Every industry has stats. Sports, automotive, financial, natural products, computers, education, music, you name it. They all have statistics and charts that show trends, sales, participation etc. Some of these are proprietary, while others are made public. Let’s focus on the public ones, since those are the ones you can use in your blog for content copywriting. These charts come with stories attached to them. Oftentimes, when they are published by the market research firm, they come with analysis which can help you get started. Here is an example of what I mean. This chart came from Natural Foods Merchandiser in their Market Overview issue. From this chart you can talk about a number of natural products marketing issues.
This post does not have to be long. The data alone is good information, and your insight positions you as a leader in that category. And best of all, you can do this in an hour or less. Blog writing made easy. Next Week: Commenting on other articles
0 Comments
About a week ago I witnessed the perfect webinar. It was HubSpot’s “Why Social Media is BS,” presented by Mike Volpe, the company’s VP of Marketing. For a few days I thought about why it was so successful, and couldn’t come up with anything other than I liked this and I liked that. That's when I decided to deconstruct it, so that I and other marketing consultants could apply what worked to future webinars. 1. The Title. It’s cheeky and somewhat controversial, especially when you consider that HubSpot is a big proponent of the appropriate use of social media within a marketing program. The title created an emotional as well as intellectual reaction (you should read some of the comments that came out prior to the webinar). And thousands of people signed up for it. 2. The Shameless Plug. At the beginning Mike introduces HubSpot and gives a very brief introduction to the company and its core belief. You need this to establish credibility, context and intention. In some webinars there’s too much company introduction and in others hardly any. This was about 2 minutes worth. 3. The Slides. They were a nice mix of humorous and serious, minimal text juxtaposed with clever images. This allowed the viewer to focus on something interesting (but not be distracted by the imagery) while Mike talked. In some instances it was just text, when a point or a list of tips was mentioned. There were a lot of slides (66 in total), so he kept up a nice pace – not too fast and definitely not too slow. (Below are the slides from SlideShare) Marketing Webinar: Why Social Media Is BS View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing. 4. Passion. There was no question Mike was passionate about his subject. He was not over the top, but his words and energy created a sense of urgency and knowledge. Too often in a webinar I lose track or get distracted because the voice of the presenter becomes drone-like. 5. Rhythm. A webinar is a performance piece. You’re trying to keep people’s rapt attention for an hour. You’re also making an argument or presenting a case, and if you loose their attention mid-way, they may not see the conclusion the same way you do. Mike set up a rhythm of introducing a strategy and then offering practical how-tos for each section. Each section was bite size, maybe 5-10 minutes in length – enough to make a logical argument for the strategy and then while its still fresh in your mind, a list of how-tos so you can actually implement those strategies if you choose to. 6. Weaving in Your Solution. Too often a webinar will present an “objective” concept for the first half and then the product solution in the second half. Mike had a point to make, which was that social media is just a piece of the marketing puzzle and should be fully integrated into a comprehensive inbound marketing program. It just so happens that HubSpot offers a great inbound marketing software platform. What Mike did was make a compelling case for a real business/marketing solution, showing the viewer why social media has to be integrated and why it works well with inbound marketing. So how do you implement that? Well, you have many options, and one option is with HubSpot. So whenever it was appropriate he showed how HubSpot could help. It was very natural, and it did not detract in any way from the objective value of the webinar. This is really hard to do, but Mike showed us all how it can be done. 7. The Final Offer. During the Q&A session, there was a slide for a free website assessment and a 30-day free trial offer. Everyone does this, and everyone should. If you have an hour and want to learn about inbound marketing and why just posting on Facebook or Twitter without an integrated approach is really not that valuable, I recommend you see this webinar. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. On this Monday, give yourself a break. Don’t wrack your brain trying to come up with something new or original. Today’s is content copywriting recycling day. If you have a webinar, white paper, speech, press release, case study, podcast, or a video, you have material for your next blog post, or more. The fact is your customers and prospects are a varied lot. Some prefer getting their information from video, some from a webinar, some from a white paper or ebook and so on. When you create any of these marketing tools the first time, you have content to recreate it in another form. Let’s say you’ve just created a webinar. Chances are each slide or pair of slides makes at least one point. That’s a blog post right there and at the end of the post you can point them to your archived webinar. White papers are a treasure trove for recycling. Often in a white paper you are logically setting up an issue which you solve. Just take the issue, briefly mention the solution with a link to the white paper and then ask your readership if they have any other solutions. Hopefully, that will encourage comments. Other recycling tips include:
So if any of you reading this have ever recycled content, let us know. Just think, you’ll be able to recycle it into our comments which will link back to your website. See how easy it is. Next Week: Love those charts. During the past two months I’ve attended both live and virtual trade shows. As a marketing consultant I worked the booths and made contact with other show attendees. While on the surface the experience might read the same, in reality there was no comparison. Let’s start with booth experience. In the live trade show, I worked in a worst case scenario. Our booth did not show up. We just had a table on which to put our information. No signage behind us. In the virtual show, everything was in place – our graphics, our downloadable material, even our video. Guess which one engaged those who came by? The live trade show – by a mile. To begin with, people walked by and actually noticed no graphics. There was also this thing called eye contact, which has been proven over the last few millennia to work pretty well. And when contact was made, conversations flowed. In the virtual event the only way I could make contact was by sending an invitation to booth attendees as they arrived, offering to give them information. They could ignore, accept or decline. Approximately 10% of those who entered our booth space accepted, and of those, 70% said that if they had any questions, they would ask. There were only a handful of meaningful interactions, and that’s the combined total of 3 virtual trade shows. Why was that? In a live event, people dress up and are completely focused on the event at hand. In a virtual event, people are in their offices or their homes. They are easily distracted. One guy actually put on his video cam, and I saw him in his t-shirt surrounded by the books and papers of his home office. That would have been OK, but even while we were conversing, I could tell he was distracted by other things going on. And he was on camera. Imagine the concentration of those who aren’t. In fairness, most of those who attend virtual events go for the educational webinars. But I’m not talking about attendees and their experience. I’m talking about exhibitors who pay to be in the show. So in the end, what’s the ROI difference? Going to a trade show and setting up a booth can be pretty expensive. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars, depending on your size and the number of people who people your booth. Having a booth in a virtual trade show still costs you money, but you don’t have to deal with any of the travel, lodging and meal expenses. So it’s a lot cheaper. You also can work out deals where no matter how many people actually show up at your booth, you can get the list of all attendees and email them after the show. Let’s say that list is 3,000, and let’s give the send a generous 33% open rate, and a respectable 5% click through rate. That’s 50 people who make it to your landing page. Now compute a normal conversion rate for your company, and you’ll see that you might get a handful of warmish leads. In a live event, you may get several hundred leads. Of those, most of them have discussed your products with you. You may even have been allowed to email or mail to the attendee list before and after the show. You probably also talked at length with existing customers – so you can add retention marketing into the mix. I’m not saying that a live trade show has good ROI, but compared to a virtual event, at least there are some sales to measure against cost. Yes, there are other factors to consider with having a booth at a virtual event – brand awareness, association with a newish technology etc. But ROI? Based on my experience, limited as it is, I’d still opt for a bricks and mortar live event over a virtual one. What do you think? Last Monday you came up with ideas for content by thinking outside of your company. This Monday you can find ideas for content copywriting by looking under your hood, so to speak. But let me digress for second. In creative writing classes, to get people warmed up, the teacher often offers the class a writing prompt. This could be a word or a short phrase: something like “telephone rang” or “the last thing I remember.” From there the writers have 6 to 10 minutes to write the first things that come to mind, and if possible to make a story out of it. They can use the phrase at the beginning, middle or end. It’s a lot of fun, and once you get over the initial panic, you would amaze yourself with what you can write in such a short time. Taking this notion of the writing prompt to copywriting for your business, I suggest you look at your keywords for your prompts. Behind (or under) every search optimization strategy there are your keywords – those words or phrases that you want to be found by. Most SEO specialists that I know recommend inserting keywords into your web text, whether that be a product page, about us page or a blog. Pretty basic stuff. What if you looked over your keywords and thought about making them the subject of your blogging? Here is what I mean. Let’s say one of your long-tail keyword phrases is ‘natural products for anxiety.’ Since you don’t want to focus too much about your products when writing your blog (remember valuable content is not about “me” but about the interests of your customers), think about the problems that your customers might have when looking for you. So here are a few prompts that can get you started:
Now pick one and write as fast as you can for 7 minutes, and then stop. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or anything else. Just write. By doing this you’ve put yourself into the head of your consumer. You may have a paragraph or a page of rough copy, which you can now craft into a more coherent blog post that: A) Includes keywords that help your search optimization B) Focuses on addressing a consumer problem C) Probably offers your product at the end as a solutionNot bad for 7 minutes of work. Next Week: Recycling content. |
AuthorArchives
June 2011
Categories
All
|