91% of B2B companies are diving into content marketing according to eMarketer. It seems that the fat part of the curve is upon us as the corporate world realizes that savvy consumers of all stripes just don’t buy the old advertising game. The new bargain is, if you give me valuable content of some sort, I’ll maybe think better of your company. Seems a bit tenuous, but I’ll vouch that it works, or used to.

We started our first thought-leadership led strategy with IBM back in 2002. We didn’t call it content marketing back then, but IBM had realized that they were not in the blue box business anymore, they were instead in the business consulting business; that’s why they sold their PC operation to the Chinese and bought PwC Consulting.

The problem is that with everyone and their brother buying into marketing automation systems, which need to be fed with content, I’m afraid the marketplace is rapidly going into content overload mode. Enterprise marketers cite producing engaging content as their number one challenge, according to the Content Marketing Institute. That’s code for: “Whoops! We’re making content, but nobody’s looking at it”.

So what’s a marketer to do? Advertising doesn’t work like it used to and the hoi polloi are ruining content marketing for the good guys (that’s us!).

Table stakes today are having a constant flow of content designed to appeal to each of your key personas at every step in the Consumer Decision Journey. This requires doing serious work mapping your consumer’s path to purchase, discovering their key touch points and understanding their psychology at every step. It sounds complex and it is. But if you don’t do this foundational work, you will not have the right content in front of the right consumer at the right time. That, however, just gets you in the game.

The challenge then is to create content that is sufficiently valuable and distinctive that your prospect not only engages with it, but also shares it, and most importantly is intrigued by the company that has produced it.  This is a very high bar and not for the weak of spirit.

Unfortunately, in content marketing today there is no substitute for a living content strategy effort informed by data and analytics and activated by best-in-class content created around valuable consumer insights. Makes you pine for the days of a clever print ad and a scotch and soda.

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In the pre-digital days there really wasn’t a need for brands to produce more than the ads that went on traditional media. Now they need to produce an almost constant stream of fresh content to keep up with digital channels and social media. For most companies it’s a pretty tall order because making content is a completely different business from what they know. And it gets even harder when so much of the content that they now need is video.

Since cheap bandwidth has made high-quality video so easy to get, people want more and more of it. Projections have video representing over 85% of all Internet traffic in a couple of years. So brands need to make lots of videos. The problem, of course, is not just the quantity, but how does a brand make videos that are good enough to stand out? While cameras and equipment are cheap and easy to get, creativity and know-how are still in short supply. Of course, what makes a video good is in the eye of the beholder, but most of us know bad video when we see it, and the last thing any brand needs is to be spreading bad videos.

So the challenge is for companies to put in place the capability to produce lots of “good” videos, consistently over time. The problem is that because the budgets are much smaller, it’s not like producing TV commercials, which brands have a lot of experience with. According to the 4A’s, the average cost to make a TV spot is over $300,000 — but for video content, that may be your entire budget for the year.

The big question is — do you try and do it in-house or hire pros? While you may need a lot of videos, you may not need enough to justify the large expense of hiring a full-time team. So another approach is to hire an in-house video producer whose job it is to put together freelance teams for each production. This is not a creative person, but a video project manager, and you still need to be doing enough work to justify a full-time person.

For most brands the answer is to hire pros. The advantage, of course, is the wide range of talent and capabilities you can access. The problem is how to keep the costs down. Most agencies focus on developing the creative, and then hire a production company for the execution. As a result, the costs mount quickly. Some TV production companies do creative, but their focus is really on the production and they are rarely able to develop the creative or the strategy for the video, which is critical. So that leaves companies and agencies that specialize in video content for digital channels.

The ideal is to have digital content strategy, plus creative, plus production under one roof. A company that can do all of that — and that is set up to produce a lot of video content over time, cost-effectively — has found the perfect solution. Of course, the videos still have to be good in the eye of the beholder, which to start with would be you.

You’ve heard of mobile-first organizations, those that launch first on mobile devices prior to web. That can be a good idea for some, but being a consumer-first organization is a universal necessity.

Gone are the days of relying on clever messaging aimed at grabbing the attention of distracted consumers. Awareness is easy, right? You can even buy awareness in digital and convince your boss that it’s edgy just because it’s digital. But being a sales-first organization that prioritizes short-term bumps in numbers should not be your goal. Building an army of dedicated, loyal followers should. Today, consumer-first brands are winning consumer loyalty and, as a result, their money.

The music industry is a great example. For decades, the music industry succeeded by making consumers pay for records, tapes, or CDs of pre-packaged music. But as soon as the tools were invented that allowed them to collect just the songs they wanted, the music industry suffered. The blame was placed on cheap consumers who just wanted everything for free. But we’ve learned that that isn’t true. Consumers, and music fans especially, WANT to pay for the things they love. In fact, artists have given away their music, allowing fans to make donations and received millions of dollars.

Amanda Palmer was a street performer turned professional musician who grew a large following and eventually received a record deal. After selling 25,000 copies of her debut album, her label considered it a failure and they parted ways. Determined to prove them wrong, she started giving away her music to her fans with the simple request that they help her out financially. She received almost $1.2 million from an ironic 25,000 donations.

I think there is a story here bigger than the music industry, which, as we all know, has seen the light (if you will) and is again experiencing growth. We’re seeing a dramatic shift in consumers’ expectations that is literally decimating entire industries. In marketing we like to talk about how social media is changing everything. It isn’t. It is simply enabling consumers to be as social as they’ve always been but now with the tools to ask for more personalized service. And that should frighten any company that is ignoring not just social, but more broadly, campaigns that genuinely connect with consumers.

Let me be clear, if your model is dependent on pulling in consumers rather than providing easy ways for them to get your product naturally, you will ultimately fail. Companies that do it right, the ones that connect with consumers and build the tools that make it easy for them to pay for the things they want, will survive. That is the difference between making consumers pay for your product and letting them.

Don’t be that brand. Don’t use social as a channel for more awareness and push messaging. Build loyalty. And then build or leverage tools to help those consumers pay you.

For years I have been preaching the strategy of Click/Reward. The idea is simple, every time someone clicks within a digital experience something pleasant should happen. This idea, while perhaps intuitive, flows from a number of observations. First we live in an instant gratification society, and, of course, we are all pleasure hounds. But more importantly it comes from mapping buyer psychology to the sales process.

Understanding the Buyer

How the unique dynamics of digital media connect with the psychology of a buyer, on the path to purchase, is the key to creating successful digital experiences.  This path today is often presented as a wonderfully busy chart with a myriad of touch points and influences. But in the end we all go through the same simple process: first we are unaware of a specific need, then we recognize it as a potential need, then we explore its value. Then, if we continue, we evaluate our options, finally make a choice and buy.

Yes, there are many factors and forces that influence this along the way, but block out all that noise for a minute and focus on the buyer’s basic motivations. Through this process our motivation shifts from passive in the early stages, and unwilling to invest much effort, to active in the later stages once our intention starts to crystallize. Continue Reading

About a year ago, I was inside a major retailer shopping for a new flat screen TV. For two hours, I roamed the aisles, smartphone in hand, doing my research the only way open to me: conducting Google searches for each and every TV I was interested in buying, reading reviews and looking at prices nearby. It was not that smooth and definitely not the kind of in-store mobile experience retailers should deliver to their smartphone armed customers.

Today I saw some data on eMarketer about Smartphone optimized showrooms and corresponding shopper behaviors. One thing was clear from the data: the overwhelming majority of smartphone showroom shoppers felt better about the purchase they made after researching product information. Continue Reading

Using data visualization to power your content marketing strategy.

Infographics are popping up everywhere. They’re in your newsfeeds, on blogs, in emails, on websites. Topics range from big data to big beards and they even have their own sharing platform called Visual.ly. Infographics are one of today’s hot social media trends because they work. Whether you want to follow the zombie evolution or track emerging financial markets, data visualization using infographics is a new effective content marketing strategy because it makes it easy to consume big, complex ideas.

Using infographics as part of a larger content marketing strategy has several advantages. They are visual so they fit right in to the increasingly visual web, and they are easily shared in social media across image-driven platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr and Visual.ly.  They also let you present, what otherwise might be boring, hard-to-consume data in an entertaining, arresting and easily shared format. The best infographics are elegantly simple, creative and compelling, but like many things, creating effective data visualization is not quite as easy as it may appear. Continue Reading

Photo Credit: www.facebook.com/oreo

Ah yes, the hazy, lazy days of summer, when marketing slips into a heat-induced coma. The pace seems a little slower, the controversies a bit duller and social media just plain boring.

Even the Olympics, that quadrennial bastion of sports and marketing, aims to muzzle its social media armed athletes to assure their tweets, status updates and photos are only happy, happy.

But fear not, several companies failed to get the memo and are stepping up their game in flagrant disregard of the trend. While other brands are stretched out on a hammock in hopes of a cool breeze, a few hardy souls have tightened the laces on their running shoes.

These are the brands that have followed guidance from experts like the Altimeter Group. In case you haven’t read their guidance, and you should, Altimeter suggests that companies go through something of a process as they move into social media and content creation. They compare this actualization process to a runner. Continue Reading

“FAQ” is an acronym for Frequently Asked Questions. An FAQ or “FAQs” are pages or entire sections of sites and forums devoted to topics that lots of people have problems with. The idea was a decent work-around in the burgeoning days of information architecture and search [1, 2], but the FAQ is now a total anachronism. It’s time to retire it altogether.

Yet the promise of the easy fix still seems to hold sway among the decision makers of institutions, regardless of the limitations of the FAQ. User Experience Architects and Information Architects do not generally advocate for the FAQ because, well, we know better ways of getting things done. It’s the managers and clients who make the final call, and although the influence of our expertise is often nullified by this power disparity, we bear perhaps a large part of the blame by not fully making the case against these things. We defer rather too hastily to the “well, if you’re going to do it” survival technique [3,4,5,6] that ultimately makes us die a little inside.

In this blog post and the one to follow, I discuss what I think are the fundamental weaknesses of the FAQ and how we as UXA/IA/EAs can reframe the argument.

Continue Reading

Do we know yet the volume of an idea? It’s Wednesday and I’m just out of IA and into wireframes. The pipes are knitting themselves into a fray. That’s how I know something is up there. My skull is not illimitable.

Wireframes. Wires: the boxes-and-bubbles tech docs that will instantiate the requirements of the project and breathe life into my IA. Wires: my big deliverables. The ironed down, buttoned up, spit shine proof that I “know what I’m doing.”

Heavy stuff. This cursor ticks with every new idea crashing into my cranium. I sift and sieve, identify and modify, assimilate and aggregate. How to turn this IA. In my brain is a swirling abstract with scrawny tendons and gawky legs. I command it to incubate.

The cursor blinks. My temples begin to bulge. A tumbleweed hops across the surface of my desk.

A wirestorm’s a-coming.

And here’s how I’m set to weather it. Maybe it’ll work for you as well. Continue Reading

Last week Google announced that they recommend responsive web design for websites that target smartphones. Responsive web design is a technique where the layout and content of a website adapt to the user’s environment, which includes screen size, platform, and even orientation. This type of design is great for making sure users can interact with your site from any device, and according to Google, it’s also great for SEO for several reasons:

Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.

No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user-agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience.

Responsive web design saves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user-agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user-agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.

To read more about responsive web design and what it means for your website, check out my previous post Future-Proof Digital and consider whether responsive web design may be right for your business.