, and monitoring. It’s up to you to decide which is best for your company.

How the CMS Fails Marketing

Mark Figart — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:09:23 +0000

How the CMS Fails Marketing

Mark Figart Tue, 12/11/2012 - 9:09am

The so-called modern web Content Management System (CMS) has outlasted its utility and is failing content marketers. And still, it is one of the most important tools that we at Digett leverage on behalf of our enterprise clients in the deployment of systems to store and display content to an audience in the form of a website.

Considered in isolation, the CMS does a fine job of this. But this constrained store-and-display scenario represents a diminishing slice of the expanding role that content plays in good marketing. To evaluate the effectiveness of the CMS from a higher vantage point, a picture emerges of widely-used toolsets that put too much downward pressure on marketing ROI.

It has become clear to me that we need to seriously rethink how we solve many of the challenges posed by content marketing.

Three Big Problems with the Web CMS

As content gains prominence, the tightly-coupled nature of enterprise systems like Drupal, for example—which attempt to address a full breadth of challenges related to the content lifecycle—becomes burdensome, inefficient and ineffective:

burdensome because we get stuck with huge applications to maintain
inefficient because replacing any part of these systems often means replacing the whole thing
ineffective because developer attention is spread thinly and unevenly across thousands of requirements.

How We Got Here

I think it is useful to recognize that we got here for good reasons. The web evolved, after all, into the most important communication medium of our time almost overnight. To address this growing demand to publish content, we have developed dozens of programming languages and web technologies to solve specific problems as they arise. To make it easier for the non-techie to take more control of the publishing function, for example, we devised simple tools to achieve this.

These were the earliest iterations of the CMS. All hands have been on deck to focus on these challenges, and look how far we've come! But somewhere along the line we crossed a couple notable thresholds.

The CMS evolved to fulfill roles that would best be divided among multiple applications.
Content became useful in more ways than our inflexible and bloated CMS architectures can keep up with.

To suggest that any one user type is the "most important" serves to help illustrate the challenge of treating content management as one to be solved by a single application. The fact is, by the way, that the most important user of a website is its intended audience. But even if we allow ourselves to shift our focus off the audience onto users that "work with content"—as does the referenced article—we are still talking about a wide range of roles: content strategists, authors, editors, reviewers, content administrators, web publishers, curators, and any number of possible "wholesale" consumers of content who need or want access to it for a purpose such as pushing it through another channel.

Each of these functions has its own unique set of challenges and requirements, and in some cases the needs and interfaces related to one function look nothing like those related to another.

Today's CMS has grown up as a one-tool-does-all approach to getting content onto the web and managing its lifecycle. We have WordPress, Drupal and Joomla (among many others), each of which increases in size and complexity with each version release.

It's not hard to see why this happens. Consider, for example, that a website is no longer something we view only from a desktop computer, but from mobile devices of all shapes and sizes. Consider that a website needs to leverage or at least play nicely with social media outposts.

These are just a couple requirements among many that demand new and more capabilities, and too frequently these capabilities become the responsibility of the CMS. This leads to bloated software that is less effective than it should be and more expensive to maintain.

Nowhere does this growing complexity result in more pain than with the never-ending and expensive two- to three-year cycle of upgrading a website to a new version of its underlying CMS platform. We do these upgrades to be able to stay current with security patches and, less often, to benefit from a new feature or two that the previous CMS version does not support.

How wasteful that we discard the result of previous website-building efforts every few years and replace it with the result of an entirely new website-building effort! Is there really justifiable value generated by this ever-repeating exercise?

How to Build a Better CMS

What we need is a more role-centric approach, applying best practices learned over decades in the software development industry, separating distinct groups of requirements into highly-tailored components, each designed for a specific role. Allowing these applications to interoperate would be well-defined interfaces that hide the complexity of what happens under the hood and make it feasible for developers to evolve and improve individual components of the content support ecosystem without worry of breaking it.

At its center would be a flexible and logically-designed content store that provides multiple methods for getting content in and out, as well as the means to effectively catalog it. Contrast this with the CMS database of today, which has become a tangle of unrecognizable labels and table structures and offers a poor foundation on which to build robust content applications.

Relegate the assembly and packaging of content into pages for viewing on different devices to a lighter-weight application that does only that. Give authors tools that streamline their own processes, which somewhere integrate with those of the content marketer who manages the production of those authors in the context of an editorial calendar.

There are hints of this type of modular approach just about everywhere you look. Drupal itself is a fabulously-architected wonder that goes further than probably any other comparable system to modularize its functions. Those who work with me know I'm a Drupal fan.

But I don't like telling my clients to budget for an expensive upgrade every three or four years on top of the significant ongoing cost of keeping the system patched. I don't think it should be that way, and right now I do not know of a better alternative.

I'd like to see the CMS go the way of SaaS, and believe at some point we'll see a tipping point toward that destiny. We see pieces of this already, and have for some time, in companies providing functions like data collection and reporting, email services, and social media integration. And there are some legitimate offerings for CMS SaaS, my long-time favorite being Squarespace.

But one of the very first frames of the video overview for Squarespace starts out by promoting its biggest weakness: "Everything you need to create an exceptional website."

Not that this might not be a legitimate approach if I'm going after the low-budget audience, mind you, but this won't fly for the enterprise. Any given enterprise is going to have its own unique set of needs that a one-size-fits-all solution cannot accommodate.

A Call For a More Sustainable Approach

In the end I'm looking for a better system, or ecosystem, to employ and leverage in the pursuit of helping my clients acquire, engage and retain customers through content marketing.

Additionally I want a more sustainable website solution; one that puts an end to the madness of explaining to my clients that shelling out $20-$30K or more every other year for a CMS upgrade is the norm, even while the old one seems to work just fine. It should not be the norm, and I know there has to be a better way.

Getting there will take time, but here’s hoping we can start a dialog to evoke change in that direction.

[Image: opensourceway]

Submitted by Your Name on Tue, 12/11/2012 - 1:35pm

Hey great article! It really makes me think about where content management systems are going.

Recently, I am trying to educate people running Drupal 6 that it is soon approaching end of life/support. It's a scary task and I feel your pain! We are already starting to see issues with Drupal 6 not running properly with PHP 5.4. We have recommended that people hold off any major changes to Drupal 6, and invest in Drupal 7 or 8.

I tend to agree with you on a lot of things, but software is always going to be this way. As always, people don't like to hear they have to spend more money on technology. The reality is that computers double in speed every 2 years...so... guess what that means. Yup, new and improved software is released every couple of years or sooner. In turn this requires more complex CMS and web systems. Website marketing people can stay in the stone ages, or embrace the change.

For this reason, I don’t really see the CMS as failing marketing, but rather drastically helping it (At a cost of course). Without modern CMS we wouldn’t have great tools such as Google Search. When was the last time you looked up how to do something at the library in one of those book things? The real goal of marketing is communicating the value of a product or service to customers. - taken from Wikipedia (I found it on Google!). Drupal does this, and it does it well. Drupal 7 does it even better of course , because it’s newer.

If people don’t want to accept change and invest in technology, it is pretty clear on what happens. Dinosaurs will die. They may be happier for not having upgraded but ignorance is bliss. If the website maintenance costs are outweighing ROI, then this is a separate issue. SaaS creates it's own set of major issues and simply hides costs.

I recently came across this article from the founder of Drupal. http://buytaert.net/the-drupal-mood-cycle . It describes the migration path between Drupal versions in a totally unfortunate but realistic/accurate way! Drupal end users are screaming! I am also screaming! (About my blackberry which is now a brick). Everyone is screaming!

Wes

Submitted by dalin on Wed, 12/12/2012 - 12:39pm

"To suggest that any one user type is the 'most important' serves to help illustrate the challenge of treating content management as one to be solved by a single application"

I think that you are taking Thomas' article too literally. No one is suggesting that we ignore the final audience. But I think we can all agree that content is king. By giving more attention to your content creators they can spend more time crafting the content rather than fighting the interface and fighting the workflow that doesn't mirror internal processes.

"Nowhere does this growing complexity result in more pain than with the never-ending and expensive two- to three-year cycle of upgrading a website to a new version of its underlying CMS platform."

While things are unique for every site and every dev shop, rarely do we encounter this situation. Our clients are looking to completely revamp their sites every ~3 years to freshen the design, re-brand, and update the IA to better reflect their evolving organization. Ideally these sorts of things would happen ongoing, but most of the organizations that we work with don't have the internal bandwidth to be constantly iterating.

For those sites that do hit the security deadline before they want a total site refresh, upgrading to the newest version is probably not what they need. Keep in mind that:
- Most security announcements won't apply to this site.
- Most of those that do are only exploitable by trusted users.
- Those that remain will be _far_ cheaper to fix on an individual basis than the 20k-30k to completely upgrade.

Submitted by Mark Figart on Sat, 12/15/2012 - 11:58am

Wes, thanks for the thoughtful reply. You make the valid argument that the CMS *helps* marketing. I just wonder if we couldn't provide more help by de-coupling the major CMS functions and possibly avoiding the pain associated with complete rebuilds every few years. Also, not sure your brief analysis of SaaS is fair or accurate. If SaaS simply hides costs, then I don't think we would be witnessing the mass shift that's occurring. Digett, for example, has significantly more capabilities thanks to innovative cloud-based services (Google Drive, Vocalocity, and SEOMoz, to name a few), and in each of these cases our costs are lower than what we dealt with before they came along. Thanks for sharing Dries' article, an interesting macro look at the upgrade cycle of Drupal. Cheers!

Submitted by Mark Figart on Sat, 12/15/2012 - 12:12pm

Dave, thanks. You're right, I may have come across as picking on Thomas, and that's a little unfair out of context. Honestly, though, I do feel like sometimes developers focus on their most direct clients (the users of the system) at the expense of the end goals. At Digett we are often in the position of developing (and executing) our clients' marketing programs. We are usually judged on the results of that, so we really do have to put first priority on the clients' audience. Still, I don't disagree... content is king, and if we can make systems that are easier for content managers to leverage, that benefits everybody.

Our clients are looking to completely revamp their sites every ~3 years to freshen the design, re-brand, and update the IA to better reflect their evolving organization.

Yes, that's not an uncommon scenario for us, too. What really bugs me, though, is that in addition to revamping visual and information design, we sometimes have to tackle, for example, a complete migration of content. I don't see the value in that, nor in re-customizing the administrative aspects, such as node add/edit forms. I wish we could figure out how to separate the things that *should* change from the things that should not, and avoid the cost associated with the latter.

Submitted by Jeremy Epstein on Sun, 12/16/2012 - 8:54pm

It's true that in the PHP world - which this article focuses on - the norm is to use one of a handful of bloated, one-size-fits all package CMSes. Back in the day, there were hundreds of CMS contenders in the PHP arena; at least today, only a few have survived to maturity (with Drupal being the most mature and the most extensible PHP CMS available, in my opinion).

However, if you look outside of PHP, you'll see that others have already developed a good ecosystem of modular, interchangeable components. I also do a fair bit of Python web dev, and in Python land, the norm is to develop a re-usable component as a stand-alone piece of code, which is managed in its own space (most commonly as a GitHub repo), and which can easily be added as a dependency of other projects using pip (and preferably also listed in a package index such as PyPI).

Python also has its monolithic CMS bogey-men, such as Django, Plone, and TurboGears. But the norm is for devs to make their bits of code available to the world as stand-alone projects, rather than as Django apps or similar.

I know that in other languages, such as Ruby and Node.js, the independent-components-not-CMS-modules approach is also the norm.

We're starting to see this pattern become more mainstream and understood in the PHP world, with Symfony2 components, Composer, Packagist, etc. However, it's still early days.

Submitted by Mark Figart on Mon, 12/17/2012 - 5:11pm

Jeremy, thank you. You have definitely educated me somewhat. I wonder if you could point me toward some examples of CMS-related python components?

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Case Study: The Secret to 175% More Conversions

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Blog routinely

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You can do it!

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Outsourcing: The Lazy Marketer’s Secret to Success?

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Outsourcing is 100% fine

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