by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 27, 2015 |
Imagine a line-up of creative, inspiring individuals with eclectic interests. Each person will go onstage to deliver a five-minute presentation—a mini TED talk—with slides on the subject of their choice. The Secrets of the Winning Handshake. Eating Animal Parts and Feminism. Seeing the Unseen. Delving into the World of Anime.
Now imagine the guy from junior high among them, the one who lived for weekend math Olympics: big hair, chunky glasses, utterly indifferent to girls or fashion. Now he’s an exuberant 20-something, practically diving onto the stage (too many cans of Red Bull?) and he’s announced the title of his presentation: Parasitic Wasps are Awesome!
WTF?
Like I said: WTF? He is psyched and passionate about this curious genre of wasps, like the one that inhabits a caterpillar, then makes it change colors and do weird situp tricks. Parasitic wasps are AWESOME! We watch crazy slides of wasps at their weirdest flash up on the screen. Hands down this is cooler than anything I’ve ever seen on Animal Planet. How about this wasp: It immobilizes a cockroach, drags it around by its antenna—like a dog on a leash!— and then colonizes its body. Gross, but AWESOME! This guy’s enthusiasm is viral, his audience is mesmerized. He can’t wait to tell us more, racing from one slide the next, punching the air and lighting up the screen with his mantra: Parasitic wasps are AWESOME!
Can’t Get Those Wasps Out of My Head
Parasitic wasps are AWESOME! stuck with me in the days that followed. I told friends about it. I Googled it. I watched it again on You Tube. Not so with the 13 other presentations that faded into a vague recollection of thinly veiled platforms for self-promotion. Then it hit me. To feed the growing appetite of social media, Parasitic Wasps Are AWESOME is a winning formula. It’s an original mix of unexpected, fascinating, and above all, absolutely genuine marketing content, bundled together with humor.
Sometimes It’s An Insect, Sometimes It’s Also a Marketing Content Moment
What’s the take away? With the accelerating demand for content marketing , there’s a lot of unexplored territory out there. Take your audience on an adventure and don’t take yourself too seriously. Make it fun, make them laugh, and make it compelling.
And never forget: Parasitic wasps are AWESOME!
by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 24, 2015 |
Coming up with one sentence that conveys the value that a product or service delivers to customers and how it is different from competitors can be very challenging. So challenging in fact, that many companies skip this step altogether. As someone who creates messaging and positioning statements for a living, I’m always trying to see if I can reverse engineer a company’s marketing message by looking at their website content. More often or not, as much as I try, I cannot find that single sentence that tells me:
- What is the product or service
- Who is the product or service intended for
- What benefit is delivered
- What results can be expected
Put like that, it seems pretty simple, right? Believe me when I tell you that it takes focus and discipline to craft a marketing message that resonates with customers. This is particularly true if your product is not yet in the market.
Having a messaging framework is REALLY important
Once in place, though, a messaging framework is an invaluable tool for content creators. Not only does it provide the structure and high level content for creating web copy, data sheets and customer presentations, but it ensures that all derivative content created by other roles in your organization and/or partners is aligned with core messaging. And it is critical that customers and other stakeholders receive a consistent message about the value of your product or service each time they interact with your organization.
Creating messaging is not a ‘once-and-done’ exercise
But messaging is not a one-time exercise. Market conditions change. The way customers use your product or service over time may change as you add more features/benefits. Your sellers are talking to your customers every day. They know what ‘works’ and what does not ring true. Your Customer Advisory Board and user groups are also an invaluable source of intelligence that can inform your messaging over time.
Run messaging by SMEs and sellers
Boost! recently had the opportunity to help a client with a decades old highly profitable offering reboot messaging. First, we constructed a messaging framework by working from existing web copy and datasheets. Predictably, there was little messaging consistency across the various channels and writers had drifted from the framework over time. We also reviewed the marketing messaging of key competitors.
Next, we created a new straw man messaging framework based on interviews with the core marketing team. Then we set up a Content Reviewer’s Board which included relevant subject matter experts and more importantly, key members of the sales organization. We worked iteratively with the Reviewer’s Board until everyone signed off on the new framework. Finally, we asked the sellers to test the messaging with customers.
Use the framework to create new content
Once the final messaging framework was in place, we created a brand new set of customer-facing sales tools including new web copy, customer presentation and datasheets. Of course, we ran each piece of content we created through the Reviewer’s Board to ensure that it would have the maximum impact with customers. We also made sure that the messaging framework is available to other content creators within the organization as well as partners who resell the offering.
Take the challenge
I am challenging you to look at your own website and customer collateral. Call us if you messaging is outdated or inconsistent. We’d love to bring some focus and freshness to this critical part of your marketing mix. Learn how else Boost! can help your organization today.
by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 21, 2015 |
It’s a decision companies sometimes make to save money and support that friend and his cousin. After all, getting a web site going and getting into the online marketing game makes good business sense since so much of the customer journey happens online these days. And sometimes, the cousin is brilliant at what she does, understands digital marketing and the web site performs well in all the areas it should. But not always. Here’s the story of what went wrong for one company site we analyzed a few months back.
The company is a mid-level service provider with revenues over $100 million. It’s well known in its field and has service providers on board doing excellent and important work. They have online marketing bios, are engaged in decent content marketing, and regularly make national news. Plug a few keywords into a search engine and they should pop right up. Except they didn’t. Several offices across the nation, lots of employees, a high profile in their field, and zilch on search. Huh?
What The Cousin Didn’t Know About Online Search and Digital Marketing Results
From the outside, the site looked great. We didn’t ask how much it had cost to build, but the company told us they had another site being redesigned with the same dev shop. So we took a look behind the the site. What we couldn’t tell them pre-engagement was that the site couldn’t be ranked in search at all due to an unfortunate oversight on the part of a tired coder. There was a big, deadly typo in the code.
To make matters worse, when specific pages where searched for, the URLs for the results didn’t point to the company, they pointed to the web development company. A good third of the content on the company’s site was being used by the web development company to boost its own rankings. We couldn’t tell if this was dishonesty or incompetence, but it doesn’t matter. The site was being hijacked for non-client search.
And remember the part where this site was new and the next one was coming online from the same company? Guess what? The platforms for both sites had been outdated for a while. Ouch.
The Good News
So, the moral of the story is, choose your web development company with the same consideration you’d use in choosing your bank, your accountant, or anyone else whose function is critical to your business. Here at Boost! we work with third party design and development teams that build for Fortune 500 companies all the time. And they’ve proven their honesty, work ethic, and devotion to client success. Every single time.
The good news is, if this has happened to you, it’s totally fixable, and not as expensive as you’d think. Give us a call if you’d like to talk about how we can audit what you’ve got, help you fix what’s already in place, or get you over onto a great platform and going in the right direction. Once you’re on the right rocket ship, the stars are the limit.
Imagine a line-up of creative, inspiring individuals with eclectic interests. Each person will go onstage to deliver a five-minute presentation—a mini TED talk—with slides on the subject of their choice. The Secrets of the Winning Handshake. Eating Animal Parts and Feminism. Seeing the Unseen. Delving into the World of Anime.
Recent Comments