Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from Neuromarketing.

Marketers are being offered unprecedented new capabilities to target consumers by interests and behavior. There’s growing evidence, though, that consumers are finding these personalized pitches off-putting. A new survey of UK social media users showed that nearly half “don’t like having ads targeted to them based on information included in their social media profiles, including activities, interests, and other personal data.”

The positive spin, I suppose, is that the other half is fine with personalized ads, but this high level of negative sentiment has to be troubling to marketers who are counting on targeting and personalization to improve the effectiveness of their ads. Yet I believe there are ways to reduce the probability that consumers will find targeted pitches creepy instead of appealing.

Target, Don’t Over-Personalize

I highly recommend an excellent New York Times article by Charles Duhigg, How Companies Learn Your Secrets, which uses Target as a case study of how companies can mine behavioral data to gain startling insights about consumers. Target, for example, was able to predict which female customers were pregnant and when they were likely to deliver by seemingly unrelated purchasing patterns for products like lotion. As you can imagine, the potential creepiness factor with such accurate targeting is high.

What did Target do? They broadened their offers for these unannounced mothers-to-be to include a variety of other products so that the baby-related deals looked incidental and normal. This eliminated the, “How do they know? I haven’t told anyone!” problem while still presenting the consumer with highly relevant products.

Ask for Permission

I highlighted some excellent social and other personalization efforts by colleges and universities in a post called Get Schooled.

Certainly, seeing your image, or your friends’ photos, appearing on a website has some creep potential, but these schools all defuse that by asking permission in some way.

In all of these cases, seeing one’s name or photo is fun, not creepy, because it’s expected and voluntary. Finding the personalized content can even become a sort of Easter egg hunt which is rewarded multiple times during the experience.

Stay Positive

One of the experiences that launched my personalization series was spotting my face in a LinkedIn job ad for a specific employer. I was surprised, but not offended or creeped out. I think that’s because the ad was positive in nature—me, hypothetically filling a vaguely relevant role in a quality company.

LinkedIn could see this strategy go wrong, for example, if they observed an individual update their work history to show their position at their current employer stopping but with no new employer starting. If they peppered that individual with ads like, “Need a Job?” or “Get Sacked?” they would likely create plenty of negativity. In the same way, if a non-profit targeted donors with a Facebook photo and a caption like, “Are you starving, Roger? These children are,” the message might be powerful but it would likely create some bad vibes.

Fails Ahead?

I have no doubt that in the coming months we’ll see some major personalization fails by a large organization. If you don’t want to be that company, think before you personalize. Ask yourself, “How could this go wrong?” And, if you can’t think of a way, ask a few creative friends who don’t have anything invested in the project. In just about every case, you should be able to find a way to personalize the offering without being offensive or creepy.

Roger Dooley is a marketing speaker, the founder of Dooley Direct, a neuromarketing and digital marketing consultancy, and author of the blog Neuromarketing and the book Brainfluence (Wiley, November 2011). Twitter: @rogerdooley.

It’s one thing to understand intuitively that different websites engage readers differently, and quite another to actually see it in brain wave patterns. Even though marketers buying advertisements or trying to understand the effect of different pieces of content probably do expect users’ experiences to be shaped by context and expectations, it’s still useful to have that expectation confirmed with real data.

That’s what NeuroFocus has done in its recent report “The Premium Experience: Neurological Engagement on Premium Websites” (PDF): they actually measured the brain activity of users surfing the New York Times homepage (as a representative “hard news” site), the Yahoo homepage (as a representative light news and entertainment site), and their Facebook timeline (as a representative social media site). They gauged brain waves in three areas particularly important to marketers: attention, emotion, and memory.

All three of these are highly successful sites, so as one would expect, all scored well overall. What’s interesting is what separates them: the New York Times activates high levels of attention and memory, but less emotional engagement than the other two, while Facebook stimulates on all three levels—attention, emotional engagement, and memory. The authors conclude that the New York Times sticks in people’s memories because it offers good information and opportunities for learning, while Facebook sticks in people’s memories because its content is obviously relevant to them.

To see how these differences in brain-wave activation translate to marketing language, researchers tested ads with three key words: “connecting,” “advice,” and “for-me.” They saw the biggest differences in relation to “connecting,” which generated much better response on Facebook than the other two key words, but much worse response on the New York Times, and “advice,” which did well everywhere except for Facebook.

There are lessons here for several different flavors of marketers:

•  For ad copywriters, it’s a stark reminder to take careful stock not only of a publication or website’s demographics, but also of its users’ state of mind when they come to read.
•  For social media marketers, it’s a reminder that online engagement is about making personal connections that feel real to users. What activates users’ interest and makes them remember you on a social media site is your social link, not just the informational value of your content.
•  For content marketers and web managers elsewhere, it’s a challenge to present content that meets users’ expectations consistently, without trying to offer all experiences to all of them, all the time.

(Thanks to Brian Massey for pointing out the study to us.)

David Meerman Scott published his book Newsjacking a few months ago, about various ways to use real-time news to generate coverage for your business. We thought this recent post on WebInkNow was a great example. Reprinted with permission.

Here’s a new book you can get on your Kindle: Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin

What?! Jeremy Lin has been the hottest sports story for less than two weeks and there’s already books about him?

Welcome to the new world of Newsjacking via Kindle.

This book is by Alan Goldsher and according to a Fast Company author interview with him, it took 72 hours to write a 15,000-plus-word manuscript, 36 hours using Vook technology to build the e-book, and then another 24 hours to arrange distribution.

And now we’re not only talking about Lin the basketball player, we’re also talking about Lin the book and about author Alan Goldsher.

Newsjacking

Whenever there is a hot story in the news, there is an opportunity to create and publish original content that the media will find and will get you coverage.

Newsjacking can be by writing a blog post, doing a YouTube video, creating an infographic, or even publishing a book on Kindle.

Business-to-Business and Nonprofits too

In B2B markets, I’m imagining a scenario where a new regulation hits an industry and some smart person does a speedy analysis of what it means for the industry and publishes that as a Kindle book.

Or in the nonprofit world, a natural disaster strikes and people are looking for how to help the victims and how to protect themselves in the future.

Write the book quickly and get it out fast. Then blog it, tweet it, and send a media alert about it.

The Newsjacking aspect comes in because the media, looking for background on a story, may read and then cite the book in their stories on the new regulation.

Newsjacking is cool. It’s fun. And it gets you ink!

A hat tip to Tony Faustino who alerted me to this story. Hey Tony, you newsjacked the story of the Kindle newsjack of Jeremy Lin. Nice work!

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, a BusinessWeek bestseller.

Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from the Brain Traffic blog.

Before coming to Brain Traffic, I was managing a publishing department at a nonprofit called Search Institute, an organization that conducts research about children and teenagers. In fact, that’s where I was working when someone in our office building named Kristina Halvorson asked if she could use our Wi-Fi temporarily. In exchange, she’d offer us a workshop about something called “content strategy.”

As we listened to the introductory speech about tying user-centered content to the business model, I saw several of my colleagues nodding in agreement. I returned to my desk thinking, “Eureka! We’ve found it!”

And then? Reality set in:

• “We don’t have the resources for that.”
• “Everyone is too busy to take on anything new.”
• “It sounds like a great idea, but we need to focus on our funded projects.”

Most of these comments are pretty typical when people initially feel overwhelmed by content strategy.

You’ve gotta start somewhere

Our dreams of best practices gave way to best efforts. Although we couldn’t afford to restructure and rewrite all of our content, we soon discovered that a little bit of alignment and analysis can go a long way.

If you’re in the content trenches at a nonprofit organization, here are a few places to focus your limited resources:

• Document what you have and what’s working. If at all possible, conduct a content inventory or a more in-depth qualitative audit, exploring what is getting results. How popular are your PDFs? Are people following social media posts back to your blog? It’s important to know who’s creating what and if all of that hard work is paying off.
• Spend time on workflow. At Search Institute, a brief study of our newsletters revealed that four individuals were creating four different newsletters for only two audiences. Consolidating resources and introducing a unified editorial calendar resulted in less work and higher quality.
•  Know your audiences. Are corporate funders investigating your credibility? Are volunteers looking for logistical information? You need to understand who is using your content, and for what purpose. Even if you can’t afford a full-scale user research study, a few phone calls, an in-house brainstorming session, or an online survey can help you start to collect this information.
• Pay attention to your business model. Some nonprofits get so caught up in providing free information and services that they neglect the audiences who are footing the bill for their good work. Are you dependent on individual donations? If so, make it easy to donate (and receive receipts!) online. Do corporate sponsors distribute internal copies of your annual report? Offer a printer-friendly version. Do other organizations purchase your materials or services with grant money? Give them links and tools that make it easier.

Meeting users’ needs for information is ideal, but meeting users’ needs when they are TRYING TO GIVE YOU MONEY is essential.

• Use your money wisely. At Search Institute, we had big dreams of overhauling our website, but we simply never had enough general operating expenses to get it done. But we did obtain money to create a new website for parents. That provided an opportunity to invest in branding and user testing—two big-ticket items that really mattered to funding partners who cared about having their logo on a reputable site.

Keep hope alive

It’s discouraging to list all of the things you can’t accomplish, so … don’t! Get started in whatever way you can. Celebrate every victory. Document the value content strategy has provided—both internally and to your supporters. Every small success is a step in the right direction.

Tenessa Gemelke is a Content Strategist for Brain Traffic, a nationally-renowned agency specializing in content strategy and content implementation.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Marketing Interactions.

How deep does your marketing content dive into the problems and priorities your B2B prospects are facing? In B2B marketing, we talk a lot about addressing problems, but quite often we don’t talk about what that really means or how to truly help our prospects solve the systemic issues that cause the problems in the first place.

This post is inspired by the following point in a list of reasons about why managers struggle on Leadership Now blog. This is reason #9:

They Fix Problems, Not Causes. Unless the manager fixes the cause of the problems they encounter, valuable time will be spent fixing the same problem over and over again.

How often do you think about why a problem exists for your prospects? As marketers we need to look beyond the obvious and get to the root of the issue to elevate the value our content provides. That’s when we start to become interesting to our prospects — when we invite them to think.

I love blog posts about people who are representative of my client’s prospects. Posts about managers and leadership are really good sources of information to help you help them by gaining a bit of insight to things they may be struggling with or how they view opportunities.

This particular insight can help us begin to consider the potential causes behind the problems that prospects say they want to fix.

Here’s an example:

If your prospect says he wants to improve team productivity and collaboration, why might that be an issue? Some possible causes may include:

• Did the company grow too fast without the infrastructure in place to support it?
• Did the company expand via mergers or acquisitions and is trying to mesh cultures?
• Is the company’s culture old school but the manager is trying to force the adoption of new trends?
• Was there insufficient onboarding to drive adoption of the last solution he tried?
• Is IT not responsive to resolving issues with the system reported by users?

Given whatever you determine might be the cause of the issue your prospect is trying to resolve, can you see opportunities to create content that helps them get to the root cause rather than just buying another bandaid?

I can see you reading this and thinking “Hey, how would I know which cause to focus on because I don’t market to one prospect at a time!”

The trick to this is to figure out which are the most likely scenarios and create content that addresses those. Theoretically, in the scenario above, each of those causes may exist for some percentage of your prospects. Think about it this way, if you can validate that customers have addressed specific root causes and salespeople tell you similar stories, you know that content designed around the cause will be on target for some prospects.

Monitor who spends time with which “cause” content and continue nurturing them appropriately with extension pieces. There’s always more than one angle to any story. Use as many as you think are relevant. It also makes sense to have salespeople ask what’s behind the issue in their follow-up and share those insights with marketing as part of the validation process.

When marketers consider how they set up the problem-to-solution stories they share to build a buyer experience, they must also consider the longevity of customer lifecycles. After all, if the cause of the issue is addressed during the implementation of your solution, it’s less likely to happen again. And that means higher customer satisfaction and adds to the value derived from each customer for your company.

Are you thinking beyond the surface of the problem when you design your content marketing programs?

Ardath Albee is CEO and B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc. Her book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale is available from McGraw Hill.

Abridged with the author’s permission from the Vertical Measures blog.

Many businesses start by building out their site and then look at the type and volume of content they will deploy. This approach is exactly backwards. The four website marketing techniques listed below will save you time, trouble and effort if you do them first.

1. Keyword Analysis

Determine what keywords you will focus on.

Volume: You want to target terms that have enough traffic to be worthwhile. You’ll find that the most competitive terms have the most volume.

Competitive Index: You can use Google AdWords to determine the competitive index for a particular keyword phrase. The index is based on a 1–100 ranking, with 1 being the least competitive.

If terms are extremely competitive, it will be very difficult for you to acquire a top-three search engine listing. Other, long-tail terms will have significant volume in the aggregate but will be less competitive and give you the opportunity to rank and gain traffic.

2. Developing Your Content

Start with http://soovle.com. This site allows you to type in your keyword and see suggestions from some of the main search engines. Enter your keyword slowly and look at the suggested terms as you are typing the phrase. Another great resource is http://www.ubersuggest.org.

Now look for ways to answer your clients’ questions, solve their problems, or engage them. Visit sites like:

• http://answers.yahoo.com/
• http://www.quora.com/
• http://www.linkedin.com/answers
• http://www.facebook.com/questions/

Enter your phrase in the search section and look for the kinds of questions people are asking about your keywords. Put these in a spreadsheet and start adding title suggestions and content types. Some will lend themselves to written content, others to video or infographics. Take your list of ideas and add them to your content calendar.

3. Developing Your Site Structure

I can’t tell you how many clients we work with that have gotten this part very wrong. If your site is set up incorrectly, then it’s difficult to maximize the value of content, link building, social media and other Internet marketing techniques.

Start by determining the categories and the directories you’ll need. Sometimes, based on your content focus, it’s really easy. But with some clients that have a tremendous number of products or a wide variety of content it becomes more difficult. Set your directories and wire-frame the site. Getting a visual of the site often allows you to “see” things that don’t line up well or places where you can revise and simplify your site architecture. Sites like mockflow.com and gliffy.com can help you with this step.

Use a content management system that allows you to post content whenever you want and to add directories as well: WordPress is great, as are Drupal and Joomla. All three are free and have strong development communities that provide plug-ins and other features.

4. Link Building

Start with manufacturers or vendors if you have an e-commerce site. If you are selling services, then go to any of the professionals you’ve used to get started and have them link to your site.  

Go back to your initial keyword report and determine the long tail terms that have a lot of volume and low competition and start building links with those terms.

Most of us focus on off-page links, but don’t forget the value of internal linking. Make it a point to show the search engines what you think is important on your site and what keywords you value the most by using your anchor text with them.

Other ways to get links to your new site:

•  Write guest posts for other websites.
•  Write link-worthy content, like free guides, infographics, and top-10 lists.
•  Write a press release about new business or product offerings and send it to one of the many press release sites.

Mike Huber is Director of Client Services atVertical Measures.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Marketing Trenches.

As part of a marketing evaluation we delivered to a client this week, we covered Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and in particular how the volume of indexed content plays a major role in the success of any SEO effort. The situation was simple: one of this company’s biggest competitors showed hundreds of indexed content pieces, and our client showed around ten. Game, set, match to the competitor, right?

Not so fast, my content marketing friends.

First, think about the sales funnel:

While there’s no universally accepted set of steps in the sales funnel, I typically use the following:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Evaluation
• Commitment
• Referral

While volume of content is important, in the B2B world in particular, churning out content generates traffic that typically fills the top of the sales funnel—the awareness phase. So what’s a marketer to do about the middle and bottom of the sales funnel?

Create better content, not necessarily more content.

Thinking in particular about the Interest, Evaluation, and Commitment steps, here are a few tips on creating better content for the middle of the sales funnel

1. Get Sp­­­ecific

Not all buyers are created equal. They occupy different roles. They work for different types of organizations. They have different budgets. They have different needs.

You can’t necessarily create content for each individual, but what you can do is create content for groups, whether it be by buyer persona, type of organization, or size of company. Most importantly, write about specific situations that groups of your prospective customers are dealing with.

And by all means, if you can name names, do so.  The difference between saying  “a professional services firm used our product to increase lead volume by 200%” vs. “Sweeney, Davis and Scaffani, an accounting firm located in Baltimore, MD, used our product to increase lead volume by 200%” = priceless.

2. Provide Data

Especially in the earlier stages of the sales funnel, before the prospect knows you or your company well, every claim is met with a certain level of skepticism. Sure, in the sales process you build one on one trust—but that takes time.

So what’s the quick way to start to remove that skepticism?

Back everything up with data, and preferably data from a trusted source outside of your own organization.

3. Ditch the Marketing Speak

Let me guess. Your product is cloud-based. It offers seamless integration with the most widely used SaaS applications. It’s a platform, but it’s also a full-featured solution.

Some of this marketing speak is unavoidable, but cut down on it before you publish. As buyers see more and more content, they will start to tune out your buzzwords and devalue your content.

4. Get Visual

Visuals—in the form of charts, graphs, infographics, photos and more—are essential to content, especially case studies, eBooks, white papers and brochures. Not only do they help break up long copy, but for some readers they will represent the single eye-catching and informative element that helps them remember the company that authored the content.

5. Say Something Original

With the explosion of published content, both in print and on the web, it’s easy to assume that your original thoughts aren’t that original after all. And yet every week, month, and year, new thought leaders emerge with original ideas, or at least new slants on previous ideas. Find a way to be original—in message, tone, attitude, or approach.

After all, they do call it “thought leadership,” not “thought following.”

Following this advice will help you avoid making the mistake of publishing content that appeals to search engines instead of humans. In any content planning effort, think about creating content to help your salespeople as they move buyers through the funnel.

Michael Sweeney is a managing partner at Right Source Marketing.

Slightly abridged with the author’s permission from The Tendo View.

I came across a useful post on the Content Marketing Institute blog entitled “The 5 Types of Content That Grab Attention.” It got me thinking of the different content types I’ve developed over the years and how some content developers may go wrong in their approach to certain content.

1. Content type: Trend pieces
Mistake: Promoting a trend that is too navel-gazing and doesn’t consider true audience need
Trend articles are a great way of getting across your company’s point of view of a changing situation in your market. But be sure to think through the trend that you’re focusing on. Is the trend truly something that is happening across your industry or is it a change that you’re hoping will happen as a result of customers using the product that you’re promoting? Readers appreciate authenticity and will hold your brand in higher regard if your thoughts are based on fact.

2. Content type: Case studies
Mistake: Being merely a rah-rah vehicle for your company or product
Granted, you’re not going to develop a case study of a competitor’s user, nor are you going to spotlight a customer that’s using your services in a less than optimal way. But that doesn’t mean you should view your case study as a way to pat yourself on the back without considering whether the case study offers lessons learned or tips that could be useful to other current or potential customers.

If possible, consider selecting a case study in which the customer did experience stumbling blocks when implementing your technology or service—and was able to overcome them. Highlighting the stumbling blocks adds some realism and demonstrates that it’s possible to overcome obstacles.

3. Content type: All
Mistake: Being formulaic
What types of movies have made a lasting impression on you? Formulaic Hollywood blockbusters, or indie movies with a plot that has interesting twists and turns? My guess is the latter.

Consider case studies. Instead of introducing Customer A, its problems, and how your technology or product helped it solve the problems, consider a different approach, such as a fly-on-the-wall report. I’ll never forget the day-in-the-life report I wrote about how vendor nCircle creates its security vulnerability testing software. I was invited to be a fly on the wall on one of its crucial days of the month. The article was an interesting way of describing how nCircle’s products work and their benefits.

Q&As are another example. They’re a frequent go-to content type because you can create them with your in-house subject matter expert via email interviews and you don’t have to worry about writing a free-form article from interview notes. You ask the questions and you publish an edited version of your questions and the interviewee’s answers. It’s straightforward. But sometimes it might be more interesting and useful to your audience if they could ask the questions.

4.  Content type: Response to sudden industry changes
Mistake: Promoting your company without providing anything useful to your audience
In his blog, Friesen describes this content type as “the meteor”—a sudden change in your industry as opposed to a “trend” that may be slow moving. I interpret that to mean news of a major security breach at a credit card company, for example. If your business is personal security or security software, you’ll want to take the opportunity to respond to the news. A good response would be to provide useful tips on how consumers can protect their personal identity if their personal information was potentially compromised. Don’t merely use the opportunity to sell your product. That would seem disingenuous.

Linda Leung is a senior editor at Tendo, a communications agency that specializes in custom media.  Avoid These Four Common Content Mistakes