Beware the vanilla web site.

I call a sites “vanilla” sites when they possess no brand message, no individuality, no human touch. You’ve seen them, too. Maybe it’s the site of a company that wants to do business with you, or the site of a company that’s been recommended.

(If it’s your site, then read on. You don’t have to sink a fortune in order to break the vanilla routine. Com’n, add some sprinkles!)

Why am I being so critical of these sites? After all, most of us don’t have a fortune to put down for our web real estate. But I want to make the point that just because you have a web site does not mean that it is doing its job for you. Now’s the time to look at your site with an objective eye, and make some easy changes that will take you far in differentiating your company and your brand.

First, how do you know if your site is vanilla?

Your site is generically branded. The colors are discordant with the logo, or there’s no color at all. Ask a web designer to change the colors or change your theme so that your look is harmonious and alive. Note to DC company owners: there are other colors in the rainbow besides red, white, and blue. Really, I looked it up!

Your site uses stock art that you’ve seen elsewhere, like the parachuting team, the European models with shiny suits and long hair, or the woman drawing a flow chart that’s reflected off the photo. Don’t even talk to me about the peg people standing next to the bull’s eye!

You can find fresh stock art (not an oxymoron!) that’s inexpensive. We’re talking $3-$5 per download. Try iStockphoto.com and pay as you go. Be sure to check  how many times your chosen photos have been downloaded before you pay. Search for newer photos. Or take a fresh angle: Don’t use people. Use only extreme close- ups or partial faces, use only objects, go for black and white, or alter the photos with PhotoShop. Better yet, grab your digital and start snapping your office, your employees and yourself.

Each page is identical, except for the copy. Content is king but every king needs some company, like original photos, charts, and illustrations. A visually interesting site is fresh, with each page different than the page before it.

The content is lengthy, but doesn’t say much. What’s the point of your business web site? Does every content page reinforce your message in a fresh way? DO you get to the point, or do you waste your home page by thanking people for visiting. Have someone else read your content and ask them to edit all extraneous words and thoughts. Sales-y pitches are out. Straight talk is in. Tell your visitor why they’ve come to the right place, and reinforce that message on every page with helpful content that establishes your expertise and builds trust. P.S. if you have typos and misspelled words on your web site, shame on you!

Tired of writing copy? Grab your Flip and make a video for your home page, your product page, or your management team page!

Your navigation is confusing. Does a visitor arrive at a page, later to find that the birds have eaten the bread crumbs and the path is lost? I was on a site yesterday where the section tabs actually float, rearrange and disappear depending upon where I was on the site. (I thought I was losing my mind for a minute there.) Ask someone who has never seen your site to sit at the computer and find “x page” or “y topic”. See how long it takes them.

There’s a cool flash intro, but little else. Flash intros ­ really? I wish I had a dollar for every recruiter company site whose logo danced around my screen. Not only do these space-wasters kill your SEO, but they’re dated, and you’re losing precious time entertaining visitors who have numbed to hip music and colorful intros. Get to the point, before I click off your site and move on.

The point? We all need to stand out for the right reasons. For business web sites, those reasons should be positive, differentiating, and memorable.

Have an example of an overly used stock photo or web theme? Leave me a comment. I’ve posted some of my “favorites” below. (These are comps from iStockPhoto.com. They have lots of fresh photos, in addition to these moldy oldies.)

Personas

“….if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get on better with all kinds of folks.
You never really understand a person until you
consider things from his point of view
…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
- Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

This post is a continuation to my previous post, Developing an Effective Content Strategy. Today we’re going to discuss the importance of personas to the creation of highly targeted, customer-centric content.

A persona is the written and visual embodiment of each segment of your audience. Developing and using customer personas is useful to your marketing team in three ways.

1. Creating audience personas helps you to visual your audience segments as real, three-dimensional people. When you see your audience in this light, you can better understand what motivates them to buy.
2. Personas help you to see your web site and marketing collateral from your customers’ point of view so that you can provide information that addresses the needs of each audience segment.
3. The process of creating personas gets your team members on the same page, so that you can work through your different perceptions and create a cohesive marketing strategy. If you take the team approach, I recommend that you include a representative from your sales, product management and customer service teams so that you work from a well-rounded view of your customers.

How to Begin

Your task is to transform each customer type into a real person that you will record “on paper”, including as much information about them as you can.

Start with the facts. First, profile your customer data, such as percentages by job title and management level, gender, education level, geographical area, company size, etc.

Make a persona list. How many different customer types do you have? If your product is HR management software, you may be marketing to the influencer (human resources manager), secondary users (training managers), and the purchase decision maker (CFO). Three customer types, three personas. If you only market to HR managers, are they all from the same size company or industry? What are the logical divisions that would indicate you are dealing with different personas?

White board it. Working through one persona at a time, write down their profile data (see Start with the Facts, above).  Next, list their job pressures, pain points, buying power (decision maker/purchase influencer), responsibilities and interests. How do they like to purchase products? What industry sites do they visit? What magazines do they read? What associations do they belong to? What keeps them up at night? What would entice them to buy your product?

Create your profiles. This is where you write short narratives of two or three paragraphs, describing each persona. Use vivid imagery and tell a story about each person. We should feel as if we know each persona from reading your descriptions. You might even add a stock photo to each persona dossier, which personifies that persona. The object is to know your audience.

Using Your Personas in Your Content Development

Now you have a clear description and a personality on which to focus your content.

Talk to that persona as if you were having a conversation with them. Give them the information that they would need to choose your company and your products.

Next time Mapping Content to the Stages of the Buying Cycle

Not a Content Strategy

As organizations jump on the B2B social bandwagon, initial focus tends to revolve around which vehicles to utilize (Do we need a Facebook page? Is our audience using Twitter?), how often to blog, tweet, etc., and how cultivate a following.

In all the pandemonium, the pivotal component these companies overlook is content. Don’t make this mistake. A well thought out content strategy and content development plan will set you apart from those who opt to scour the web looking to re-purpose business content.  Why tweet on behalf  of someone else when you can leverage social media to spread your own messages? If executed correctly, a good content strategy will result in a strong following for your company and your brand.

Where to Begin?

There are several components of a solid content strategy:

•    Developing content for each buyer types

•    Mapping content to the stages of the buying cycle

•    Producing content in a variety of formats and media to suit different content preferences

Today’s post will focus on the first component, . Check back next week for posts on the other components.

Developing content for each buyer type:

Few companies have a claustrophobically-niched target audience, say: one-legged IT directors who run mainframes for online dating services and hate Star Trek. Even if you sell to one job function, like “IT Directors”, you can probably divide your IT directors into sub-groups. For example, let’s say you sell disaster recovery software to IT Directors. The IT director in a public institution, like a university, probably has very different concerns and pain points from the IT director that works for a high-powered Fortune 500 company. Yet both IT Directors may be in the market for disaster recovery software, and both may be your target, but you have to approach them with different messages.

Your audience may be broad, especially if you have a complex sales process spanning multiple departments and touching several decision makers.

For example, if your disaster recovery software is expensive, or has the potential to save a customer big bucks by minimizing down-time, than the CFO might need to hear your message as well. However, the message you send to the bean counter (product reduces the risk of lost people hours, less initial investment, lower total cost of ownership, SaaS equals savings) is considerably different from what the IT Director wants to hear (reduced IT hours to maintain, automatic updates, SaaS equals less headaches).

You should develop separate content, collateral pieces and even web site pages for each distinct audience.   Now, where to begin?

Next time: Creating Marketing Personas

Last Sunday was July 4th, a date that (for me) has always signaled the beginning of the end of summer.

Back when I was home for school vacations, I would count how many days until we had to return to class. Instead of living in the moment, enjoying my free time, I would wake up and think “only 5 more days till schools starts…” “Only 4 more days till school starts…”

How’s that for the glass being half empty! But that’s how I’ve always been wired.  Just when it’s hot as heck and the fireflies are out each night, I’m dreading the fact that soon, sandal season is over, the kids will be back at school and the leaves will start to blow. Good grief, it’s practically Christmas!

I may be a major bummer at times to be around, but I’m kind of like the squirrel hiding acorns for the cold  months, all the while scolding the carefree chipmunk (or was it a bear?) for not being prepared for the rough times ahead.

Which brings me (finally) to this week’s blog post.

You may not be thinking of reevaluating and investing in your marketing today. Business may be good for you right now. Sales team is humming. Phones are ringing.

Kewl. That’s great.

But what about in three months? New competitive offerings, foreign competition into your niche, new technology on the horizon. Maybe your key sales person jumps ship, taking her client list with her. One thing we know, thanks to Murphy, is that whatever could rock your world will rock it.

Look at your marketing strategy now. What’s your plan of engagement for the next 6-12 months. Make sure your visibility and engagement spans different channels, because if one well runs dry, you won’t have time to dig another.

A networking friend of mine told me over breakfast today that he is starting a blog that he described as “70% personal, 30% business.” He wanted to know if I think this is a good idea.  I think it’s an excellent question, and a good topic for today’s blog post! (Thanks John S.!)

If you’re thinking about starting a blog and you want to combine the professional with the personal, I have a word of advice: Don’t.

I recommend that, like my 12-year old, you never let your food (for thought) touch.  Don’t mix your personal and professional blogging.

Here’s my reasoning:

First of all, you’ll bore your friends.

Second, if your blog includes posts about your business as well as posts about, say, why you think that American Idol sucked this year, you risk branding yourself as “not to be taken seriously.” (Just look at Paula Abdul, no one takes her seriously!) Not a good idea if you expect to do more business as a result of your online literary efforts.

Now, you could create a separate blog category and call it something like “On a Personal Note,” so readers understand that this category’s content is not related to your business. If you travel this route, you should still avoid any subject matter that could be deemed questionable or offensive to customers.

Does using caution mean that your posts must be totally innocuous, limiting your professional blogging to product announcements and trade show reviews? Not at all! Professional blogs don’t have to be dry like toast. Blogging is the perfect vehicle for sparking controversy and debate. Stating your opinions makes for interesting posts.

Just be careful to only say in your blog what you would feel comfortable reading aloud at an industry event, or to a new client.

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there were two adjacent kingdoms, MarketingHeaven and SalesAPlenty. These two kingdoms lived in perfect harmony (hey, it’s my fairy tale!), exchanging services, marrying each other’s cousins and not interrupting each other in meetings. When SalesAPlenty wanted to sell oxen or unload a beachfront community, all MarketingHeaven had to do was fire off one well-appointed arrow and the right buyer was er… found. No hunting, no farming, no cultivation.

Life was good. Everyone prospered.

We now return you to real life. And the truth is that there is no Magic Marketing Arrow. There are many, many ways to generate awareness and demand for your company and products. There’s an ever-expanding variety of media in which to dabble, but no one knows for sure which is the best for your business and your goals until they set to work, read the results and refine for next time. Marketing is a continuous process of messages to blast, offers to offer, new buyers to consider, and an infinite combination of variables to test.

The mistake that companies (especially smaller companies) make is thinking that they will get the best results they can get the first time they invest in marketing. They hire an agency or consultant to put together a plan, execute the first part of the plan, then pull the plug if the initial results are not as promised.

From the marketer’s perspective, each test provides valuable data to apply to the next round of testing, so that each subsequent campaign is more targeted. Campaigns in one medium are synchronized with campaigns in others, and social media provides the continuous soundtrack to build community and get people talking.

Any business that believes in a magic marketing arrow is in for a rude awakening, and any marketer that tells you they know that the first marketing effort will be a charm is deceiving you. Set realistic expectations and a budget that you can support, then release the arrows and see where they land. Next time you’ll be that much more accurate when you launch.

And you (and your marketing team) will live happily ever after. The End.

I have a pet peeve that I inherited from my dad: people with weak handshakes. My father was a salesman; he shook many a hand in his lifetime. He told me, you can judge the merit of the person by the sincerity with which they shake your hand.

When I lived at home, I would tell a nervous boyfriend, “Make sure you give my dad a good firm handshake, and look him right in the eye!” When Dad met my future husband Fredrick, he said “I like him: he’s got a firm grip.”

Like many other traits and beliefs I got from Dad— like being left-handed and not trusting politicians— my belief in the importance of a good first impression has stuck with me, and I often wonder why some people, especially men, shake hands like they’re testing the bath water.

Your company brand and message are like that introductory handshake to prospective customers. If you’re wimpy about who you are, what you stand for and what you have to offer, the connection you make is insincere and ultimately ineffective.

Not sure what impression you make? If you’re a part of an organization, invite one representative from every department to sit in a room with a white board, and write down the answers to these questions. If you’re a one-person show, sit down with paper and pencil.

1. How do we create value for our customers?
2. Why are we different from our competitors?
3. Why do our customers keep doing business with us?

Now look at your company’s web site home page, brochures, proposal boilerplate, Facebook/Twitter page and other customer-facing marketing materials. Are you clearly and succinctly articulating your message, both visually and in your marketing language, or are you vanilla, trying to be all things to all audiences? Is the impression you make the impression that you want to make? If you’re not sure, ask your customers for their input, then go back and have another look.

Don’t let your communications hit your audience like a wet noodle.

Do you have other questions to add to my list for improving your handshake? Please leave me a comment.

Busy week, and it’s only Wednesday! (which is the new Tuesday, since Monday was a holiday— but then what to call Friday?)

I’m busy promoting my participation in an upcoming webinar with Dialog Magazine called The Clash of the Sales Titans, with Huthwaite CEO John Golden and Miller Heiman’s Sales Vice President Richard Blakeman. These are the two behemoths of sales effectiveness training, and they’re battling head to head on what makes a VIS (very effective salesperson). The folks at Dialog have asked me to present the marketing POV.

For those of you who don’t know this, I served as Huthwaite’s vice president of marketing for four and a half years, but that does not mean that I will be officially representing them. On the contrary, I will be on my soapbox for overworked, under-appreciated marketing teams everywhere. It’s our primary task to support our sales teams and drive revenue for our organizations. But we all wish it wasn’t so darned difficult to be heard, share ideas and get a little respect.

Some frightfully important reasons why you should register for this webinar:

1. The format: it’s a lively panel discussion, not a canned presentation.
2. It’s only 29 minutes! So in the time it takes to eat your Lean Cuisine at your desk, you can get some new ideas.
3. It’s controversial! Huthwaite and Miller Heiman have been neck and neck competitors for years! Will the fur fly?  Will they play nice?
4. It’s my first live webinar, so come and support me! I’ve produced webinars, created webinar presentations, and promoted webinars, but this is my first appearance.
5. It’s free!

What else is keeping me busy? A new client, a new writing project, and a presentation on sales and marketing integration that I am giving this coming Tuesday (the real Tuesday, not Wednesday’s Tuesday) for an area business group.

In my post, Relevancy for Muggles, I suggested we craft marketing content so that each audience segment we need to reach can find and relate to information specific to their needs.

Relevancy is a push/pull phenomena in that as media consumers, we all choose to view what is highly relevant to us and ignore the rest. When marketers stay the course and continually deliver good content, we become loyal consumers of that content. This is what makes social media so powerful; no longer are we given only a handful of choices (like in the ’80s when we read Newsweek or Time), we subscribe to RSS Feeds and ListServs and favorite bloggers (like yours truly…?) and follow an “unfollow” as the wind blows. It all hinges on what’s relevant to us at any given time.

By making highly relevant information constantly available, the relevant info sort of feeds on itself and becomes even more relevant. For example, a copywriter friend of mine sent me a link the other day to Marketo’s blog post  called 5 B2B Social Media Success Stories. One of the examples was about the company SAP and their community of 50,000 users. No sooner did I read that blog post than I got a call from a technology company that sells to firms who use SAP.  He wanted to know if I thought that social media as a good way to attract potential customers. I forwarded him that blog post as my response. (Yes!)

Today I read an email from a client who told me he’d be happy to participate in a webinar that I’d lined up. The next email I opened was a blog feed from Funnelholic titled 34 Tips, Tricks, and Thoughts for Better Webinars. Coincidence? Of course not.  Magic? Nope. Remember, we’re all mere Muggles.

Today, let’s look at how to land a date with your prospect! If you are married and are reading this post, carefully remove your wedding band (if it isn’t sandwiched to your finger) and place it on your mouse pad. Ready? Wonderful! Let’s begin.

Looking for services on the web is a lot like online dating. When a suitor (your prospect) goes to a dating site (search engine) such as Google or Yahoo, they type in basic attributes that they are searching for, and several hundred thousand “best matches” appear.

If you’ve done your SEO well, and have peppered your site with well-researched keywords, your site will show on the first results page. If you wrote your page description clearly and its content supports your keywords, then congratulations, you’ve scored a 30-second speed date.

Here’s where good looks come into play. Let’s forget for a moment what your mom told you about a good personality and a large wallet, looks are critical to getting the date. Your site must be attractive and articulated well visually.

However, when it comes to your web site, you must think of beauty and brains. You want your web site to look the part but without being so distractingly, blindingly beautiful or sexy that your suitor turns shallow and cares not for what lies underneath the bright colors and animation, such as your products, services and value proposition. Balance your creative brand with common sense so your prospects see value, not flash. Think of your web creative as Sandra Bullock, not Pamela Anderson.

Once you sell your prospect on the look and feel of your home page (which happens in about 3 seconds) they will begin to read. Here’s where compelling web content is crucial to keeping a prospect on your site. The best dating advice is to encourage your date to talk about themselves, and your web site is no different. Only in this case, the conversation is going on in the prospect’s head. “Do I like this company?” “Could I see this company again?” “Could I introduce this company to my clients?”

You want prospects to picture themselves doing business with you.

Your content must be benefit-oriented and client focused, not self-centered and one-sided. How do you provide value? How do you help customers? Are you ready for a commitment and long-term relationship? If your web site is all about you and your company, you’ll quickly become a bore and you’ll never get another date. Your prospect will swiftly seek refuge in the arms of a competitor who cares about their needs and feelings. Yes, I said feelings, because the decision to do business is largely emotional.

Are you ready to get out there and meet some customers? Great! Call Soapbox for your web site content so you can attract new customers. Oh, and don’t forget those breath mints!