How to Make Your Content Less Boring

How to Make Your Content Less Boring written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Think about the number of websites you visit on a given week. It’s a lot, right? We spend so much time consuming content online that after a while, it all starts to blend together.

Even if your website technically ticks all of the boxes, it will quickly fade into the background if the content is not designed to reach out and grab the viewer.

What can you do to spice up your website and make sure it sets you apart from your competitors? Read on, as I offer up some tips to make your content less boring.

Mix Up Your Medium

Remember being handed a copy of Moby Dick in high school english class, staring down at the tome, and being filled with dread? No matter how great the content is (and Herman Melville certainly knew how to write!), a giant wall of text can be intimidating.

The same goes for content on your website. Visitors are looking to quickly learn whether or not your business can solve their problem, so present that information in a variety of easily digestible formats.

Visuals and infographics are a great way to provide a high level summary of the products or services you offer. Video is an engaging way to not only quickly communicate your business’s mission, but also put a face to your company’s name and build trust and a human connection.

Keep Your Copy Lively

Of course, you do still need some copy on your website. When it comes to creating interesting website copy, there are a handful of basics to adhere to. First, you want to keep sentences and paragraphs short and snappy. Eliminate flowery prose and strings of unnecessary adjectives.

You also want to adopt a voice that is authoritative but approachable. Sure, you’re the industry expert, but that’s no reason to talk down to your readers. Steer clear of jargon and SAT words.

For even more tips on writing effective website copy, check out my previous post on the topic.

Lean Into Your Brand’s Voice

Tone matters. Writing like a robot won’t win you any fans. Of course, your tone will depend on the industry you’re in. A lawyer’s website will have a more serious, measured tone than a party planner’s site. But whatever your voice is, communicating with it makes a big difference.

Adhering to this principle is true for all elements of your website, from your value proposition on your home page to seemingly minor or throwaway pages.

Take a look at these examples of brands who have used 404 error pages as a way to still represent their brand and inject some fun and personality into what otherwise would be a nothing kind of page.

Every inch of your website is an opportunity to show visitors who you are and to build trust through consistent messaging. Take advantage of that fact and have fun!

Make it About Storytelling

If you’re at a loss on where to start with creating strong content, think first about storytelling. Start with your brand’s value proposition: what problem are you on a mission to solve?

From there, you can build out a cohesive story about why your brand is the one to take on that problem, and how your team’s passion and commitment will allow you to create wins for your customers.

Great storytelling is not only engaging, it also allows you to guide customers through their journey. When you think about the way you want them to encounter your brand as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, then you can arrange your content in a way that nudges them down that road sequentially.

Create Valuable Content

Above all else, you must be creating valuable content. What do I mean by that? I mean content that establishes you as an expert in your field, provides answers and guidance in a way that none of your competitors can match, and gives readers practical takeaways and actionable steps.

I also am using the term “content” more broadly than to describe just blog posts. Content is anything and everything on your website. Yes, that does mean your blog, but it also includes webinars, product guides, videos, podcasts, and everything in between! Get creative about the many ways in which you can share your knowledge with prospects and customers.

The internet is saturated with information. If you’re providing content that meets a clear purpose and allows the reader to walk away and effect positive change in their life right now, that’s the kind of content that is highly interesting.

There are millions of business websites on the internet. And with such a crowded field, it can be difficult to stand out. But when you embrace your business’s personality and expertise, and use that to drive all of your choices as you create your content, it’s possible to build a website that gets noticed.

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How B2B Marketers Can Make the Most of Interactive Content Tools

Informative. Engaging. Entertaining. Inspiring. Interactive content is a rising B2B marketing star, allowing brands to break free of their “boring-to-boring” reputations to give their audiences bold, beautiful, badass experiences. And to make it increasingly easy for B2B content marketers to deliver those interactive experiences, interactive content tools—from simple web-based tools to robust platforms—have proliferated. But here’s the thing: From upping marketing efficiency to collecting unique audience data insights, the beauty and utility of many interactive content tools extends well beyond content creation and delivery. So, if you truly want to make the most of your interactive content investments, you should take care in making the most of your tools of choice. How? Here are a few tips.

#1 - Take advantage of templates to boost efficiency.

You’re busy—and so is your graphic designer or design team. And unfortunately, when you’re strapped for time and resources, content innovation can take a back seat and the “static-only status quo” lives another day. But you don’t have to build an interactive content asset from the ground up. Interactive content tools come stacked with templates—most of which can be optimized and customized for your brand and audience. By leveraging templates, you can maximize efficiency and get content in front of your audience faster. For example, Ceros—which is a more advanced interactive content tool—offers a template gallery that includes templates for case studies, content hubs, eBooks, infographics, lookbooks, short- and long-from quizzes, and the list goes on. In addition, some interactive content tools give you the ability to create your own templates, which is an excellent feature to take advantage of if you’re creating a content series or if you’d like specific design elements to be the same throughout every piece you create. SnapApp, which now bills itself as lead qualification platform for marketers, is a great tool for creating interactive quizzes. And the SnapApp team offers a super simple five-step process for creating a template.

#2 - Make use of resources to curb the learning curve.

Regardless of simplicity or complexity, every tool has a learning curve. But the good news is that some interactive content tool makers don’t skimp on learning resources. This means you or your design team can get the on-demand resources you need to create great content more quickly. For example, Webflow, which is a platform that allows you to design, build, and launch responsive websites (complete with animations and interactions, of course) without bothering your web development team, has an impressive learning platform dubbed Webflow University. The educational portal is complete with tons of video course and tutorials to get you started and make the most of the tool. They also have a robust blog and a forum for users to ask questions and share best practices. As another example, Ceros Educate is a dedicated learning portal, featuring courses for designers who are just getting started or need a refresher, as well as a plethora of articles that detail specific functions and features. There’s also a collection of resources for developers. Finally, even Qzzr, which boasts an extremely simple interface, offers a learning and support resouce featuring advice and insights from its team.

#3 - Leverage integrations to enhance visibility, insight, and lead gen and nurturing.

Whether you’re embedding a quiz in a blog post or creating a content resource hub, interactive content tools are designed to make it easy for you to deliver experiential content on your owned channels. And the good news is that most tools offer some unique analytics capabilities so you can understand how users are interacting with your content. For example, Ceros provides all the basic KPIs such as visitors, opens, and pageviews, as well as engagement metrics like time spent and interaction clicks. The tool also track inbound referrals, social shares, video plays, and outbound link clicks. But the even better news is that some tools boast integrations that makes it easy to connect data and information with various CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, and analytics platforms. This not only gives you a more holistic view of how interactive content perform as compared to other types of content assets, but can also streamline lead gen and nurturing, and the sales process. via GIPHY For example, SnapApp integrates with: HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Salesforce, Adobe, and Act-On. As for Ceros, integrations include: Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. In addition, Qzzr supports webhooks and third-party integrations such as Zapier to send quiz data such as email addresses, scores, and outcomes to a variety of CRM and SaaS tools.

Put Interactive Content Tools to Work for You

There’s no doubt that interactive content tools are designed to help you deliver a great end-experience for your audience. But to really make the investment worthwhile, take advantage of the unique features and benefits each tool offers so you can maximize efficiency, minimize the learning curve, and streamline data collection to improve your marketing and sales efforts. How are B2B brands using interactive content? Check out these seven examples of interactive B2B content to find out. Attending B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, AZ from Feb. 25-27, 2019? Attend Lee Odden’s session to learn how interactive influence content can help you break free of boring B2B.

The post How B2B Marketers Can Make the Most of Interactive Content Tools appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Can’t-Miss Sessions at 2019’s B2B Marketing Exchange Conference #B2BMX

The post Can’t-Miss Sessions at 2019’s B2B Marketing Exchange Conference #B2BMX appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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ABM Best Practice vs Malpractice

Where's Email in Your ABM Strategy?

59% of B2B Marketers rate email as effective for driving early stage engagement, 81% say it's effective at driving conversions later in the funnel.

Let that sink in for a moment...

Email marketing is one of the most widely adopted and effective channels a B2B marketer can use, yet it's glaringly absent in the best practice we see today. Top 10 lists, ABM jingles, and thought leadership presentations, completely vacant. Wow!

Two critical dimensions for this concern. As a primary communication channel, it:

1. Produces a ton of "digital exhaust". That is, you can learn a lot about a target account by gauging their interaction with email.
2. Creates a ton of mixed up and confused situations when it's not in sync with your display ads or other ABM communications.

Malpractice = When ABM Ignores Email

This isn't a gripe about marketers. On the contrary. This is a gripe about the general state of what has been declared as ABM best practice.

Over the last year and a half, pretty much every marketing automation player has scratched their head and thought that they too should have a stake in this ABM game. After a litany of announcements, only one has passed muster as being a serious contender in this space, Oracle and their ability to augment Eloqua functionality with their recently announced CDP offering, Unity. This is probably out of reach for SMB to mid-tier B2B marketers, but their announcement last week about integration with MRP Preltytix changes the game for any Eloqua customer. It's freakishly strange how we can find only one such player in the email market that has a serious idea around ABM.

Confounding at best, how can ABM platforms ignore email? OK, a couple of them can deploy email outside of client core systems, but it's by far the exception that any ABM platforms can both gather insight from a clients' email platform and can, in turn, deliver account coordinated messages back through it.

Considering ABM? Add email to your purchase requirements!

The single best thing you can do at this point is to ask the right questions. We've got your back!

Your email platform should be both a source of insights and a channel of delivery in your ABM program. Period.  Don't let a sales rep try to convince you otherwise.

Why is this important? Don't make it hard for buyers to buy. When you present buyers at target accounts with conflicting and dissimilar messages between channels you make it harder for them to grok what you do and how it can be important for them. When your most reliable channel, email, is a part of your ABM program, you can make the content strategy between channels seamless.

This something you can solve today. Make it a priority. It's already hard enough to get your message through to buyers. The AMA estimates people are subject to as much as 10,000 impressions per day... make your messages the ones that leave an impression.

Find out more about what you can do with emails with “Christmas in July: Consistency Is the Key to Email Success.” 

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Weekend Favs February 23

Weekend Favs February 23 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

• Sip 2.0 – Create and share unique color palettes with your team.
• HCM Deck– Automate the employee onboarding process.
• HubSpot’s Business Templates – Access free templates for everything from invoices to business plans.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

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Digital Marketing News: HubSpot’s Email Lead Capture Report, Adobe’s Content Survey, Facebook & Google Tops for Mobile Ads

The post Digital Marketing News: HubSpot’s Email Lead Capture Report, Adobe’s Content Survey, Facebook & Google Tops for Mobile Ads appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Who Decides What Best Practice Is, Anyway?

Peter Armaly is a Senior Director and Advisor for Oracle SaaS Customer Success. He is responsible for program design and execution of skills enablement for the customer success organization and in that capacity he works closely with senior executives both internally and externally. Peter is a highly accomplished marketing and customer success practitioner/leader who leverages his background by speaking and blogging about the challenges and opportunities around developing sophisticated customer-centric approaches.

Keith Fessler is a Senior Client Optimization Specialist and Subject Matter Expert on Oracle’s Customer Success Value Realization Team, focused on Field Service. With 40 years of pragmatic cross-industry consulting experience at IBM and Oracle, Keith works with Oracle’s Customer Success Managers and their customers to help them develop strategies and game plans for transforming their service management, field service and cloud environments in order to achieve desired results through value-driven transformations.

Peter’s a big fan of coffee and a lesser fan of meetings,  but when you can combine both, magic can happen. Recently, Peter sat down with Keith to chat about one of Keith’s pet peeves, the term “best practices.”

Peter:  Hey Keith, I see we’re both approved to attend Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience (MCX) in Las Vegas. Aside from the wonderful opportunity to meet customers, we’ll be presenting some messaging to them, hearing about their experiences of working with our solutions and services, and getting a more focused look at what our product teams are releasing to the market.

Keith: Hi Peter, looking forward to seeing you in LV. I’ll also enjoy seeing at MCX a number of the customers I’ve worked with on optimization efforts and attending the Oracle Field Service Cloud Customer Advisory Board where we really get to hear their feedback on current product capabilities. At that same meeting, we’ll also get to hear from product management what’s coming in the next few releases. I’ve got an interesting topic teed-up for a short-session at MCX on getting customer perspectives on “best practices” and what they mean in the customer’s own environment. Plus, I’ll be trying to get customer interest in participating in a survey (with shared results to participants) on “best practices”.

Peter:  I’m detecting a hint of insurrection in your desire to survey people about “best practices”.  The term has been around forever and I know that it’s a topic you’ve long wanted to explore. Is that because you feel it has fallen victim to marketing’s devious devices and you’d like to skewer it a bit or is it because you truly believe there are some practices that can work and that deserve to be widely shared?

Keith:  The term “best practices” is something we trip over all the time, given its different orientations in people’s minds. I tend to think of it as a one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor.  I believe the discussion needs to consider the notion of a “better practice” as being more of the goal. A “best practice” may not be the right thing for an organization to chase for a myriad of reasons. Your current environment limitations, the expense of changing to adopt to the “best” practice (the technology, the process, roles and responsibilities, the organizational implications)¾AND potential overkill stemming from the “industry-accepted” practice that you may not really need, be it “best” or not.   Broad initiatives for achieving “best practices”, in many situations, are used as a shield to deflect criticism from poor current process execution or striving for goals in terms of execution that really are not achievable, in point of fact, based on your current situation. There needs to be a balanced look at achieving an advanced practice for processes or sub-process activities, at a granular-level, to weigh impact, course, speed, and spend.

Peter: As my high school biology teacher said when gazing down at the baby pig on my table, “Now that’s a good dissection.” Okay that clears things up and I agree with you that there needs to be a balanced look at achieving advanced practice. Maybe that’s the term we should be promoting instead: advanced practice. It has a more realistic aura about it and not so absolute. I’m lately from the marketing world and have been seduced by its drive towards simplicity in messaging. Don’t get me wrong. Marketers, I realize, are under a lot of well-deserved scrutiny these days, but I think the simplicity thing is smart. Authenticity works; it’s what customers respond to and so if “advanced practice” sounds more authentic to us, it probably sounds more authentic to others.

It also aligns well with the Oracle service you and I are associated with, Customer Success Advanced Services. One thing I’ve learned in this long career in technology is that it’s unwise to ever declare that anything is “the best”. Things change too rapidly and by the time the words slip out of your mouth, some startup has figured out a new and better way of doing what you just said was the best.

Keith: Yes, Peter, agreed! “Advanced practices” does capture the essence very well.  A broad advanced practices approach may not fit in every customer situation, and the determination of where to focus is indeed a case-by-case review of what it would take to achieve an advanced, or more optimal, process execution if you injected a new process practice (or set of practices). Who defines the “best practice”?  Advanced practices can be said to be the next evolution of current practices, but where does the designation “best practice” come from?  Some Industry process models can be thought of as an amalgamation of best practices, as they are often comprised of practices which have been defined in relationship to one another, in the context of the overall model, making them best practices in the context of the model.

Our Advanced Customer Services Success Planning approach includes the calibration of our customer’s process maturity in key areas, into an objective-oriented, metrics-based, monetization-governed success plan for transforming portions of the operational environment. Our Success Plan includes outlining SME-driven, domain-specific process and KPIs initiatives, domain-specific technology initiatives, and domain-specific organization initiatives. Course, Speed, Spend are the watchwords of the game, inclusive of real savings. They’re often achievable with advanced practices, if impediments to enabling new practices can be removed.  Then, of course, it’s not advanced practices just for the sake of saying you’ve got them. It’s about impact and cost vs value, as you look to make changes.

Peter: Keith, my man, all great information and you won’t find disagreement from me on any of those points.

Keith: Sounds good Peter!  I knew you might be of like mind on Success Planning, and the rigor that needs to be applied to get operational results from change.  I’ve got some related notions and topics we should discuss, as I’d bet you do also.

Peter: Sounds good. Let’s make it happen.

For more from Peter and to learn more about the talent you should be keeping an eye out for your team, take a look at “Talent and a Team for Our Times.”

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