dburstein

How to Appeal to an International Audience

Abridged with the author’s permission from a post on the MarketingExperiments blog.

How well do you know your audience? For Americans at least, sometimes I worry we have a view of the world similar to Saul Steinberg’s famous cover for The New Yorker. But let’s not forget that this is the World Wide Web. Your customers are, or at least have the potential to come from, anywhere in the world.

So here are some thoughts to consider and ideas to test when appealing to an international audience:

Where in the world?

Most analytics software, such as Google Analytics, will break down your traffic by country of origin (and drill down even deeper than that). Understanding where your current audience comes from can help you shape your message. Test how often to mention different cultures and which cultures to mention and see how that affects your traffic.

But don’t just limit yourself to where your audience is coming from today, consider where they could be coming from and think about how you can target content to that potential audience. In addition, if you have an ecommerce or even lead generation site, look at how your traffic compares to actual orders and leads. If you get a big chunk of traffic from a certain nation, yet they very rarely order or become a lead, what in your conversion process is stopping them?

Understand when it pays to habla Español

While you don’t necessarily need an entire website for every possible language, it is always a good idea to delve into proper segmentation of your current and possible audience. And if you find a big enough potential market, that commonality of language may significantly help your conversion rate.

You don’t even necessarily need to look beyond your borders to find that opportunity. For example, according to the U.S. Census, the buying power of Americans of Hispanic origin is projected to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2014.

Shalom means hello…and goodbye

If you do choose to test custom foreign-language pages, don’t just settle for poor translations of your current pages, but truly put the time and investment into understanding that segment and its motivations…as you would with any other segment.

Marketing history is littered with funny (and costly) cross-cultural blunders. It doesn’t take a major blunder. Even simple bad translations can turn away potential customers. I probably would not shop in the “Exciting Dressy Fashion zone” or want to eat “Desktop bacteria rice.”

6,809 ways to say “customer service”

Even better than acknowledging the existence of other cultures, show them that you truly cater to their needs. If you’re looking for some good examples, Israeli websites tend cater to a global audience well (a combination of state subsidies that makes international shipping cheap and the global interest of a nation that holds importance to three major religions).

One good example from that country is TheGreatShofar.com. This site clearly illustrates how it serves other parts of the world by, for example, having an American phone number and a testimonial from someone in America right on its homepage (leading us to believe that either America is one of its most important, sought after segments or this is a landing page optimized for Americans).

Daniel Burstein is the Editor for MarketingExperiments, the first Internet-based research lab to conduct experiments in optimizing marketing and sales processes.

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Joshua Malbin Magnificent Publications Inc.

Whom Do You Trust?

Think about the rise of social networks and social-network marketing. An underlying assumption is that people trust their friends, and so will trust the recommendations their friends make. Every company needs a presence on Facebook and followers on Twitter.

Now, there may be many other good reasons to maintain a company identity on Facebook, Twitter, et. al. But according to Advertising Age, this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer shows that cultivating trust by proxy is not one of them:

It’s a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

Ad Age suggests that the explosion in social networking itself may be partly to blame: when people actually knew all their friends on Facebook, they might have trusted recommendations from them, but Facebook friends are just as likely to be casual acquaintances now, or people who went to one’s elementary school. No one has 300+ friends they really trust. It further suggests that people know marketing when they see it:

People have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind that influential blog post or tweet. Despite regulations regarding disclosure of marketer-driven efforts, consumers may feel that whatever it is these people are receiving from companies positively influences their endorsements.

In other words, the well is tainted.

But marketers still have to market. So how can they build trust in an increasingly mistrustful internet?

There is no shortcut, unfortunately. We believe the answer lies in providing information consumers want, free from hidden marketing or sales messages. If people come to trust you as an objective voice, they might also trust you as a vendor. It can’t hurt if the information you offer is backed up by sources people still do find reliable, and they vary by field.

A colleague, for instance, trusts few health reform experts more than Dr. John Wennberg, founder of the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which for more than 20 years has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. In the field of Internet usability, many of us trust Jakob Nielsen far more than most other writers. But then we’ve been following the topics of health care and Internet usability for years because we have clients in those fields. And as with any subject, you yourself need to know something about the topic and its experts to determine whom to trust.

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James Cosco

Enlisting Contributors: You Don’t Have to Do It All Yourself

This two-part post originally ran as one on the Tippingpoint Labs blog. Read part 1 here. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The spirit behind Food Thinkers is to create a blog where like-minded “foodies” (food writers, bloggers, chefs, and food lovers of all kinds) contribute recipes and share ideas and insight about all things food and beverage.

When the site launched, the staff at Tippingpoint Labs was busy creating formats, filling in the content calendar, sending recipes to our food photographer, and writing content. Tippingpoint is full of great writers and producers, and some even might consider themselves minor-league foodies, but sometimes the writing came across as a little forced. The solution: recruit digital influencers who are already writing for their own food blogs — invite them to come aboard as contributors for our features. This would help augment our content creation team and support our strategy of developing relationships with digital influencers in our clients’ space.

Our ideal contributors are good writers, good food photographers, active in social media through Facebook or Twitter, and have an existing foodie blog. Food Thinkers’ Twitter stream was one of the more successful ways we found contributors.

We also reached out to culinary schools, knowing they had talented students and alumni who might be anxious to build their online identities. For them, Food Thinkers is an opportunity to expand their existing reach and strengthen their portfolios. All of our contributors get a byline, photo, short bio, and an outgoing link to their own sites.

Formats as road maps

Before Food Thinkers even launched we were on the lookout for potential contributors. Enlisting help got easier after Food Thinkers was up and running for two months, and our contributors could see the quality of the content being produced. When we got serious interest, the feature formats we had drafted were key in getting the kind of content we wanted from our contributors.

The formats give our contributors the road map to follow; they just have to fill in the blanks and provide the recipes. Meanwhile our staff, which had been very busy writing every article for the first two months of the site’s existence, now became editors, and our overall productivity increased.

Some of the contributors are turning out to be great writers in their own right, making it easy for our editors to polish the drafts. Because all our contributors are passionate about cooking, the overall quality of the articles has increased too. Each story is now written with a flare of expertise and enthusiasm that we could not replicate during the site’s initial launch.

Jim Cosco is Chief Content Officer and Founder of TippingPoint Labs, a digital content creation shop founded in 2002.

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Posted in Management of a publications enterprise | Leave a comment
James Cosco

A Content Calendar Case Study

This two-part post originally ran as one on the Tippingpoint Labs blog. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Rule #1 for a successful content strategy — you have to update your content on a regular basis, preferably every day. Most organizations think that adding frequently updated content to their website is next to impossible with their existing staff. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible. The keys to success are creating a regular editorial calendar, devising simple feature formats, and recruiting outside help. We took this approach when we launched Food Thinkers by Breville.

The Editorial Calendar

Our goal is simple: each day of the week we release one new piece of content geared towards one of Breville’s targeted audiences. We limit our content creation to five weekdays, so we’ve targeted five corresponding online identities. Here’s how it breaks down.

* Mondays — The Healthy Gourmet

* Tuesdays — Newlyweds and the Female Gourmet

* Wednesdays — The Male Gourmet

* Thursdays — The Mom Gourmet

* Fridays — The Metro Male Gourmet

With the audiences clearly defined for each day of the week, we create features for each day of the month. These feature help establish our audience’s expectations for the content on Food Thinkers. So for example, on the second Friday of the month, the Metro Male can expect a feature on mixology, while on the last Tuesday of every month, the Female Gourmet can expect a feature about appetizers and wine pairing.

By the second week of each month, our feature editors pitch stories and recipes for the next month. We have to pitch this early because selected recipes have to be sent to our food photographer for the great images he creates. The goal is to always have the final draft of each piece of content in place on WordPress one week before it is released.

Creating Feature Formats

When we first created the features, our next step was to make formats for each of them. Essentially, a format is a formulaic approach to creating the actual content within any feature. The format becomes the general guideline and structure for creating the post, and it ensures that the contributor will have an immediate direction when he or she sits down to write.

So a format might include an introductory paragraph that sets the scene, a sidebar about finding the freshest ingredients, a recipe, and a photograph of the final, plated dish. The more specific the formats are, the more useful they will be to the contributors when they sit down to write.

Here’s an example of a format for “Entertaining Apps,” a feature on Food Thinkers that pairs an appetizer with an appropriate wine.

postpic

Jim Cosco is Chief Content Officer and Founder of TippingPoint Labs , a digital content creation shop founded in 2002.

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Posted in Management of a publications enterprise | 1 Comment
asernovitz

Get Your Audience Involved

This post originally appeared on Damn! I Wish I’d Thought of That!  Reprinted with the author’s permission.

After every Broadway performance of Hair the audience is invited on stage to dance the last song. The dance is filmed and posted online the same night. Audience member can tag themselves and share the video on Facebook.

Folks, this is genius word of mouth marketing at its very best:

1. It makes the fans the stars, not the company

2. It gives a compelling, fun reason to share — “Hey, I’m on Broadway!”

3. It’s immediate and relevant

4. There’s a fresh blast of word of mouth every single night

5. It’s easy to share — just one click to Facebook

6. It’s cheap:  Camera + website

7. It’s completely freakin’ awesome

Watch these videos on the official site. Watch the excitement. They’ll be talking about it for months.

YOU CAN DO THIS.

* Find your fans (they are probably standing right in front of you)

* Do something fun (keep it simple)

* Make it easy for the fans to share.

Andy Sernovitz is CEO of GasPedal, a company that teaches word of mouth marketing to brands of all sizes, and author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.

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jbaer

How to Pitch a Blogger

Abridged with the author’s permission from a post on Convince and Convert.

If you have a product or service to promote, these days you need to promote it among bloggers as well as old-school reporters—and bloggers take a different touch.

All blogs start with zero readers and have to build their own influence. Bloggers’ influence is derived from their own ability and moxie, whereas journalists’ influence is in large measure derived via the outlet they represent. And unlike with journalists, writing is usually not a full-time job for most bloggers. Thus, bloggers are typically inveterate multi-taskers that protect their time like a pissed-off goose with a nest full of goslings.

That’s why bloggers get so irked about ham-handed pitches from clueless PR folks that are still in the “harvest email addresses and send bulk releases” school of outreach. It wastes time, which is a commodity that’s in short supply for bloggers—who don’t have any readers unless they make it happen.

The Influence Economy

Most bloggers are not compensated directly for their writing. Sure, they may have some ads or affiliate links, but unless the blog gets serious traffic, the ability to monetize eyeballs is limited, indeed. The max I could make through conventional advertising for the time I spent on my blog, for instance, would be about $14 per hour.

But blogging is incredibly important to my business because it generates social media speaker opportunities, and social media consulting projects. Thus, every reader of my blog is a potential client, or a connection to a potential client—as well as a potential colleague, friend, drinking buddy or fantasy football league-mate.

So even though I’m not in the advertising business, traffic absolutely matters to me, as it does to all bloggers.

So What Do Bloggers Want?

There are two currencies that matter to bloggers—traffic and influence. When you’re pitching bloggers, find a way for your interaction with them to generate one of those two things (or both), and you’ll have yourself quite an effective pitch.

What generates traffic and influence for bloggers? Access and information. Don’t just send a blogger a write-up of your nifty marketing program. Give the blogger access to your metrics and ask if they’d like to create a post analyzing your ROI. Provide an interview with the customers that participated in the program. Link to the blogger’s post from your corporate Web site.

It’s not about exclusives and embargoes. It’s not about doing all the work FOR the reporter, so he or she can hit a deadline with minimal effort. With bloggers, it’s about co-creating the content WITH the blogger, helping him or her package the content in a way that’s unusual and memorable. That’s what drives traffic, and that’s what drives influence.

Jay Baer is a social media strategy consultant and coach for corporations and public relations firms.

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jmaziarz

Web Managers: Answer Your Email!

Abridged with the author’s permission from Eat Media Blog.

Content strategists often get very wrapped up in the concrete deliverables of the content creation and production process, and that’s understandable, because they are the sorts of things that are easy to make into line items in a proposal budget. If there is a sexy part of content strategy, it’s content creation and delivery.

But the final piece of the content strategy puzzle is often the part that gets the least thought and fewest resources once the sexy part of a project is “completed.” Of course we are talking about site maintenance, one aspect of content governance.

In the olden days, many sites often had a “contact webmaster” link that would often open an new email, or send you to some onerous form, or worst of all, send you to an FAQ page that had the sorts of questions that no one had ever or would ever ask. Even if you were able to send a message about your problem, the chance of getting any sort of meaningful reply was vanishingly small, if you received a reply at all

But all those user inquiries do go somewhere (even if it’s an unmonitored mailbox or some sort of auto-reply bot), and how those emails are handled is going to go a long way toward making your users happy. Anytime you can get a kind human response out of a computer means a lot to the puzzled and frustrated human on the other end

Here are several tips on how to be the best website manager you can be:

  • Know thy CMS. Chances are if you are the one checking the system admin inbox you are also the person updating the content on a regular basis. If you were really lucky, you got to participate in the design and beta testing of the site, so you’ll have fixed many of the flaws that might have made your visitors angry. But, inevitably, there were items that got pushed to “YourSite 2.0” and some wonky features that got left “as is” because no one wanted to go to the trouble/expense of fixing them, rationalizing that, “people would figure them out.” Regardless of how you ended up where you are (and how bleak that landscape might be), learn your platform inside and out. Know how the content needs to be tweaked in the back end so it looks and performs its best on the front end.
  • Be a problem solver. The vast majority of people aren’t writing in to pay you a compliment. They have an issue. Give them an answer. And if you can’t give them an answer, or if you know the answer to their question isn’t going to make them any happier, apologize, sincerely.
  • Take accountability to the next level. If you see the same issue cropping up over and over again, don’t blame the users; take a hard look at your site and fix what you need to in order to create a better and less frustrating user experience.
  • Become an expert in the site’s subject matter. If you are running a site about cars, you better know your bias-plys from your radials. This is going to make your job easier in the long run and is going to make the provision of excellent customer service faster and more reflexive.
  • Be nice. You will be asked stupid questions and you will be asked them over and over again. It may be the 10,000th time you’ve been asked something, but to the person on the other end, it may be their first experience with your site. Make sure it’s not their last.
  • Be open to new ideas. You will receive a lot of suggestions about how to improve your site. Some of them will actually be good. Politely thank everyone and quietly implement the best ideas.
  • Know when to escalate. Some people will be asking about your products and services. You should consider this an epic fail for your site and something that rates pushing the panic button if it happens too often. If people are contacting the webmaster and asking how to buy your products, you have a huge problem.

Jonathan Maziarz is a content strategist for Eat Media. Follow him at www.twitter.com/bentpiton.

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Joe Pulizzi Junta42

Content Marketing Resists the Recession

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form on the Junta42 blog. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The results are in.  Content marketing spending will rise again in 2010.

The 3rd Annual 2010 Junta42 Content Marketing Spending Survey found for the third straight year that marketers will again put significantly more money into content marketing initiatives—those that draw in consumers by offering information they want rather than bombarding them with ads they ignore.

A few of the major takeaways:

  • 6 of 10 marketers are increasing content marketing spending in 2010. Only 7% are decreasing spending.
  • According to the 259 survey respondents, average content marketing budgets are 33% of the total marketing budget (up from 29% in 2008)
  • Small companies spend more than 2X as much on content marketing as larger companies.
  • Of all content areas, marketers are increasing their focus on mobile content solutions more than any other area (as a % growth from 2009).
  • Content marketing spending overall increased 11% from 2008 to 2010.

Click here to see the entire report.

Joe Pulizzi is founder of Junta42, the go-to site for content marketing and custom publishing. You can read more about Joe at his blog or check out his book, Get Content. Get Customers.

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drieck

Design Concepts for Copywriters

Abridged with the author’s permission from Pro Copy Tips.

A lot of copywriters think that “copy is king.” And that’s true. Sort of. It’s true if you mean that the message is what matters. And it’s true that, as a copywriter, you are the one primarily responsible for writing the words that deliver that message.

But you’re wrong if you think words are ALL that matter, as if design is little more than window dressing.

You don’t see businesses photocopying your copy deck and handing it out to consumers, do you? That wouldn’t work. What works is copy and design coming together to deliver a selling message. And just as the designer needs to understand the copy, you need to understand the design.

So here are a few of the most basic design concepts you should understand.

  • Attract attention. Certain graphic elements help make this happen, such as a face making direct eye contact with the reader, bold colors, money or coupons, a busy layout, large photos or illustrations, odd sizes and shapes, large headlines, and the word “FREE” set in large type just to name a few.
  • Design for actual reading conditions. How something looks displayed on the studio wall is not how it will look to the reader. Mock up a design and stick it in a mailbox, insert it into a magazine, or view it on a website.
  • Put headlines above body copy. Generally, headlines anywhere else will interfere with the natural reading pattern. And keep headlines close to the body copy so the reader can move from one to the other easily.
  • Lead the reader’s eye into the copy. People in photos should be facing toward the copy, not away from it. Angles of illustrations should be headed toward the copy.

  • Show products being used. This is usually better than static illustrations or tabletop photos, except when showing specific features. People like to look at other people. And it makes understanding and visualizing the product far easier.
  • Make phone numbers big and bold. This will almost always increase response. Why? Because a big number gets noticed. Because a big number says, “This business wants me to call.” Never be subtle with a phone number.
  • Call attention to key words. Use underlines, highlighting, boldface, italics, and other techniques, but don’t overdo it. Less is more.

Yes, of course, copy is king. But copy speaks through design. Good design can’t save bad copy. But bad design can kill good copy.

Dean Rieck is a direct marketing copywriter and consultant and publisher of Pro Copy Tips, a blog that provides copywriting tips for smart copywriters. This abridged version had room for only half of the valuable concepts covered in his original post.

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Posted in Design | Leave a comment
Ardath Albee

Show How You’ll Fix It When It Goes Wrong

Abridged with permission from her blog, Marketing Interactions.

You’ve launched a lead generation program that’s done a terrific job of getting people to opt in for more of your great content. The flow of leads remains steady and your follow-on nurturing program is kicking into high gear. Things are looking really impressive until about the fifth “touch,” when movement comes to a screeching halt.

What happened? Your prospects’ risk perception just shot off the charts, causing them to dig in their heels. Given a chance, many people will “what if…?” themselves until their ability to make an active decision dies.

So what do you do?

Create content that helps to assuage fears, allay concerns, validate beliefs, and smooth your prospects’ way forward.

One way to do that is with implementation content. This kind of content is built to show how your expertise helps customers overcome problems discovered midway through projects, or even unknowns that surface. It’s the down and dirty stuff that never makes it into those slick customer stories that make even the most complex projects appear to have never had a blip.

In order to do this well, you need to find out what the “blips” were. You can do this by talking to your salespeople, account managers, customer service reps, deployment teams—whoever is involved in project implementation. Don’t forget to speak with your customers. Ask them what impressed them the most during implementation. Their answers are likely to include those saves that we’re looking for.

Some possible scenarios you can explore with this content could include:

  • Process change that affected other departments not considered—what steps did you take to help smooth the ripple effect to keep from disrupting work flows?
  • Rigidity of legacy systems that caused implementation plans to shift—how agile is your company in working around proprietary system issues?
  • Unexpected user adoption issues—what steps did you take to help your customer turn this around?
  • Unexpressed expectations from peripheral team members that weren’t factored into the original plan—even if you didn’t know about them from the start, how did you make it right once you did?

The point is that even if what you promise sounds fantastic, complex projects always have some degree of risk associated with them. It’s up to you to help your prospects gain the level of confidence they need to put their trust in your company.

Ardath Albee is CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc. Her new book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale was recently released by McGraw Hill.

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