We received an e-mail the other day that illustrates how organizations can write more effective solicitations. It asks us to support a new credit reporting system, a genuinely worthy cause. All it needs is a more worthy message, one the average reader can understand. We have some suggestions.

The release currently begins:

The Political and Economic Research Council (PERC), the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) seek your support in helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US by endorsing efforts to permit the full inclusion of fully-reported non-financial payment data in Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulated consumer credit files.

Come again?

Try this. Move the alphabet soup to the end of the release. If you make readers care about the case, they’ll find out who you are. Then, explain the problem in plain English. Instead of “helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US,” why not say, “Because many poor people pay their bills in cash, they don’t build up a credit history. This means they can only borrow from payday lenders, who slam them with insanely high interest rates.” A blander version of that statement appears about halfway through the current release, but most readers won’t get that far.

Here’s the point: Before readers can become interested in helping your cause, they have to understand why the status quo is no good. Put the problem up front and only offer the solution after you’ve explained it.

(Note that this is the opposite of the advice we’d offer an organization sending out a press release announcing success. For that type of communication you’d want to mimic the classic newspaper “inverted pyramid” construction, where the most newsworthy information comes first.)

The rest of the release is generally clear and well-written. For instance:

Non-financial payment data, both positive and negative, would be provided by utilities and telecommunications firms to national credit bureaus. Currently, only negative data, or delinquent payments, are reported. We believe that consumers should be rewarded for timely and accurate payments, not simply punished for delinquencies and defaults as is currently the prevailing practice.

The release could make an even stronger case by saying, as in the sign-on letter that a better credit reporting system could have mitigated the credit crisis. Not everyone cares that much about low-income consumers, but the broader economy matters to us all.

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Abridged and reprinted from his blog Web Ink Now with the author’s permission.

David Meerman Scott is pleased to announce a partnership with Dow Jones and HubSpot to leverage and focus on innovative solutions for new and improved, next generation, cost effective, world class, high performance, value added outcomes.

Does the sentence above suck or what?

That’s how so many PR people write — using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless.

I conducted an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. The project used Dow Jones Insight to tally the uses of 325 gobbledygook phrases collected from a variety of sources.

Here are the top 25 most abused:

Rank Phrase # uses in 2008

1. Innovate 51,390
2. Pleased to 48,762
3. Unique 48,095
4. Focused on 40,964
5. Leading provider 33,101
6. Commitment 29,621
7. Partnership 28,969
8. New and improved 20,167
9. Leverage 19.243
10. 120 percent 16,916
11. Cost effective 15,454
12. Next generation 15,371
13. 110 percent 13,659
14. Flexible 13,656
15. World class 13,407
16. Robust 13,309
17. High performance 13,049
18. Scalability 11,929
19. Proud to 9,877
20. Optimize 9,547
21. Outcomes 9,329
22. In terms of 9,217
23. Value added 8,725
24. Easy to use 8,398
25. Metrics 6,851

So how do you avoid using gobbledygook?

Easy! Write using the words and phrases your buyers use. You can also run your press releases, Web site text, brochure copy, resume or any other document through the brand-new Gobbledygook Grader {http://gobbledygook.grader.com} from HubSpot. The Gobbledygook Grader will give you a score based on how many over-used gobbledygook phrases you use and suggest ways to improve.

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, a BusinessWeek bestseller. He is on the board of advisors of HubSpot and provides coaching services to Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.

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This article is excerpted with the author’s permission from Content Marketing Today.

Influence them with information well before they are ready to buy from you.

I have written before about the many differences between a traditional website and a blog.

Your website typically provides timeless information, while your blog provides timely information. Moreover, your blog becomes more important as you keep adding more and more content that is relevant to your prospective customers.

But a case study about a consulting company, De Novo Strategy, from Bernie Borges’ new book, Marketing 2.0, suggested a nuanced but critical reason for the power of a business blog.  It boils down to the fundamental difference between the purpose of your website and of your blog.

Your website must necessarily be designed so that when your customers are ready to research the purchase of products and services, they will find everything they need to know to make a positive buying decision on your site.

Your blog has the opportunity to reach those prospective customers earlier in the process. The best blogs provide a continuous stream of information about topics, issues, and problems that are specific to a well defined market niche.

As we begin an initial search for information in a particular niche, we probably have no intention of buying anything from anybody. At that moment in time, we simply want to become better informed in areas that matter to us, either professionally or personally. We are looking for information. We are not looking for a vendor.

My Aha moment came when Bernie talked about De Novo Strategy’s unfortunate website experience. Read the entire article.

Newt Barrett is president of Content Marketing Strategies and co-author with Joe Pulizzi of Get Content Get Customers, which is sold on Amazon, as is Marketing 2.0.

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Managing Director, Tippingpoint Labs

This article is abridged and excerpted from a series about evolving marketing strategies. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Shifts in the digital landscape have forced marketing departments to rethink budgetary planning. Traditional marketing strategies and “big idea” campaigns are being replaced with targeted, relationship-building activities.

The online discussion space is a consumer’s paradise and favors their influence over the producer’s. The thriving digital world has brought with it an efficient knowledge market. News travels faster than ever, and what is known about a product or service is more immediate — and often more accurate — than ever.

What’s the worst that could happen?

The penalty for non-participation or limited participation, even insincere participation, could be an opportunity cost greater than the cost of comprehensive engagement.

Let’s look at the potential consequences:

• Non-participation. You might be making the assumption that your market doesn’t exist in the digital world. This is wrong. There are millions of conversations going on about a million topics. There are likely conversations going on about your product or service. Ignore them, and you will have no influence.

Further, you’ll glean no insight from them. Non-participation represents a missed opportunity to build extremely valuable relationships with consumers. You’re also leaving the opportunity open to the competition.

• Limited participation. You might start a Twitter account or a blog to publish press releases or announce new products. You don’t monitor these accounts and maybe you don’t reply to your followers or publish any of their critical comments. You assume your one-way conversation is enough to get news out to the web.

Wrong again! Social media and Internet forums are not traditional news outlets looking to just rebroadcast your news. They are networking events; there has to be a give and take. You’ll be called out by the very audience you’re trying to reach as just trying to extract dollars from their wallets. Your reputation will take a hit. This could potentially be even worse than not participating at all, because you’ll be viewed by the community as completely uninterested in the discussion.

Bad-product backlash

If your instinct tells you to hold off on engaging in the online world for fear of bad-product backlash — follow your instinct! There is nowhere to hide.

Poor quality products and services are exposed and flushed out of the market much sooner; and better, more competitive products will replace them at breakneck speed. If your product won’t hold up to consumer scrutiny, hold off on cannon-balling into the digital space to tout your wares, at least until your wares are worth touting.

The takeaway

The only way to extract value from the endless conversation that is the Internet is to interact with it openly and honestly. Provide the discussion with relevant, quality content that informs the existing discussion, and listen to what comes from it.

Building trust and relationships with your audience will ultimately lead to sales in the long term.

Tippingpoint Labs is a digital content creation shop founded in 2002.

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It’s tough being a pioneer. If your colleagues sometimes oppose your efforts to make a Website more user-friendly, here’s a way to dodge the arrows. Check out the Nielsen Norman Group’s usability site for guidelines on persuading subject matter experts to bring Web content more in line with the target audience’s needs.

The key is to study actual user behavior, under the watchful eyes of the subject matter experts. As the authors point out, many people can only be convinced if they see the truth for themselves.

Here’s a preview of what they’re likely to observe. Users react favorably to:

• Highlighted keywords, which can be hypertext links, typeface variations, color, or words set apart in other ways
• Subheadings that convey meaning
• Bulleted lists
• Paragraphs with only one central idea (readers usually skip over additional ideas)
• Inverted pyramid writing style, the kind found in good print publications, in which the main facts appear in the opening paragraphs, with elaboration coming later
• Really short copy, roughly one-half what you would see in a print publication

The Nielsen Norman Group conducted its original study in 1997. Since then, according to NN/g, hundreds of studies across numerous industries and countries have replicated the findings.

Not every test produces exactly the same results, but if you follow the experts’ advice you can expect at least a few doubters to join your pioneers’ camp.

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Abridged and reprinted with permission from her blog, Marketing Interactions.

When a prospective buyer tries to choose among sellers, going after a reduction in price is the easiest option on which to focus. With the commodity status of many products, differentiating by price seems the easiest way to choose when the belief is that all the options enable the same outcomes.

And therein lies the rub. Even though many products look alike, the outcomes that buyers can gain from them can be wholly different based on their unique circumstances and the expertise of the company providing the product.

What a grand opportunity for educational content development.

Educational content can point out underlying (and often unrecognized) costs and consequences companies can incur by only focusing on price. Dispelling these misconceptions and pointing out your extra expertise can go a long way toward making the price issue less relevant, and can even make your price seem like a bargain.

If you can get to the root of the prospect’s problem, you’ve gained additional insight into how you can address their pricing concerns from a value perspective.

For example: If they only equate the cost of your solution against solving the predominately obvious problem, but not the underlying root cause, your price can take a beating.

Get your customer to focus on all the economic costs they’re not seeing. The result is less focus on pricing because the value of the product has escalated. This means you need to shine a light on your expertise and the successes your customers have achieved.

By getting out in front of this issue with educational content that helps your prospects understand the situation, your sales cycles will shorten and your reps will have fewer obstacles to overcome when they get face-to-face with the buyer.

When your company is the first to help them simplify and understand the true issues they’re dealing with, you can become the “anchor” on that subject, setting a high bar your competitors must surpass, putting you exactly where you want to be.

Ardath Albee is CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc..

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This post first appeared in a slightly different form on Junta42. It is reprinted with permission.

About a month ago, we brought home our first pet…a guinea pig that the boys named Phary (pronounced Ferry).

After the initial adjustment week, a routine developed.  The boys would get Phary out of her cage in the morning and right before bedtime.  As one of us walked over to get Phary out of her cage, she would place herself in the left corner of the cage so we could easily grasp her and carry her out.  All was right with the world.

Last week, the routine changed a little.  There were a few mornings we were gone and couldn’t get to Phary.  There were also a few nights where she didn’t get her “out of cage” playtime.

Understandably, Phary didn’t like this.  This morning when I went to take her out, she didn’t go to her regular spot, and fought me a bit as well as I struggled to take her out of the cage.  As I finally took her over to the play area for the boys, she almost pooped in my hand.  Not pleasant.

We were not consistent with Phary, and she didn’t like it one bit.

Above All, Content Must be Consistent

Naturally, after the “Phary Incident,” I thought about content marketing (but of course). Not that your customers are like guinea pigs, but the same behaviors apply.

• A content marketing initiative, be it a blog, e-newsletter or custom magazine, is a promise to your customers. A deviation in the regularity or consistency of the content product is like breaking that promise.
• Once the promise is broken, you should expect a change in behavior in some of your customers. For example, if you have a weekly e-newsletter, then suddenly skip a few weeks, your open rates will decrease. You’ve broken the promise, and readers just don’t care as much any more.

So, when you look at your content marketing tactics, put consistency at the very top.  Don’t believe for a second that you can skip an issue here or there and it won’t have a negative impact.

Joe Pulizzi is founder of Junta42, the go-to site for content marketing and custom publishing. You can read more about Joe at his blog or check out his book, Get Content. Get Customers.

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We’ve alluded in the past to Edward Tufte’s screed against The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. To summarize, he argues that PowerPoint forces presenters to dumb down their arguments to bullet points, eliminating logical structure in favor of lists where everything carries the same weight, and to severely limit the amount of information the audience receives through any one chart or graph.

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint was written in 2003. Last week The Wall Street Journal brought us news that Tufte’s criticisms have caught on—with a few. For example, T.X. Hammes argues in the Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint has undermined the military’s whole decision-making culture:

Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision.

Hammes also echoes Tufte’s criticism that PowerPoint slides are often packed with too much information for the audience to absorb in the minute or so each is onscreen. Tufte blamed this effect for the Columbia space shuttle disaster of 2003, claiming that superiors failed to understand engineers’ warnings before the launch in part because of it. According to the Journal article, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board officially agreed with him. One shudders to think of the damage that could be done in the military.

José Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University, is also identified by the Journal as an anti-PowerPoint crusader. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bowen encourages teachers to put their presentations online as podcasts, test students to make sure they watch them, and then devote class time to discussions of the material.

These efforts point in the same direction: productive discussions of complex problems are only really possible when people have had time to absorb and digest information. If organizations fail to allow for that, it’s an indictment of their management culture much more than it is of a piece of software. After all, Tufte has persuasively argued that poor graphic design in a slide-based presentation was responsible for the Challenger disaster in 1986, too—well before PowerPoint was in widespread use.

As Hammes puts it:

[PowerPoint] can be useful in situations it was designed to support — primarily, information briefs rather than decision briefs. For instance, it is an excellent vehicle for instructors. It provides a simple, effective way to share high-impact photos, charts, graphs, film clips and humor that illustrate a lecturer’s points. … Yet even in a classroom setting, it is not appropriate for developing a deep understanding of most subjects. For that, additional reading is required. There is a reason students cannot submit a thesis in PowerPoint format.

Just as we all still use QWERTY keyboards even though proponents of Dvorak have been arguing since the 1930s that we could all type faster with that key layout (convincingly or not, depending on which studies you read), we may be stuck with the imperfect PowerPoint for a good long while. But that doesn’t mean we have to be stuck with poor presentations or poor decisions. We can bring you advice on the presentations. The decisions are up to you.

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By Ardath Albee. Abridged and reprinted with permission from her blog Marketing Interactions.

Newsletters delivered via email are a staple for many B2B companies. These e-newsletters usually contain titles, descriptions, and links to several articles, perhaps an executive column, a customer spotlight, an invitation to a webinar or a white paper download, and any product or company news at hand.

The problem I see with many company newsletters is that they’re instantly forgettable. My brain goes to “blah, blah, blah” when I see them in the preview pane of my inbox.

What may be keeping your newsletters from performing is the lack of strategy applied in their assembly. That usually occurs because the goal for your newsletter is about your company keeping its name in front of customers rather than providing value and relevance to subscribers.

Your newsletter needs a goal.

Start small and set one goal for existing customers and one for prospects. Based on the goal(s), plan your content layout around one thing you want to learn. You shouldn’t ever send a single marketing communication without the goal of learning something.

Newsletters can be a great opportunity to:

• Float new ideas to gauge interest. For instance, run an article about solving a problem of concern to your customers and measure time spent by readers who clicked through. Say it’s 22 seconds, but you know it really takes at least 60 seconds to absorb the idea. Bank it until later, or rethink it altogether.
• See what gets the most attention. Measure the clicks for each article. If readers represent a nice mix between prospects and customers, and time spent is high enough to show true interest, this may reveal an opportunity both to sell more to existing customers and to nurture new prospects.
• Examine the readership of every story. A story may not attract many readers, but when you look deeper, you may see that four people from the same company all viewed it. That should trigger a follow-up call. Maybe the story was about a company just like theirs. At the very least, you know exactly how to start the conversation.

Beyond open and click-through

The problem with focusing on just the basic statistics is that you’re only scratching the surface on an aggregate level. Let’s say you achieve a 40 percent open rate and a 15 percent click-through. In comparison to other emails, this may seem like a great outcome…but is it? You’ll never know if you don’t dig deeper and measure your statistics against specific goals.

Ardath Albee is CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist for Marketing Interactions, Inc..

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I’m hardly a fashionista, but once in a while—usually when I decide that au courant toes no longer justify the pain—I buy a new pair of shoes. And I always buy them from Maryland Square, a mail-order house that carries every brand imaginable, ships promptly, and most important, inundates me with catalogues and e-mail. I’m what a marketer would call an active loyalist.

I also buy books from Amazon. Do I appreciate their e-mails and Web site lists of more books I might like? Of course. And who doesn’t love Angie’s List for helping to protect us from the vast array of scams in our capitalist paradise? I especially like Amazon and Angie’s List because they know what matters to me. Angie’s List wants to know how I felt about the vendors I found on their list and wants me to add ratings.

With marketing communications media as diverse as they are today, smart companies target active loyalists any way they can. A particularly good way is to sense their pain and alleviate it. Hyundai, for instance, allows customers to return their cars if they lose their jobs. How much more loyalty could you possibly engender? Sure enough, Hyundai’s market share is growing.

No less an authority than consulting firm McKinsey & Company urges marketers to make expanding their base of active loyalists a priority. “Developing a deep knowledge of how consumers make decisions is the first step,” say their authors in a recent article.

So who are your most loyal customers? If you think about it, you can probably persuade others to join the club.

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