In the following video, Michael Stelzner from SocialMediaExaminer.com interviews C.C Chapman, the co-author of the acclaimed book, Content Rules. In this interview, C.C explains how businesses can use content marketing can help to build trust and relationships with customers.


sme_cc_chapman_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Highlights:

• Content marketing is actually not new, but marketers have recently discovered how valuable it can be.
• When you're creating content, forget about those that fall outside of your target market, and keep focused on the ones that do.
• Content marketing is all about good storytelling - look to "experts" and customers to act as contributors. 
• With the rise of mobile and interactive, content will become more and more focused on "real time".

Email marketing plays a fundamental role in today’s
marketing efforts.  Whether it’s attracting new customers,
nurturing leads, developing loyalty or transactional messaging, there are standard best practices for email content.  Marqui’s email content best practices can be applied to all emails including promotions, e-newsletters, triggered campaigns, drip campaigns, win-back or client education programs.

The following lists the tactical approach Marqui recommends to all email marketers with regard to email content best practices:

Trust Elements  

•    Is the privacy policy clearly accessible?
•    Can recipients easily control their email subscription?
•    Does the “From" line contain a recognizable company name?
•    Does the email let the recipient know why they are getting it?

Engagement

•    Does the subject line communicate value?
•    Is the subject line too long (< 50 characters)?
•    Is the message self-explanatory without graphics?
•    Is the relevant content above the preview pane fold?
•    Will the content properly display on mobile devices?
•    Are there quick ways to read the email?
•    Does the look and feel integrate with your brand?

Action

•    Is there a clear call-to-action?
•    Can the user complete the promised action?
•    Are you tracking for conversion optimization?

Word-of-Mouth

•    Are members motivated to forward the email?
•    How easy is it to subscribe?

Metrics

•    Does the deployment ensure short and long-term measurable results?
•    Do you have a plan to continually optimize your content to improve results?

Following these best practices for email content will help you ensure that your campaigns are engaging and effective.  A Marqui email audit can help you determine how best to implement these practices and invigorate your marketing efforts. Talk to a Marqui Email Strategist today.

The importance of great content cannot be
overstated. Without content, there is no
marketing. Period.

So what is content marketing? To make things simple, let's start with what it's not:
 
Copy. 
Advertorial.
Spam (we had to say it!)

Think of content marketing as a method of
creating and distributing content of value to your customers and prospects. The guiding principle behind content marketing is the belief that by offering relevant, meaningful content, businesses can build their brand integrity, loyalty and eventually, their customer base. What channels can content marketing encompass? Your website, whitepapers, webinars, blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - the list goes on. 

Many companies recognize the importance of content marketing, but feel daunted or confused about where to begin. Creating content doesn't have to be a burden - it can be incredibly rewarding, and a great way to foster contribution amongst various departments in your organization. Setting yourself up for success in content marketing involves building the right infrastructure to support content creation.

Here are some tips and tricks to help get you started in your content marketing strategy:

1.   Find Your Editor 

You need to create a content marketing process that works for your organization, one that ensures timely, relevant content in support of your business objectives. When it comes to content creation, envision your company as a traditional print magazine: the best place to begin is to build an editorial calendar, one which lays out all the hot topics your audience would find value in reading and sharing. Be sure to also incorporate any special “ad hoc” events or promotions planning into the calendar.

Don't forget seasonality! Framing your content around milestone holidays can provide instant relevance to your customers.

2.   Get the Right People Involved - Look Inside

Before you think about outsourcing your content creation, look to those within your company. You may be surprised at the number of fantastic writers around you!  Or, at the very least, you will discover those with lots of great ideas who can contribute to your content plan. If you find at least one avid Tweeter, you will already be in a better place to start building your content marketing strategy. This is where your company's subject matter experts (i.e product developers) and customer-facing staff can really thrive. They are the ones with the deepest insight into what you are selling and who you are selling to, including their concerns, interests and priorities.

Find a way to reward these people for their involvement! It can be a prize, or even just bragging rights for the most-visited blog post. Either way, take a note from those gamification gurus and give your colleagues playful incentives to contribute. Also, getting a sense of where everyone's interests lie will help them find fun in the process - some people love Tweeting, others love taking photos - capitalize on people's interests and that passion will translate through into your final product.

3.   Look Outside

Leverage the voices of your customer into your content marketing plan - let them be your ambassadors! For example, if you have some really vocal customers or fans on any of your social media, invite them to help produce content for you. Case in point: MTV did this in 2010 with their search to find a Twitter "jockey".

4.   Use Variety

They call it the spice of life for a reason! Experiment with the types of content you produce. Enlist the help of your creative department to produce unique, highly-valued infographics, and link to relevant audio and videos (think interviews!) Not only will your audiences be instantly drawn in, it makes your content easy to distribute across platforms and channels, reaching more people.

5.    Don't Launch and Leave

Monitor your blog comments and social media sites and keep your responses timely - the more active you are in responding, the more willing your readers and followers will be to engage in dialogue with your business. Don't forget to make it share-able by implementing social sharing plug-ins to your blog.

Following these simple tips and tricks, your organization will be in a much better position to build a sound process, with opportunities to evolve your content marketing strategy over time.

To finish off, here are some useful quotes about content marketing. Hopefully you find them as inspiring as we do!

Thanks to everyone who attended our latest webinar, "Cloud CMS: The Best Marketing Investment You Can Make This Year". We had a great group in attendance!

Our hosts, Richard Sharp, VP of Marketing, and Adam Koebel, Product Specialist, provided their thoughts and observations about the current digital marketing and next generation CMS landscape.

Here are some highlights from the webinar:

•  The web is complex and fragmented – yet, integrating tactics is crucial to proving ROI.
•  With traditional web tools, control of web content rested with a legacy CMS, IT or an agency. The next generation of CMS is agile, flexible and marketing-enabled.
•  Next generation CMS allows for a lead’s successful journey through multiple touchpoints.
•  CMS tools and tactics provide measurable returns for your business, improving lead engagement, capture, nurture, qualification and closing.

If you’d like to know more about Cloud CMS or next generation content management, check out the full webinar here. Also, stay tuned for the next webinar in our series, coming soon!

Does your content capture your readers’ attention immediately? Does it engage them and not only play on their interest but encourage them to interact with your website further? If your website’s content, whether it’s a resource, a piece of page copy or a blog post doesn’t snag your readers’ interest immediately and then turn it into a conversion, you may as well be using Lorem Ipsum.

For those of you who don’t know what Lorem Ipsum is, it’s a common placeholder text that’s used in graphic design and publishing to demonstrate text elements and it is completely nonsensical. Basically, it’s a bunch of Latin gibberish that’s used to indicate where proper copy should go at some point. When it comes to content if it’s not interesting enough to convert a reader, to a prospect or a lead, then it’s not really doing much and it may as well be gibberish, after all, most B2B website’s exist to help convert traffic to leads.

So how can you make sure that your content is engaging enough to convert?

1. Know who you’re writing for. If you don’t have a good idea of who’s going to be reading your content, then how can you possibly ensure that it will be interesting to them? You wouldn’t write the same content for a child as you would for an adult, so why would you try and write the same content for every audience?
2. Be catchy. If your title and initial sentences don’t grab a visitor’s interest immediately, then they’re not going to stick around to convert. 
3. Make sure you’re right. One of the biggest things that discourages a reader’s interaction is reading something that’s riddled with grammatical errors. Not only does this ruin your credibility but it’s also difficult to read and takes more effort to engage with. 
4. Be easily digestible.  Simple is the key idea here. Your content needs to take as little of a commitment as possible to digest. If it’s too much work, your audience won’t commit. 
5. Help them learn more. Using internal links to different areas of your website where your readers can get more information on individual topics is a great way to drive them towards conversion. 
6. Give them a way to convert. If your readers don’t know how to convert, then they won’t. Do you have calls-to-action readily accessible from your content? Do you tell readers that you want them to convert? Do you give them a good reason to?

These tips can help you to increase your conversion rates with your content, and we suggest to try them out to see if they work for you, because honestly, if you’re content isn’t helping you reach your website’s goals, then it may as well just be filler text.

You spend a lot of time on your content, most marketers do, and if you’re anything like the rest of us, then you get frustrated when, after taking so much time to make content that you think is compelling, you realize that no one is reading it.

Sorry, folks. It’s the ugly truth.

While there are many reasons why people will gravitate towards (or away from) your content, there are some quick copy tips you can implement to help make your writing appear instantly more interesting to your readers.

Sound too good to be true? It isn’t. Trust me.

1. Keep it short and sweet. Your readers are looking for a quick fix for their content needs. They’re most likely searching for the same reasons that you normally search: they want a quick answer to a query.
2. Keep hierarchy clear with headings. Headings make your content easier to read and interact with. Period. 
3. Use lists! Bulleted and numbered lists are quick and easy to read and help you get a lot of content into a small space. There’s really no downside. 
4. Include relevant links. Linking to other pages (internal and external) that supplement what you’re saying allows you to keep your content short and to the point but still valuable and relevant. 
5. Add EMPHASIS.  By bolding important sections of text, and making it clear which parts of your content are the most important you give your readers the ability to both read all your content (if they are inclined to) or skim to the important bits (if they want to). 
6. Use words that elicit emotions. One of the best ways to grab attention and encourage readers to interact with you content is to choose words that cause an emotional reaction in the reader. Power words like love, death and money are used a lot because they work.  
7. Make it strange, interesting, compelling or unlikely. Looking at things in a new way helps to capture readers’ attention because of the incongruity. People love things that are odd, controversial or interesting, so give it to them!

Today’s marketers tend to wear many hats. I don’t know very many marketers who aren’t also writers, analyzers, content developers, artists and a whole bunch of other things as well, and the reality is that it’s impossible for marketers to be the better at all of these than industry specialists in those areas. A marketer is most likely never going to be as strong a copywriter as someone who does nothing but write copy for a living. So—how do we combat that? We develop tricks (we’re crafty like that) which help us overcome the imbalances and appeal to our audience’s baser instincts for instant gratification through content. Sound good? I’ll take ingenious plotting over hours spent perfecting my writing skills any day.

A few months ago I wrote a post outlining what Creative Commons (CC) Licenses are and have a brief explanation of why they are useful. In today’s post I would like to take a more in-depth look at exactly why these licenses are important for your overall we marketing strategy and how they can help you with both lead generation and brand promotion.

At the most basic level, a CC License is a way to encourage internet users to share your content and disseminate it widely across the web. If you’re an organization (whether B2C or B2B) that is producing compelling content for the web, then using these licenses is a good way to promote the spread of your content to a wider audience than your organization alone may be able to reach effectively.  For smaller organizations that don’t have the reach that larger ones do, creative commons can be a blessing because it allows companies (and content creators)who aren’t as well known to increase their reach exponentially without the need for a large company behind them.

For some organizations the concept of “free” content can be terrifying, but, that doesn’t have to be the case. When you use a CC License you’re not giving up all rights to the content, you’re just modifying them from traditional copyright to allow users to share and utilize your content with varying degrees of attribution (as specified by you).
In terms of search engine optimization, cc licenses allow you to choose how your content is attributed back to you and this requires a link. That means that anyone who finds your content and wants to use it can, they just have to link back to you. Not only does this spread your content to wider audience, increasing brand recognition and hopefully driving traffic to your site, it also helps you build links, a foundational element of a strong SEO strategy.

Another factor that it’s important to keep in mind when it comes to CC licenses and content is that because so much of the content available on the web today is free, often if a user can’t access your content without paying they will simply click away to a website where they can get the content they want. In today’s web marketing environment, “free” is becoming the necessary standard to remain competitive.

Image by TilarX on Flickr.

Content stealing is a fairly controversial topic in the web marketing space. Many people feel that if content is made freely available then it is free to use, but when it comes down to it, using another organization’s or person’s content without permission or attribution is considered to be theft. One of the most common areas to see this is blog content. There have been many times when I’m researching content for a webinar, blog post or other piece of content and I’m reading some blog posts on the topic and I’ll come across a blog post that has been essentially copied and pasted into several different blogs, to the point where it’s hard to actually determine who wrote the original post.

The reason that web content theft is a tricky subject is because there is a fine line between sharing content and stealing it. Sharing content is crucial for many online businesses because it spreads word of mouth about their expertise, products and services, but stealing can be detrimental to an organizations online marketing strategy.

So what’s the difference?

Sharing – Taking content that someone else has created it and sharing it to your friends or followers through social media sites, email, blogging or social bookmarking with PROPER ATTRIBUTION and credit to the content creator is sharing content, and it is a vital component of online marketing strategy.

Stealing – Taking content that someone else has created and copying and pasting it or reproducing it on your website, blog, social media accounts, email or social bookmaking accounts without attribution or credit to the content creator. This often results in the content thief passing the content off as their own. Content theft is especially common when it comes to blogging (as I mentioned before) because it is relatively easy to take a blogs RSS feed and reproduce it on another blog. This process is often referred to as “blog scraping.”

What is Blog Scraping?

Generally a person trying to use your blog content is trying to make as much money online as they can quickly and easily. These blogs will take the full feed from your blog and add that content to their website or blog using a free blogging platform (like Wordpress or Blogger) using their own domain name. Once the blog is posting your content, they then cover the site in multiple advertisements like those from Google Adsense. Besides the fact that stealing content is an extremely unethical practice, stealing content in this fashion is actually not very lucrative. Most search engines are smart enough to tell when a website or blog is posting duplicate content, which means that the website won’t rank well, and won’t get the traffic it needs to actually generate any payback.

Recently I was visiting our blog’s Feedburner account to monitor our blog’s analytics when I was pointed to the fact that our feed was being used for several “uncommon” uses. Google define’s uncommon uses as:

“FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.

Beyond these known places, FeedBurner can also help identify “Uncommon Uses” of your feed content. These references could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers want to see where their content is republished and it’s very helpful to have something like FeedBurner to provide visibility into usage. When FeedBurner identifies an “uncommon” use, we highlight it in your main Analyze tab Dashboard and in the detailed Uncommon Uses section within this tab as well.”

The answer goes on to explain that:

“You may ask what you can do if you see a domain using your feed in a way that you feel is not appropriate (e.g., the feed content is posted on the site without proper credit to the source of the material). In this case, you should contact the domain or the domain host and take up the issue with them directly. You may also want to use the FeedBurner Creative Commons Service (on the Optimize tab) which adds a machine-readable Creative Commons copyright license to your feed.”

When I checked to see what these uncommon uses were, I came across a blog that was blatantly making use of our RSS feed and posts without any attribution to us, not even a backlink to our website. After checking a little further it became obvious that the blog is making use of the RSS feed of several different (and some very recognizable) feeds without any credit due the authors (I must admit, I’m pretty interested to see how well they monitor this blog. If it’s done poorly, it’s going to be pretty amusing to see this post show up in their feed. I’ll keep you all posted).

I think you’ll see the irony in the fact that the website has a prominent link to a disclaimer stating:

1. Copyright, Licenses and Idea Submissions.

The entire contents of the Site are protected by international copyright and trademark laws. The owner of the copyrights and trademarks are (I've taken out the name of the actual blog, we're just spreading awareness in this post), its affiliates or other third party licensors. YOU MAY NOT MODIFY, COPY, REPRODUCE, REPUBLISH, UPLOAD, POST, TRANSMIT, OR DISTRIBUTE, IN ANY MANNER, THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE, INCLUDING TEXT, GRAPHICS, CODE AND/OR SOFTWARE.

So what should you do?

Well, that depends. There are several courses of action you can take against those that are misusing your content and they will depend on the severity of the theft and how seriously you take it. First, it’s important to say that content theft is definitely not an uncommon occurrence (no matter what Feedburner chooses to categorize it as). In fact, content theft is almost as common place as content creation. If something has been written on the web, then somewhere there is most likely someone who will consider stealing it.

If you want to take action against those using your content there are several things you can do:

• Place a copyright or creative commons image in your feed footer
• Link to your other blog posts
• Contact the owner of the domain 
• Contact the domain’s advertisers and alert them to the issue 
• Take legal action

Why shouldn’t you take the theft too seriously?

In cases of blog posts (like the situation with our blog) we’re not very worried about the theft. Why is that? Well, after doing our research, we can tell that it is very unlikely that search engines won’t pick up the fact that this blog is stealing content, but there are also several other reasons:

• For one thing, the blog has only been around for 2 months (search engines tend to give more credence to older domains)
• the blog is using duplicate content from several different websites
• Taking the time to deal with the theft is time we could be spending promoting our blog 
• Most search engines are smart enough to judge by the quantity of  backlinks where the post originated

So, long story short, content stealing is unethical and in the long term, really not that worthwhile and while it may be annoying, it’s most likely not going to affect your overall traffic. Having said that, if you notice that someone is using your content consistently and it is influencing you success, then it is certainly worth taking action against. Every situation is different and you’ll have to judge for yourself if it’s worth taking action or not.

Image by Nisha A. on Flickr.

The beginning of a New Year is the perfect opportunity to address and make changes to your current content strategy and to start implementing your resolutions that affect content. One of the biggest problems that many organizations face when it comes to their content is that it often begins to seem and feel repetitive or stale (even if it’s new content). Your content developers don’t have an unending reservoir of ideas, and often writers begin to fall into an uninspiring, uninventive content creation routine. To help you avoid starting 2011 off on a repetitive note, here are some of our best tips for writing inspiring content in the New Year.

What are some of the key elements of fresh content?

1. Strategic. Your content needs to fit and support your online strategy and your online strategy needs to fit and support your customers’ wants and needs. Your copy needs to make a connection with your audience, and if you’re consistently in tune with your visitors’ online interests then you should constantly be updating your content so it evolves along with what they’re looking for.
2. Search engine-friendly. It doesn’t matter if you’re constantly updating your content if no one can find it. Your SEO strategy and content strategy need to work together to ensure that your new content is getting the same attention as your older stuff.
3. Analytics-driven. Your analytics are your best source of information on what your customers want and need from you in terms of content. By analyzing how your customers find your content, what keywords they search to find it and which they find the most helpful, you can make sure that your continually writing content that your customers want.

What are some sources you can turn to for compelling content ideas?

1. News stories. Everyone wants to stay on top of what’s going on in your industry. Providing commentary and insight into what’s going on and how it’s going to affect your customers is good way to grab readers’ attention.
2. Popular industry blogs and websites. The popular blogs and websites in your industry are probably already doing something right in terms of content. Take a look to see what your customers are already reading and figure out how you can make that work for your content in your own unique way (tip: copying what other websites are doing isn’t a way to succeed, just use them for ideas!)
3. Social bookmarking sites. These websites are consistently updating what the general public (including your target audience) think is interesting at any given point in time and can help to keep your content current. 
4. Colleagues! Your colleagues are already interested in your space. Use them as a source of fresh ideas when you run out of inspiration. 
5. Social networks. Social networks provide a repository of hundreds of thousands ideas, opinions and news reports. Use them to get up to date on what people are talking about.

These certainly aren’t the only sources of content or key elements you can and should be using in your content but they are some of the most important in our opinion. Don’t start the New Year off on the wrong foot! Get your content working for you in 2011.

The purpose of the content on your website is to sell your company’s products or services to your website visitors, sounds easy right? Well with the enormous amount of copy and content on the internet today, it’s actually very difficult to write content that catches readers’ attention and engages them, however, there are some things you can do to help your website’s copy stand out and one of them is to tell stories.

Storytelling is one of the most well-recognized and compelling methods for engaging audiences. Storytellers have been around since the beginning of humanity and remain important because humans love being told stories. Most stories are filled with traditional techniques for influencing readers to help to convince them that your product or services are the best.

Stories are a natural part of daily life for most people. Audiences today are inundated with thousands of different stories on a daily basis through print ads, television, human interaction, novels and more. The powerful stories are the ones that grab people’s attention, that they enjoy participating with and are rich enough that users’ have an emotional reaction.  If you can use these methods when developing copy for your website, you can help persuade your audience, build credibility and trust, and create brand fans.

How can you use storytelling techniques in your copy?

1. Write a story that is relevant to your products and services. It’s great to write an interesting story on your website, but if it doesn’t support your marketing strategy then it’s not doing what you need it to do. Your story can’t just be interesting; it also needs to be convincing enough to encourage your readers to move to the next step in the buying cycle.
2. Speak to your key audience. A story is useless if it doesn’t make an emotional connection with your audience. Make sure that the story you’re creating speaks to your audience’s pain points. 
3. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of the story. Remember, your story is still meant to sell. Just because you’re writing a story doesn’t mean you need to write a novel. Keeping your copy concise is still important.

Writing stories in your copy isn’t as easy as it sounds. A story is only effective if it supports your overall web strategy. If your stories don’t sell, then they’re no more effective than story-less copy.

Image by jma.work on Flickr.

One of the most common goal marketers have when optimizing their websites is to increase their website's conversion rate. Every page on your website has a goal which supports your overall business objectives and encouraging your users to take actions which help you reach those goals helps your website's ROI. There are many ways that you can help to increase your conversion rate and one of the most overlooked ways is simply to optimize your web copy.

How can you write web copy that optimizes your conversion rates?  

1. Define your webpage’s objectives. If you don’t know what the goals of your page are, how can you successfully convince your readers to take the actions you want them to take to help you reach your objectives? Every page has a purpose. Defining that purpose for every page on your website before you start writing your copy is essential for getting your readers to do what you want them to do.
2. Highlight key points to get their attention. Writing catchy headlines that are easily distinguishable on your page is a good way to grab and hold your visitors' attention. Matching powerful words in a headline with your optimized web copy will help to draw your readers in.
3. Make your message clear and brief. Don’t confuse your readers! The simpler the better when it comes to web copy. Once you've defined your objectives you need to communicate your message with your readers as clearly and concisely as possible.
4. Focus on the benefits.  Your readers aren't going to take action based on what your products are capable of doing. They're going to take action because you've told them what buying your products will do for them. Providing the benefit of taking an action, gives your visitors a reason to act.
5. Make your copy actionable and urgent. Your job when writing web copy is to make sure that your reader knows what is expected of them on a given page. You want your visitors to understand almost immediately after landing on a page what you want them to do on that page.
6. Keep copy consistent across your entire website. You can’t just optimize your copy on one or two key pages on your website. This process needs to be a consistent theme across the entire website. If you don't and a visitor happens to land on a page that isn’t optimized you may miss out on converting them. 
7. Tell the truth. Don't lie to your audience. Stretching the truth to try and make your product sound better in your copy will not breed trust in your audience, and sours your prospects' experiences with your company from the get-go.
8. Write to and for your target audience. Using appropriate language, tone and writing style can help you communicate more effectively with your audience. If your readers don't relate to your copy, then they most likely won't convert on your offer.

The first impression you make on your visitors when they arrive at your website is crucial, but this is often more focused on the design aspects, which are the very first things that your visitors take in. What do you do once that initial impression is over? Does your website have the kind of copy that encourages your readers to stick around?

If you can’t keep your readers' attention then nothing else that you’ve done on your website really matters, and with the enormous amounts of competition available online, if you can’t keep your visitors interested, another website that potentially can is just a click away.

So, how can you help keep your readers attention?

1. Use Images. Images can create very strong emotional reactions in readers, leaving them open to the effects of your persuasive copy. With a great image you can capture your readers’ attention and build interest before they’ve even started to read your copy.  By creating an emotional connection between a picture and your copy, you’ve already engage your readers interest on a deeper level than your copy alone could.
2. Tell a Story.  Nothing illustrates a point like a compelling story. Content that is filled with specific real-life details is much more compelling than discussing general concepts and the more you can relate your copy to your reader by highlighting the similarities between them and your product, the more likely you are to encourage them to continue reading. 
3. Ask Questions.  Many copywriters will use questions to help relate website readers’ pain points with a company’s product or services. Asking questions can help to draw the reader in by helping them relate their problems with the solutions you offer, helping them to paint a picture and engaging their curiosity, after all, chances are that if you ask a question that’s relevant your readers are going to stick around to find out the answer. 
4. Include Internal Links. Including hyperlinks within your copy to other areas of your website can help your visitors navigate more easily, and can entice them to explore your website in more depth. If a reader arrives at a page and while reading sees a hyperlink to another area of your site that they find interesting it is easy for them to continue to browse the copy that your site has to offer. 
5. Avoid Using a Passive Voice. Using a passive voice results in your copy have more words than necessary while an active voice can help your copy be direct and authoritative.  Avoiding flowery copy and getting right to the point, is a good way to get the important information on your site across to your visitors and this is a key step in keeping their attention.

Here’s an example of active versus passive voice:

Passive: “The ball was thrown by the boy.”
Active: “The boy threw the ball.”

Grabbing your readers’ attention and encouraging them to stick around starts with having “sticky” website copy. Using these simple tricks to enhance your current web copywriting practices can help you increase the chances that your visitors will stay on your site rather than clicking away.

Your website’s copy is one of the most important aspects of your sales and marketing strategies. Content that is well written and user-friendly, encourages your visitors to interact with the copy on your website and hopefully to take the action you’re asking them to take.

You content is an important factor in your visitors’ interaction with your company online. If your copy is difficult to read or understand, if your visitors feel like it doesn’t relate to them or they can’t easily distinguish your offer, or value proposition then it isn’t d oing all that it can to help your online lead generation.

Here are our tips for making your content more user-friendly:

1. Keep voice consistent. Having a voice that is consistent across all your pages and which resonates with your target audience is one of the best ways to keep your content easy to understand. If you’re voice is constantly changing, or it doesn’t appeal to your key audience then it won’t be an effective selling tool.
2. Use active verbs. Using active words in your copy is essential to engage your visitors and encourage them to take action. Don’t let your readers be passive, instead encourage them to participate with your content by using active verbs. 
3. Check for errors. Your website should be free of all typographical and grammatical errors, but, no one is perfect. Make sure that you have you copy read, and re-read by multiple people to try and ensure that you catch every error before your content goes live. 
4. Don’t ask for too much commitment. Long blocks of copy require too much of a commitment on the part of your audience to get the information they’re looking for, or a better understanding of your offer. By keeping text skimmable using brief paragraphs, clear headings and bulleted lists you can encourage engagement by making it easy for them to get the gist of your copy. 
5. Keep your focus on your customer. Your content needs to be targeted towards your customers’ wants and needs rather than your company. Remember, you’re trying to sell to them, and prattling on about your company doesn’t encourage anyone’s interest. Make them feel like you understand their situation, their pain points and that you have the solutions to solve them. 
6. Explain benefits verified by features. Including product or service features which are verified by benefits, is an important way to make your content more user-friendly. If you’re not sure what the difference is between a feature and a benefit, of you’d like to read a little more on this topic, you can check out our blog post, “Product Marketing Tips: Writing Features Vs. Benefits Part 1”
7. Avoid keyword stuffing. It’s important when you’re writing your website’s copy that you’re aware of using your targeted keywords. However, keyword stuffing (over-using your keyword for SEO purposes) makes copy difficult to read and understand.  This tactic might help you SEO, but it won’t help your site’s usability, and once visitors arrive at your site, you still need to convince them that your product or service is right for them.  
8. Create clear calls-to-action.  Your calls-to-action represent the actions that you you’re your visitors to take once they get to your site.  Whether your call-to-action is a text link, a button or any other graphic or copy, optimizing them for effectiveness has a huge effect on whether or not your visitors will do what you want them to do on your site. Each page on your website should have at least one call-to-action and they should be clear about what they’re asking. If you want to learn more about optimizing your website’s calls-to-action you can read about it here.
9. Use links in your copy for ease-of-use. Using links within your copy to relevant areas of your website can make it easier for users to follow your copy. You can also use this technique to link to outside references that reinforce your points.

Image by Aturkus on Flickr.

Writing web copy is hard.

It's not just hard because it takes a lot of work, or because it's a continual, constant process. It's also hard because the amount of information available on the web means that to have any real impact your content needs to be really good and it needs to differentiate itself from the crowd.

Consistently writing fresh, engaging web copy, whether it's for you're website's homepage or your blog, can be a difficult task, and believe us, keeping up your creativity levels from day to day is no walk in the park.

But, before you get to scared away by the dire opening to today's post, it's time for the light in the dark. We have tips! Lots and lots of tips for writing that killer content that will leave your competitors in your metaphorical, internet dust and we want to share!

So, without further ado, here are our tips for creating killer B2B web copy:

1. Create content strategically. Every piece of web copy that you write needs to support your overall business strategy.  Your copy should be an active part of your overall web strategy, not just an afterthought. When writing copy, you need to keep the "big picture" in mind and make sure that your copy is a relevant piece of the puzzle. 
2. Write content that is actionable. Guess what? Copy that is useful encourages your readers to take action. If, after reading your copy, your readers aren't inspired to do something (even if it is just to change their mind) your copy is essentially useless.
3. Choose simple words. Demonstrating the size of your vocabulary isn't a necessary part of communicating the value of your products and services. People want the web copy they read to be easy to understand and absorb. Use simple words, be direct and you will be more successful.
4. Keep it short but sweet. This relates to the point above. Your visitors want your web copy to communicate your point in the smallest amount of words possible. Asking for too large a time commitment is a surefire way to lose readers. That's not to say that all copy benefits from being concise, but if you feel your copy absolutely needs further explanation, have a "read more" link for those visitors that are truly interested.
5. Write with confidence. You have confidence in your products or services, now you need to convey it. Confidence doesn't instill itself and without it, no one will pursue a business relationship with you. Tell your readers in no uncertain terms how you stand behind what you're offering (hint: explaining your company's guarantees is a great way to do this).
   
6. Make sure they know why you're special.  What sets you apart from your competition? Communicating your unique selling proposition is one of the most important ways to explain why your visitors should buy from you and it can instantly make your copy more effective.
7. Write informally. Often, businesses are too concerned with creating copy that is "professional" rather than "appealing." Unfortunately, these companies don't realize that if your copy isn't appealing, then it doesn't matter how professional it is. Your visitors want to read things that are easy and enjoyable to consume and one of the best ways to do this is to write copy that has a personal, informal tone. A common trick for this is to write the way that you speak.
   
8. Use their pain. This might sound a little sadistic but using your customers pain points in your copy is one of the best ways to explain that you understand their issues. If your visitors don't believe that you understand their personal problem then why would they continue to interact with your copy?
   
9. Set up a need. Once you've convinced a reader that you understand their pain then you can create a need that compels them to continue reading. Implying to to your readers that you have the solution to those problems and that they are going to miss out if they don’t keep reading is an important part of engaging your audience. 
10. Edit Ruthlessly. The first draft of any web copy is often complete garbage. Be completely cutthroat in your editing and shorten, delete or even rewrite everything that doesn't immediately jump out at you as compelling. We absolutely, 100% advocate getting someone else to read your copy before you publish it. Believe us, no matter how good a writer you are, you're still going to have a biased opinion on the copy you've written because you know what you're trying to say. 

Image by Leo Reynolds on Flickr.

Publishing your pricing for your products or services can be a bit of a touchy issue for many B2B companies. There is always a fear that putting your pricing “out-there” on your website can scare potential customers away if the price isn’t right, or that it will allow your competition to use that information against you. We’re here to tell you that, we don’t believe that. We actually think that publishing your pricing on your website can have significant benefits for your organization, we have our pricing published and it has helped us discover some of the key ways that it has helped our website conversion rates.

Web usability expert, Jakob Neilsen, has stated that not publishing prices on your B2B website is one of the number one mistakes that company’s make and,  according to Jakob, “Price is the most specific piece of info [sic] that customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line.”

We agree with Jakob and to help you understand why we agree, here's our list of 4 ways that publishing your pricing actually helps increase your website conversion rates:

1. It builds trust and brand confidence. If you publish your pricing on your website, it shows that you’re not afraid to stand by your products. If you are willing to publish a price (whether it is on the high or low end of the spectrum for your industry) it shows that you believe your products are worth that price. Displaying your prices with confidence breeds that feeling in potential customers.
2. It allows you to comment on your pricing. Publishing your pricing gives you the opportunity to explain how your prices are built-up. You are able to tell your customers which features they get for which price, differentiating your products within the market and keeping the buying cycle as simple as possible. Nothing is worse than reading about a product and finding out you can’t get what you want for a price you can pay.
3. It makes your promotions' value obvious. Publishing your pricing allows you to put on effective price-based promotions. Offering someone $200.00 off your products (for example) has little or no relevance if they have no idea how much your products cost in the first place. Communicating the value of your promotions can increase the leads they bring in. 
4. It forces your leads to qualify themselves. If a lead comes to your website and can’t find the pricing, they may take the time to contact your sales team for further information, only to find out that they don’t have the budget for your products or services. This wastes valuable sales cycles and time. By publishing your pricing, potential customers have the ability to qualify themselves as hot leads (if they like your pricing) or to go somewhere else if your pricing doesn’t work for their budget. Don’t be afraid of scaring people off! Customers that aren’t able to afford your products, or who are looking for the cheapest solution on the market, tend to be the ones who leave as soon as some less expensive option comes along.  

Hopefully, most of you have come to the realization by now that compelling content is an essential aspect to any effective website. It can help bring traffic to your site, it can help maximize the conversions you get from that traffic, and better yet, it can turn those leads into repeat, loyal visitors.

The ideas behind why you should create compelling content are well recognized, but how to do it? That’s where content strategy gets a little trickier.
 
There are hundreds of tips we could give you on how you can create content that draws customers to your site and then entices them to return, but rather than run through the entire list, we’ve picked the ones that we think are the most important aspects of a sustainable, content marketing strategy.

1. Understand what your customers want to read and then give it to them. If you give your readers something they want to read and educate them at the same time,  then it encourages them to return because it is in their best interests to do so.
2. Be committed to keeping your content fresh. It’s not just about having current content that draws a customer in once. You need to create content consistently so that they will keep coming back to see what else you have in store for them. 
3. Establish yourself as an expert, but don't self-promote. Does that sound like a paradox? It doesn’t have to be. Offer your visitors educational content that demonstrates your expertise but doesn’t blatantly self promote your products or services. 
4. Keep it short and sweet! Most of your visitors probably don’t have time to read your 10 page research paper. What they are looking for is concise, easy-to-read, tidbit style content that can give them the information they need at a glance, and without too much of a commitment on their part. This isn’t to say that those papers don’t have their uses, but the majority of your visitors are probably looking for content they can access and consume quickly and easily.
5. Put ownership in the right place. Content creation has become a collaborative effort (especially if your company uses a web content management system). This cooperative structure means that you can have the content writing spread among different owners, and put it in the hands of the people who are most qualified to write about specific subjects. For example, if you want to create a piece of content demonstrating how your customer service team deals with customer inquiries, why not have one of your customer service representatives write it, rather than a member of your marketing team?  When people write about topics that interest them, or that they have experience with,  they usually write content that is inherently more compelling to their audience. 
6. Plan ahead—way ahead. Remember, you’re not creating content because you want to land a sale in the first conversation like a used car salesman. You’re building a community of visitors, based around your content, who come to you because they trust you to inform them, educate them and answer their questions and in the long run, this will lead to relationships that drive sales.

Hopefully you found this post helpful. Make sure to check out the other posts in this series:

Start Fresh in 2010: A How to Guide on Redesigning Your Website for the New Year
Website Redesign How to Step 1: The Website Audit
Website Redesign How to Step 2: Website Design

We just finished our webinar, "Marqui's Recipe for Compelling Content" and we think it was a definite success.

This was the first webinar that I co-presented since coming to Marqui, and as a web content specialist here, many of the pains marketers face creating content hit really close to home for me. I hope that you all found our tips and insights helpful, and that our strategy pointers work for you as well as they work for us!

Content creation can be a major pain point for a lot of marketers, and we know from personal experience that creating a successful strategy for content can be a difficult and time-consuming task. To help out we decided to give a webinar which discusses the web content ecosystem and some tips for how you can create a sustainable content strategy that works.

The webinar focused on several major aspects of content creation:

1. What is the value of compelling content?
2. What does compelling content look like?
3. The common content creation challenges most marketers face.
4. Our recipe and ingredients for compelling content which included: frequency, consistency, consumption and expertise among others.

If you were unable to make the webinar, the recording is now available in our resource section.

If you did attend, please take a moment and let us know how we did. We love to hear from you!

One of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy is proper content management.

By developing sustainable creation strategies and understanding your visitors, you can engage your customers in meaningful conversations and help build relationships with prospects.

To help you develop a successful content creation strategy, we're holding a live webinar on Thursday March 18th at 10:30 am PST. During the webinar we're going to cover ways that you can:

• Create content your visitors want to read
• Engage your customers in a dialogue with meaningful content
• Ensure that your content is always "fresh" 
• Develop a plan to maintain your ongoing content creation efforts

You can register for the webinar here.