Red On Marketing Blog

B2B Companies Don’t Pick That Up - You Don't Know Where It's Been

Before you cut and paste, at least verify that the information is true

A year ago, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for several kinds of fraud and money laundering. People trusted him with billions of dollars, and he bilked them instead of investing it. What’s especially astonishing is how he managed to string them along for decades. Ever wonder how he got away with his scheme for so long?

One reason is that when a new investor came along, he saw the prestigious client list and figured Madoff must be all right. Surely those earlier clients had checked everything out, right? The problem is, some of those clients had relied on the famous names of even earlier clients. They never checked out anything, they just wrote out checks.

Recyling dangers

Here’s how this applies to b2b company marketing materials: A lot of people make the same mistake when they start gathering material for a blog or a web page. They see a great item elsewhere on the Internet, and with a few clicks of the mouse they copy and paste it into their own file. Surely the other guy knew what he was talking about, right?

Nope. Very likely the other guy stole it from an even earlier appearance on the Internet. Even if the other guy said where the information originated, you still can’t trust it. He might have stolen the attribution, or he may have garbled things in an attempt to put it into his own words, in the course of internet marketing.

Oooo, shiny!

In some ways, we’re like little kids who see something nifty on the sidewalk and want to play with it. As Mom always said, “Don’t pick that up; you don’t know where it’s been.”

Earlier this year I spent the better part of an afternoon chasing down a statement that supposedly appeared in a “recent” issue of a national magazine. I thought it was a great item. So did about 20 different bloggers and companies who posted the same statement, word for word.  Not one of them cited a specific publication date, or even the name of the article. Finally I tracked it down in the footnote of a book. The “recent” article had appeared in 1989. Even with that, I couldn’t find out who the author was, or if he was quoting someone else.

Stats sleuthing

Here’s a great bit of sleuthing that illustrates my point. Mel Gosling and Andrew Hiles tried to track down the origin of some oft-repeated stats, such as the claim that "over 70 percent of businesses involved in a major fire fail within 3 years, if they ever re-open at all."

In many cases, the folks presenting the stats online couldn’t say exactly where they came from. They saw it, they copied it, they repeated it. Who bothers checking out whether it’s true?

R.e.s.p.e.c.t. yourself

Now, maybe you don’t care about putting junk in your blogs or your web site. Maybe you are just looking for something that sounds good. Maybe you are so anxious to make a point that you’ll grab anything that seems to support it, even though you have no idea where it came from.

More likely, however, you want to be seen as a real authority. In that case, take the extra time to find out where your information originally came from, and whether it’s true. Yes, that means extra work during blogging, SEO copywriting, etc. It’s worth it.

Sleuthing assignment

Here’s a homework assignment: The next time you come across a statement that you’ve always accepted without question, see if you can find out where it originally came from. You may find out that it doesn’t have the pedigree you thought it did.

B2B PR: Get inside reporters' heads to grab their attention

Can you get reporters at top-tier business publications to take you seriously? Of course you can.

Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story

Not every B2B marketer has worked previously as a news reporter. Few news reporters have ever worked in a marketing consulting company.

Is it any wonder that sometimes the two don’t get along very well?

That’s only the half of it. Say you are an account assistant in your mid-20s, pitching ideas to the top-tier business publications with reporters who have been covering your client’s industry since you were in junior high school. Can you get them to take you seriously?

Of course you can.

One key is to pitch with authority rather than bravado. Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story, then gather some information yourself.

Who

Within the publications or blogs, who writes about your industry? Names are important, so get them right. I’ve known several co-workers who would save the most outrageous misspellings of their own names and tape them to their computer monitors. You can bet they remembered who sent the worst howlers.

What

Now you know who covers your industry. But what aspects does each person cover? Some may look only at the stocks of public companies in your industry. Others may look only at new products. In this age of layoffs, one person may have to do it all. Know before you pitch.

When

Even with the Internet available 24/7 to showcase their prose, writers and bloggers have deadlines. Find out what they are. They may have special reports of publications scheduled throughout the year. See if they’ve posted that editorial calendar online. If you are trying to get them to interview the CEO of your client company, first make sure the CEO will be there to pick up the phone or see any incoming email.

Where

Some organizations cover the world, others cover only the United States, still others stick to a region. If you want to get a Boston company noticed, don’t waste the time of a writer who only covers Northern California -- unless the Boston company is opening a San Francisco office, or just landed venture capital from a firm in Silicon Valley.

Why

Readers turn to business publications for a reason. Usually, they are looking for a way to make money. How is your pitch going to help the readers do that? Nail this one and you can get a writer’s attention fast. Remember, a story doesn’t have to be a profile of the client company. If the client CEO can speak as an industry expert about current trends, that’s gold.

Proceed with caution

Those are some Do’s. Here are a few Don’ts:

• Don’t rush things. Research takes time, but it’s a good investment. You may discover that you don’t have anything right now that’s likely to interest your target writers. It’s better to wait until you do, instead of annoying them with an idea that’s off the mark. Likewise, good relationships take time to build. The salty reporter has to learn to trust you. And you have to learn to trust Old Salty. It won’t happen on the first phone call or email.
• Don’t ask, “Will the story be positive?” For one thing, what’s positive to you might be negative to someone else. Suppose office space is getting cheaper to rent. That’s negative if you own a building, but positive if you are looking for space. A good reporter will write an honest story and let readers love or hate the facts as they wish. But even if a reporter knows what kind of reaction to expect, that might change during the reporting as new facts come to light. So don’t expect the writer to know how your client will be perceived.
• Don’t be a control freak. Guide, yes. Control, no. Let’s say the reporter asks you about something the company would rather keep quiet for right now. You might be tempted to say, “If you hold off, we’ll give you an exclusive.” The problem is, you can’t really control that. Think about it: The reporter already heard about it. So the story already is floating out there. How are you supposed to control whether somebody else gets wind of it? Reporters want to report news, not the CEO’s second-day reaction to a story that somebody else ran with while the first reporter was waiting for you to give the green light.

Now get out there and win one

Follow these simple tips ... and you still won’t bat a thousand. Nobody does. Even Old Salty strikes out sometimes when he’s pitching an idea to his editors.

Your thoughts?

B2B Website Disasters (giant blobs and other sightings)

Repel visitors with ease

By Rebekah Donaldson*

(*Note: To develop this article, I took Writing Web Content for the Online Reader by Cris Rominger and turned it inside out.)

Websites have been a standard business marketing tool for more than a dozen years, and yet some folks still don’t know how to present material well on the Internet.

People don’t look at the computer screen the way they look at the printed page, or even the television set.

The web demands its own approach if you want your content to grab the eye and get attention.

With that in mind, you may be headed for a B2B website disaster if you:

Get stingy with hard facts

Business-to-business buyers are information hounds. They spend a lot of time researching, evaluating, and compiling information online because it helps them make decisions. According to Enquiro research, a full 92% of respondents turn to online resources in the early stages of the buying cycle. What b2b folks don’t like is promotional fluff, mission statements, and other marketing blah blah.

Throw giant blobs of text at your visitors

As information seekers, we’re goal oriented, impatient and critical. We scan rather than read. People have a hard time dealing with more than 100 words in a solid block, according to Crawford Killian, author of Writing for the Web. (Also check out Killian's fiesty post How not to write for the web -- I'm e-swooning.)

If you have more to say, break the chunk into two or three paragraphs, each with a subhead, all surrounded by lots of white space.

Avoid transitional phrases so your content chunks can stand on their own. Information on the web works best in modular rather than linear style.

Take your time getting to get to the point

Heat maps and eye tracking studies repeatedly show that headings grab our eye. To leverage their impact, use descriptive phrases that tell the reader what the content is about.

Place information carrying words at the beginning of headings to quickly convey meaning and use language your readers understand. If they "pick up an information scent" (Cris' term), they’ll drill down. And if they find relevant information that serves their needs or interests, they’ll read.

Write in a flowery style

Use strong verbs. Write in the active voice. Get to the point. "Marketing prose" does more than slow readers down. It annoys them.

Make readers work for information

Help the reader learn what the paragraph is about by using boldface type for information-rich keywords.

But don’t go overboard. Too many bolded words are distracting and hard to read. Use bulleted and numbered lists when appropriate. They rank right next to headings as the most-scanned areas of a page. Bullets are a great place to convey key benefits.

Consider tables for voluminous information. Tables or matrices can quickly convey and compare information that is easily lost in text.

Make the page too gray

Use photos, graphics, and captions to guide the eye and reinforce your message. They are called anchor points. They are the places where we start looking at a page.

Don’t worry about the design

A sloppy or confusing design hides your message. A good design instills confidence and trust. The right visual segmentation and hierarchy will help readers see how to interact with you.

B2B Companies, Look Out Behind You

It may be time to give your marketing materials a refresher

By Robert Celaschi

If you check out the little bio under my photo at the bottom of this article, you’ll see that “Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years...”

But it’s not true.

The fact is, this month marks 25 years since I started writing for business publications. I bring it up not to brag, but to point out how easy it is to let the details of marketing copy slip out of date. Where did the last three years go?

Even after all the research, all the editing, all the nice graphic design, you still need to keep an eye on the finished product to make sure it doesn’t get left behind as the rest of the world marches on.

Often it’s the little things that trip us up. For instance there’s that little line on most newspapers and magazines that says something like, “Vol. XXVI, No. 49.” Every edition should get a new number, and the volume number typically changes ever year or six months. It’s so easy to forget to change the number that many publications make part of their standard production checklists.

Even then it’s too easy to let the mind coast. I have seen weekly publications that dutifully change the number of the edition each week: 49, 50, 51, 53, 54 ...

Eventually someone says, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to change the volume number after 52 and start over with 1?”

Your turn

If you have been using the same marketing copy for more than a year, go back and read through it with a critical eye.

• Have any of the facts changed since they went into the brochure or onto the website?
• Do the photos and graphics still show reality? (Of course we assume that they did originally)
• Do the press release dates include the years?
• Do all your web links still go where you think they do?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

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B2B Copywriting: Wide Load Ahead

Have pity for the poor sentence that is asked to do too much

By Robert Celaschi

I did promise not to get all grammatical in these blog posts, and I'm not going to bring out the chalkboard today. I'll only make a quick mention of nouns and verbs. You can say a lot with just a pair of nouns and a verb.

You probably remember: A noun is a thing, and a verb is what the thing does. If you have a company - for instance, Niftycorp - that's a noun. If you introduce a product, "introduce" is a verb. And "product"? That's another noun.

Now, in a product announcement you need a few additional words or else you'll sound like Tonto: "Mmmm, Kemosabe. Niftycorp introduces product." But watch out when you start loading up the sentence with details.

Here’s how it typically starts. Your company is announcing its brand new line of framdoodles. You start writing,

“Niftycorp has introduced its new line of framdoodles.”

It’s better than Tonto, but still not very good. It does tell me what the product is, but it doesn’t tell me what’s so new and special about it. So you expand it to,

“Niftycorp has introduced its new line of color-coded framdoodles.”

Ah, that’s good. Of course we have to include our trademarked product name:

“Niftycorp has introduced its new line of Framtastik® color-coded framdoodles.”

Oh, and don’t forget that the Big Boss wants us to play up the product’s durability.

“Niftycorp has introduced its new line of Framtastik® shock-resistant, color-coded framdoodles.”

But wait, there’s more!

While you were writing all that, a few more important people have weighed in with their suggestions. Before long, you have an announcement that says,

“Niftycorp has introduced its new line of Framtastik® shock-resistant, color-coded, industrial strength, environmentally friendly, anodized, high-throughput, permeable framdoodles.”

Of course, you can’t pass up a chance to tout the company itself. And you need to identify your target audience. And you want to show the company’s reach.

So:

“Niftycorp, the leading provider of provision leadership solutions to the cost-object deliverables industry in the greater tri-state metroplex, has introduced its new line of Framtastik® shock-resistant, color-coded, industrial strength, environmentally friendly, anodized, high-throughput, permeable framdoodles.”

If you can’t tell yet what’s wrong with that, try reading the sentence out loud. Now try doing it in one breath.

Yes, you have many important points to convey. But when you try to make everything stand out as important, nothing stands out as important.  So start with a couple of nouns and a verb. Lightly sprinkle them with one or two ultra-important bits of information, like the product name and what’s new about it. Save the other important information for later sentences.

Your turn!

Pick up some of your marketing materials and read them out loud. Do you start stumbling over sentences that are trying to do too much? Do you run out of breath? If so, take a deep breath and start splitting the message into manageable loads.

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

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B2B Email: Your subject line can kill your pitch (or, Hi, I want to talk to you about … uh, stuff)

By Robert Celaschi

Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.

What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.

I’ll confess I’m sometimes guilty of sloppy subject lines. I’ve struggled and sweated to craft the right message. I’ve set the right tone. I’ve targeted the right people. I’m ready to press the “send” button and then — oh, yeah, gotta put some kind of subject line on this puppy. Zip-zip-zip, done. Instead, I should take even more care with those precious few words that may determine whether the email even gets opened.

Let’s look at a half-dozen real subject lines that real marketing people emailed to me in the past month.

Subj: New Dilemma For Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment

Huh? Let’s see: I gather that there’s a new dilemma of some sort. For whom? Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment. Uhhhhhhh, sorry, does not compute. This one would work better with a simple colon after “Business.” Not great, but better. The story is about businesses transferring the leases on company cars, because they’ve laid off so many of the workers who used to drive them.

Subj: Non-Profit

That’s it, just “Non-Profit.” There are a lot of nonprofits out there. They do a lot of different things. I had to dig way, way down to discover that this nonprofit is a foundation that helps children. They are holding a fund-raiser this month in Miami. If I hadn’t picked this as an example for the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered to find out any of that.

Subj: Survey: A Quarter of Firms Scaling Back Training

A direct hit. Tells me everything I need to get started. Now I’ll open the email and find out the details. Whoops — turns out that while 26 percent are cutting back their training programs, 28 percent have expanded. But, hey, they got me to read it.

Subj: Boston – Social Media Capital?

I don’t like questions for subject lines. Why are you asking me? Don’t you already know? If not, go do some more research and get back to me.

Subj: Time for Change in Credit Card Game

Maybe it is indeed time for a change in the credit card game, but since I have no idea what this means, it’s hard to say. The easy fix here would have been to condense the first line of the enclosed press release: Consumers now can say “no” to credit card interest rate hikes.

Subj: July home sales increased 12 percent; median home price declined 19.6 percent

This one delivers. I feel like a double winner, because I learn about sales volume and about price. This is about the California housing market, by the way. Bad news if you are a seller with a fat mortgage.

Your turn!

OK, you get the idea. Now take a look at the email you’ve sent in the past month. If someone didn’t already know your message, would they get the right idea from the subject line?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

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“Solution” is not the solution in B2B marketing communications

By Robert Celaschi

I won't buy your product or service if you don't tell me what it is.

Fun and games!

Here’s a fun game:

Guess what each company is selling, using these lines from their press releases.

“…an expert in the image solution arena.”

“This is a result of an improved customer focus and strong actions to improve our solution competitiveness.”

“… delivers business-aligned solutions

“… a provider of mobility solutions”

And my favorite of the moment:

“… a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries.”

Believe it or not, these companies sell specific things: elevators, servers, computer consulting services, camera phones, iPhone applications.

Drifting off message

I know how we got here. Back in the mists of the 20th century, some truly brilliant marketing folks got the idea that their company did more than push a product out the door; the product actually solved a problem for their customers.

“Mr. Customer, we aren’t just selling you a widget polisher, we are providing a solution to your scuffed-widget problem.”

But somewhere along the way, companies got so fixated on “solution” that they forgot to say what they are selling.

Think about the marketing material you are writing right now. When it falls into my hands, it may be the first time I have run across your company, and I’d really like to know what business you are in. But I don’t have time to play detective. Tell me the specific product or service, preferably near the start.

If you want to call it a “solution” later on, that’s fine.

Reality check

Here’s your homework assignment: Pick up some of your marketing materials and look at them through the eyes of someone who never heard of your company. Is it clear from the start what you are offering? Or are you merely providing vague “solutions” for an undefined problem?

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Copywriting marketing materials? How to speak prospects’ language

By Robert Celaschi

Copywriting marketing materials? The challenge is to ensure prospects are informed, not befuddled. An expert marketing copywriter gives tips on speaking their language.

Fans of Steve Martin might remember his plumber joke, supposedly told for the benefit of all the plumbers in the audience. It’s actually a joke about the disaster of using language that people won’t understand.

The joke

“This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch gangly wrench. Just then this little apprentice leaned over and said, ‘You can’t work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch wrench.’ Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, ‘The Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.’ Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, ‘It says sprocket, not socket!’”

[Worried pause.]

“Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?”

Hitting the mark with marketing materials

When you are putting together materials to market your company, think about the audience you are reaching out to. When you talk about “plants,” will they assume you mean botanical or manufacturing? When you mention the AIA, will they know which AIA you mean? There is an American Institue of Architects, an Aerospace Industries Association, and other groups going by the same initials.

If your target audience is new to your product or service, help them get on board. They won’t be impressed if you dive right in with details about Langstrom wrenches and Findlay sprockets. They’ll be baffled, and they’ll go looking for some other company that they can understand.

On the other hand, your target audience may know more about Findlay sprockets than you do. In that case, they’ll appreciate you using their language. If you oversimplify your pitch, they might think you don’t respect their expertise.

Marketing copywriter’s reality check

There’s no standard formula for finding the middle ground between talking down to your audience and talking over their heads. But there’s one good test to see whether you’ve hit the mark: Ask them. Show a rough draft to a few people in your target market and ask them what they think.

Have you tested your marketing materials with someone in your target audience? Are there times when you need separate materials for the newbies and the veterans in your audience? Please comment.

Help with marketing materials

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B2B content: search and destroy

By Robert Celaschi

You want your marketing materials to carry a wallop, right? So don’t waste words. Here are three words that are almost always a waste. Take a few extra seconds to get rid of them, and nine times out of ten you’ll improve what you just wrote. 

 

“Situation”

“Situation” isn’t such a bad word by itself. But it’s usually a big waste when it’s bolted onto another word. For instance, how is an “emergency situation” any worse than a plain old emergency? It isn’t. That’s always a good way to tell if you’ve padded out your writing with useless words: If you can chuck the word without changing the meaning, you didn’t need the word in the first place.

I’ve heard advice about how to handle a layoff situation. I’ve seen TV news reporters talk about flood situations. I’ve read blogs describing a hoax situation. They don’t fool me. These are just garden-variety layoffs, floods and hoaxes.

“Process”

It’s the same drill with “process.”  Here’s a fun video about choreographed ball-passing. Notice that the choreographer isn’t content to merely start rehearsals. No, he starts the rehearsal process. Remember the flood situation from a few sentences ago? It’s almost always followed by a cleanup process. How about the interview process? The reading process? Engage in the thinking process about that.

“Facility”

“Facility” takes a little more thought. If you run across something like “nursing home facility,” you already know what to do. But sometimes facility is hanging out there all by itself. In those cases, you still take it out, but you have to put something in its place. 

But what? Try this little exercise. It works better with two people, but you can do it by yourself in a pinch. Close your eyes and have somebody read the following list of words out loud, slowly. Pay attention to mental image you get when you hear the words:

• Gas station
• Hospital
• Ballpark
• Laboratory
• Restaurant
• Church
• Facility

If you got any kind of mental picture for “facility,” you have a better imagination than I do. Just about any building (or group of them) is a facility. So the word doesn’t mean anything in particular. If you see “facility” in your blog, brochure or other writing, try to picture what kind of facility you are talking about, then use that word instead. 

Of course, someday you may find yourself writing about a combination gas station, church and restaurant. Don’t rack your brain. Call it a facility and move on.

Other words and phrases

Can you think of some other words and phrases that don’t really mean anything? Sure you can. There are lots of them.

Someone always pays

By Robert Celaschi

By now almost everybody has heard the Internet mantra that “information wants to be free.” What it really means is, “I want someone else to foot the bill.”

Advertisers paid for most distribution…

There’s nothing new about that. It’s how radio and television have always worked in the United States. The audience never paid for the broadcasts. Advertisers did. The model wasn’t much different for newspapers and magazines. The subscription price covered only a small fraction of the cost of making and delivering the product. Advertisers paid the bulk of it.

The same principal drove the press release and the story pitch. You tried to coax an editor into assigning a story that featured your business or executives. Advertisers covered the cost of getting it out to the world.

The difference on the Internet is that advertisers aren’t nearly as willing to pick up the tab. It’s true that they are starting to support some video sites. If you want to watch shows on Hulu, for instance, you have to sit through commercials. But you probably haven’t been using TV sitcoms as a conduit for your business-to-business marketing.

Selling content gets tougher

Newspapers and magazines are having a tougher time convincing advertisers to pay big bucks online. Most don’t even charge a subscription fee from online readers. And those that do are still working out the bugs.

Businesses are in a slightly better position for getting the word out. There’s already a structure in place for selling content such as whitepapers (see examples). People recognize that it’s worth paying money for. Most businesses also are used to footing the bill for straight marketing materials and press releases, and build it into their budgets.

DIY-ers can flourish

Now it’s time to apply that thinking to areas where you used to rely on coaxing an editor or reporter into telling your story.  As that platform shrinks, other opportunities arise for a do-it-yourself approach.

First, the Internet has made distribution relatively cheap and easy.  Today you can make information available to millions of people around the world without having to own a printing press or a broadcast tower. The White House, for instance, is going straight to the public by posting candid photos straight to a Flickr account.

The lower cost also has inspired the creation of new ways to pass information around, including blogs, Twitter, business networking sites such as LinkedIn, and social networking sites such as Facebook.

Who pays to build the audience?

But now you’ll get stuck with the bill for some of the functions you used to hand off to the print or broadcast media: gathering useful information, organizing it, and presenting it in an attractive way to an audience. You need people to write the profiles and cases studies, others to provide photos, still others to make the material easy for search engines to find on your Web site, and to bring items to the attention of bloggers and people seeking information through social media.

Information has never been free. All that’s happening now is a shift in who pays for it. Don’t let that chase you away from opportunities.

Do you have some tips to share about how you are getting someone else to foot the bill for your marketing efforts? For instance, maybe you’ve made presentations at a conference. Who paid to gather the audience? Not you.

How are you beefing up your marketing budget to deal with the changing media landscape?

How are you getting somebody else to foot the bill for your B2B marketing efforts?

NOTE: This post is Robert Celaschi’s first bylined contribution to the B2B Communications Red On Marketing blog.