Artisan Blog

B2B marketing fundamentals don't change. The tools change. The technologies change. The business climate changes. But marketing your business has always been about being visible, being remarkable, communicating what you do to the people who care and building those relationships. That's pretty much what it's about today, too.

It's a message that bears repeating, especially in these times of crazy social media hype, technology overload and economic challenges. Your clients still want their problems solved. They still want to know that you understand where they're coming from. They still want to know that you know what the heck you're doing. (The fundamentals apply to those who market to consumers, too.)

I might talk about this a lot, but I'm not going to say it any better than the way it's presented in this video excerpt from the 2009 Business Marketing Association conference. It's a live staging of the famous McGraw-Hill "Man in the Chair" ad. Brilliant.

So instead of worrying about whether you can afford to be marketing in this economy, watch this. And tell me, what are the fundamentals of your marketing message?

Do you communicate your ideas clearly and convincingly in print? Do you know how to effectively evaluate the writing that passes across your desk for approval?

Strong and effective writing is an invaluable skill in today’s business world, whether you’re drafting client letters, proposals and reports or reviewing and approving marketing materials written by others.

Unfortunately,too many business owners, executives and even marketing/PR folks— people who are fluent in basic grammar and construction— have a discomfort with writing that puts them at a disadvantage.

Maybe it’s time for a reframe. Think about the last time you attended an industry event or had drinks with colleagues or clients. In these situations, certain rules of the road apply. Many of them are applicable to good business writing as well.

1. Get your head out of the office. When you physically leave the office, you instantly take on a different perspective. You leave behind an internal company focus and see a bigger picture. Starting your writing (or reviewing) with this mindset helps create the distance and perspective that good writing requires. If you need to get up and go somewhere to make the mental shift, do it.

2. Remember, it’s not about you. If you walk into a business lunch more concerned about whether you want to be there and what others think of you, you're not going to connect.When you arrive willing to listen, open up and share something of value, your communication naturally works better. In writing, it's critical to separate your preferences and desires from those of your audience.

3. Loosen up a bit. Think about how you talk with clients or prospective clients about your services. Do you speak formally and continually refer to yourself and your company in third person? Or do you use words like "we" and"our"? Try relaxing your writing the same way. Bringing active,conversational language into your writing helps your message get through.

4. Stop talking about yourself already. Have you ever been trapped across the table from someone who is determined to sell you? Or someone who shares endless stories about himself, talking at you instead of to you? How different it feels when someone throws out a question that sparks good conversation among others, or when a person shows genuine interest in you.
Writing requires similar engagement. When you keep the focus on yourself,your audience walks away.

5. Watch the lingo. All industries have their language, and yes, your credibility hinges on being familiar with that language. But people's eyes will glaze over if you're talking like that all the time. Nine times out of 10, you can say the same thing better without falling back on industry jargon (or worse, your company's jargon). When you see this chance in writing, take it.

6. Prepare a couple of starters. You wouldn't necessarily start a conversation with the first words that pop into your head. Same goes for headlines. Brainstorm as many as you can think of, and then weed out the non-starters.

7. Make it easy. At a networking event, you want to be able to make quick decisions based on easily accessible information. You want it to be clear where to get a drink, how you get food, who else is there, what their names are, how much time you've got. In writing, can you say the same thing in bullet points? In shorter paragraphs? With a graphic or a chart?

8. Get specific. If you were at a cocktail party talking about your "leading solution" that "beats the competition hands down," chances are good that you would be asked how you do that and maybe even challenged on your claims. In writing, skip the canned phrases and illustrate your claims with the percentages, the budget numbers, the rankings, or the anecdotes that tell your story.

When we write something, we want people to read it.

When my clients pay me to write something, they want people to read it. Usually, a very specifically targeted group of people.

But really, we want more. We want them to think about something, to know something they didn't know before, to change their behavior. We want them to DO something with that information. Often, we also want them to buy something we're selling.

Sometimes we spell this out for them in a call to action. Sometimes we don't. But we always have a motive.

Rajesh Setty over at Lateral Action has written a nice concise blog post, complete with an equally concise diagram for the visual folks, that outlines nine ways readers will respond to online content: from skipping it altogether to quickly scanning it, saving it if it's useful, spreading it to others, and possibly subscribing to get more of it. It's a thoughtful look at what actually happens when you put your content out there (though I might put shifting behavior at the end of this list), and I'm not just saying that because I'm a fan of Raj's alliteration. Here's that link again so you can read all of the 9 S actions.

What I got from this is that our online world isn't different from our offline world, no matter how much we want to pretend that everything has changed.

Once upon a time, I wrote and managed subscription newsletters for principals, C-levels and marketing directors, and the 9 S diagram applied then, too. When readers "get" your content, when it's relevant to them and interesting enough to grab their attention, they become more engaged with the author, the web site, the business. They send you feedback. They call you. They share it with colleagues and friends. They subscribe. They're more likely to buy what you're selling.

In marketing and PR, this is the message. In newsletter and white paper writing, it's the topic and the presentation. In blogging, it's what you're writing about and how you're writing about it. In Twitter, it's the content of your tweets.

You get the picture.

The thing is, people move faster online. Instead of tossing your newsletter on the desk of a colleague versus in the trash, readers are emailing your blog post, or link to it, or spreading it out among their social media channels. But only if it's relevant and gets their attention in the first place.

Tall order? Sometimes.

How many times do we sit down to write web copy or blog posts or tweets (or offline print marketing) and wonder how clever we can be or what the competition is doing instead of how we can creatively communicate something of actual interest? How often are we worried instead about whether we should be blogging three times a week or sending newsletters or whether we're getting left behind on social media? Or how can we establish expertise and visibility for ourselves? All good questions, sure. But they often answer themselves.

Writing starts with the reader.

For example, in a recent content brainstorming session with a B2B client, we put all that aside for a bit and spent time stepping out of our expert opinions and our marketing and technical/professional agendas and into the clients' shoes. It was part marketing exercise, part Council of Jedi Knights.

A handful of the questions we asked:

• Who are these folks and what are their job titles?
• What's making their job so hard to do right now?
• Who do they answer to and what for?
• When they call you, what is it they ask first?
• What worries of theirs can you take off their plates?
• What topics do they need information on right now?
• Who are the Joneses they're trying to keep up with?
• What are their reading and learning preferences?

What came out of this? Not just a calendar of good content ideas and some solid writing, but a genuine caring about making a difference for clients/readers through useful content. New ways to share that knowledge. And so far, some great conversations with clients as we begin to include them in the process.

Tell me what you're doing.

Have you ever languished in one of those endless strategic planning meetings designed to hash out your organization's core values statement? Or the marketing pow-wows aimed at defining your key messages? You know the ones. Those meetings where you can just feel the life being sucked out of you.

Maybe it's just me? My experience is that many of these well-meaning marketing-focused efforts end up being a waste of valuable time, energy and brainpower.

Before you stop reading and click away, hear me out.

In too many marketing settings, message- and value-focused meetings are missing the key ingredient: a healthy dose of reality. A little walking of our talk. Social media strategist Amber Naslund has a great post over at her Altitude Branding blog on this topic (you can see my comments near the bottom). Amber lays out what a lot of people are still trying to figure out about social media: the message minus the experience doesn't work.

But really, this is no social media problem. It's been around for years. This is the crux of why marketing has a bad rap in some circles. It's why a lot folks equate "public relations" with "spin". The message-- no matter how clever or how well crafted-- will never be enough if it's not real to the people you're trying to communicate it to. By real I mean that they understand what you're telling them because it syncs with their own experience of your business.

Bear with me for a minute, but I believe public relations is really about relating to and communicating to your public and that marketing is having a conversation with your customers about what makes your business relevant to them. If it's not true, if you can't deliver on the promise, it has no place in your messaging.

What's the solution?

Think about this for a minute. What is your company's tagline? Was creating it an internal exercise, or did your customers figure into the process? And your list of core values? Are they a wish list of all those things we hold up as important (quality, service, integrity... you know the list). Or is this really how we operate the business? How do we live this stuff every day?

These are hard questions to ask, and I've sat in plenty of message strategy meetings where no one wanted to ask them. Yet if we ignore the reality of delivering on and exemplifying our key messages, we might as well save ourselves all some time, money and brainpower and not spend so much of our time writing them down and spreading them around.

The alternatives are not so complex. Ask the questions. Dissect the answers. Walk a half a mile in your customers' moccasins. Wonder if they will believe you. When the answer is yes (versus, how can we sell this?), you are headed down the right track. 

In the past week, the topic of writing case studies has come up in conversations with three different businesses. Must be something in the air.

As often happens, my own case study focus was reinforced almost immediately. What you focus on really does expand, no? I wasn't actually looking for this info, but I noticed that Casey Hibbard has written a great little piece on using case studies on the Marketing Profs web site. (Read it!) She begins:

A major survey on corporate trust just came out, and the news isn't good.

Of people surveyed in 20 countries, 62% say they trust corporations less now than they did a year ago (2009 Edelman Trust Barometer).

People do business with people they like and trust, so how can you inspire trust during the current crisis of credibility?

Yes, writing case studies, or customer/client success stories, are one excellent way to do that. They don't have to be in the traditional several page case study format. Short, well-told stories can be just as effective. Getting creative about sharing your customer's successes through long testimonials and short case studies can be a simple way to build credibility, trust and relevance in your marketplace.

Need ideas? Casey lists 25 easy ways you can share these positive case studies for your marketing advantage. (I'm going to throw in #26 and #27: Include them in your press materials by finding ways to publicize your customer's successes and add them to your company Intranet to share across your internal operations-- employees can be strong marketers.)

Just don't make the mistake of writing these as direct sales pieces. This is not the place for "We're great because we did this cool project." (Actually, I'm still trying to find the proper place for that approach.) I'm talking about customer-focused case studies, stories that put on your prospect's hat and answer the questions that they might be asking about your products and services. Questions like:

• How does it work?
• Is it really relevant to my business?
• Do you understand the issues I'm facing?
• How can you solve my problems?
• Can you show me the results?

It's the business application of the old writing advice: Show, don't tell.

So go to it. I'm sure we can all manage to find at least a couple of places where a good example goes a long way. And if you need help making it happen, give me a shout.