Selling with Content

User stories: great for sales support, poor for SEO or converting sales leads

Of all the content that companies create for marketing, “user stories” confuse the most. The confusion comes from its extremely uneven performance at different marketing functions.

For salespeople, a well written story about a successful user, who has a situation similar to a potential customer, is a big help in closing a sale. But buoyed by positive feedback from the sales department many marketers overuse this type of content and apply it for less appropriate functions. The problem is that while customers in “similar situations” find user stories interesting, customers with dissimilar situations do not.

If your user story is written about a Fortune 500 customer, potential small business readers will yawn. Don’t expect a big city retailer to be interested in reading a user story about a small town store. Other kinds of content more easily cross these divides, for example, trend stories in a small market can be as relevant in a big one. I spend many years with a trade magazine where we were always amazed at the extremely low readership scores that user stories received. Where routine articles in the publication would be read by anywhere from 40 to 60% of subscribers, user stories consistently received scores in the 10-15% level.

In a study I will be releasing through Alethea Research in January, I tracked the customers of 34 different suppliers in a market and asked them to check if they felt if supplier provided “user stories,” motivated them to be more likely to want to buy products from the sponsoring suppliers. About a third (36%) said user stories positively motivated them, but this was a significantly lower score than many other content forms received. In addition, the customer bases of the individual 34 companies had different scores. For the customers of the company with the lowest score, only 29.6% said user stories positively motivated them. At the other end of the spectrum, 49.3% of customers of a different company said they were motivated by user stories. That's about a 20% spread between them. Lower scores seemed to go to companies whose products and solutions were better established and understood, companies with products that were generally newer or more unusual received higher scores. There seems to be less interest in reading user stories about prodcuts that are well understood or more familiar.

Bottom line: marketers need user stories. If you can create a series of them covering the typical usage situations of your products you can help your sales staff close sales. Keep in mind that the popularity of user stories will vary company to company, and product to product, depending on how new, unusual, or newsworthy products are. But just because your sales staff loves user stories don’t think they will help with your web site's search engine optimization (SEO), build readership for your newsletter, or provide down-loadable content to fuel a lead generation program. For those functions, there are other kinds of content that will do a better job. To hear more about my content usage study, sign up for my "Marketing Broadcast" newsletter.

Is your company newsletter "all about us"?

How many company sponsored newsletters are regularly read? Since most are promotional content packaged in newsletter form, not many. These, "all about us" newsletters contain news about the marketer’s new products and new sales as well as stories about company personnel, testimonials, and user stories.

While this kind of information is interesting to people inside the marketer’s company, customers often see it as just promotion. How many people are thrilled to get ongoing promotions in their e-mail in box? Not many. 

Marketers who use newsletters as a promotional tool are missing the bigger opportunity of creating a newsletter that acts as a direct channel to customers. It is not hard to do. Instead of sending promotional newsletters, build ones with content which is 80% non-commercial information that customers want to read and 20% company promotion. When customers are sent information they want to read about, they often look forward to receiving it. When newsletters with customer centric content are sent out: 

• Customers read them more regularly.
• Newsletter open rates go up.
• More customers subscribe. 
• More customers stay subscribed.
• Newsletters can be sent out more frequently (2x per month or weekly). 
• The newsletter builds a positive brand image.
• No one gets accused of being a spammer.
• When the newsletter carries a promotion, it goes to a wider audience that is more receptive to the sponsors messages.  

A newsletter that first follows the informational needs of customers and not the promotional needs of the sponsoring company open an ongoing marketing channel of communication to customers. Creating a channel to customers it is a much bigger win than just sending promotions and hoping for the best. 

But what was the content marketing plan?

I love this cartoon by Brady Bonus I found on the Eloqua cartoon collaborative. I don't have to ad much about the importance of having a content strategy driving social media because this cartoon says it beautifully:  

Should your emphasis be on earned, owned, or paid media?

When I was a kid, there was one kind of milk you could spend money on only, the white kind. But now you choose from whole, skim, 1%, 2%, organic, and chocolate. Media is a lot like that. You used to spend money on it for one thing only: exposing customers to marketing messages. Now you choose from “bought media”, “owned media”, and “earned media.” The definitions:

Bought media: media you pay for like print ads and banner ads.

Owned media: media you own and control such as your company website and blog or newsletters and digital magazines your organization publishes.

Earned media: exposure you “earn” by posting content on social networks, forums, and websites that you do not own. Examples are comments posted on blogs, photos shared on Facebook, or videos uploaded to YouTube. Here is chart from a presentation from Alex Wong that illustrates this:

Conventional wisdom says each of these media has different strengths:

Owned media is best for reaching your current customer base. Since your organization should have the most complete list of your own customers, publishing a newsletter or digital magazine to that list should provide the best coverage available anywhere.

Bought media is best for reaching new customers. The weakness of “owned media” is that it reaches largely people who are already customers or inclined to become them, so it is less likely you will reach customers of competitors or new customer just coming to your market. “Bought media” strives for total market coverage which will include the groups you miss with owned media.

Earned media enables your biggest fans to advocate for you. Every company has customers who, if properly motivated, will advocate for you online. While this is basically an organic process that you have no direct control over, smart organizations find ways to encourage this process along. Many mistakenly think that earned media is free. While there is no charge for posting content on most social media sites, the task of doing this requires staffing for the function, and adding staff is never free.

Earned, owned, or paid media. Which should you emphasize?  
If your customer are heavily involved in social media, then earned media needs your attention. If you have not asked about your customers social media involvement in a year, you need to ask again.

 If you sell a utilitarian product like car batteries, or commodity products like toothpaste or paper towels, paid media might be best. When was the last time you saw a passionate bog post or successful newsletter about toothpaste?

If most of your business comes from repeat customers, you need to think more about owned media.

Different media work best for different situations. Along those lines, I prefer skim milk in my morning cereal, but 1 or 2% % for hot coca.

See Alex Wong's entire presentation on slide share

Study: top content marketing tool is... the newsletter?

There are some very cool options in the content market's toy box. When social media is added into the mix we get to play the darlings of the news cycle like Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages. But a recent study by the British consultancy cScape, suggests that the most effective content marketing tool may the less sexy, reliable work horse: the newsletter.  

In a terrific FREE study cScape measured how marketers use different tools to establish online engagement with customers. cScape did us real service by mixing social media and traditional online tools to give us a better understating all options, less the typical social media hype.

The finding that stood out came  when marketers were asked which media aided customer online engagement the most. All the newly minted social media experts must have headed screaming for the door as the lowly, e-newsletter took the top score.

Sure, social media is a great way to engage customers, but lets not get distracted by the sizzle. Newsletters are a workhorse for advancing ongoing online customer engagement. 

On top is the chart of what marketers say improved their online customer engagement, below is how ad agency personnel responded to the same question. Newsletters are the top pick for both groups.  

View a free version of the report

Why it is worth publishing a newsletter with a 25% open rate

Most company newsletters operate with a 25-30% open rate. Is it honestly worth the effort to send it out when only a small minority of  users will open and read it? 

I say, “ yes” because of the nature of the 70 to 75% of readers who do not open the newsletter.  This may be a group of people who did not open the last newsletter, but they are more than just that. They are also a group that opted onto your mailing list, not opted off of your list, now remain on your mailing list, but did not open the last e-mail you sent them.

Why would customers do all these things? When a customer does not open a newsletter it might mean they are busy or traveling. But more often, it means they are not focused on the kinds of products and solutions you offer. Customers are not focused on buying products from you all the time.
If you make construction materials your customers may be involved with a lot of other responsibilities. They may not open your newsletter because they are involved in maintenance issues but will return to when their job demands it.

What if your company could buy a list of customers who were interested enough in your product category to subscribe to a newsletter, were not were not actively involved in  buying products right now, but would return to buying eventually. Those customers would comprise  a pretty good mailing list.

Instead of calling them deadbeats who don't open your newsletter, think of them as latent customers who will return to your area of interest, open your newsletter, and buying from you all in good time.