Content Marketing Today

Here's a quick three question quiz.

Give the home page of this website a 10 second review (no cheating--you can't look at any interior pages). Then answer the following questions:

1. Who are their target customers?
2. What product or service are they selling?
3. How can those products or services solve customer problems?

Here's the best I could do:

1. Somebody in public transit
2. Some kind of technology relating to transit operations management
3. I have no idea.

Actually, I was probably cheating because I spent more time looking at the site before I decided to write this post.  So I might not have picked up both one and two in a quick look at the site. 

The problem: A great Southwest Florida company with a mediocre website.

The solution: Use a content marketing approach that pulls visitors in and offers them solutions to their insurance challenges.

Many of us rant and rave about big insurance companies, their irritating bureaucracies, their frustrating approach to claims payment, and their frequent unwillingness to insure us when we really need insurance.  But, I'm willing to bet that however we feel about the insurance giants, most of us also count on our local insurance agents to give us reliable advice and assistance whenever we need it.

GulfShore Insurance is one such reliable company.  This Naples-based firm has an excellent reputation and has grown steadily over the past 38 years.  Gulfshore could be even more effective by making some basic but important changes to its website. 

Here is a list of opportunities for significant content marketing improvement:

A typical professional services website will explain what services the professional provides, offer a brief bio of the principal or principals, provide basic contact information, and perhaps show a list of clients.  That information is necessary but sadly insufficient.

By adding two simple but powerful content marketing elements, any professional can stand out from his or her peers. 

1. Provide a basic primer on the subject area in which the professional is an expert.  For example, an accountant could do basic articles on the importance of cash flow, how to minimize tax exposure, and what to look for in a business loan.
2. Provide regular news about topics that would be important to clients.  For our hypothetical accountant this might be the impact of new tax laws, health insurance changes or new withholding requirements.

Check out a live PR website prototype to see what's not just possible--but easy

Imagine for a moment that every person surfing the web is wearing an identical baseball cap.  On the front of that baseball camp is not a New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox insignia but 5 capital letters: WIIFM

Those five letters enable you to do a bit of mind reading and may keep you from making a very serious mistake.  They stand for: "What's in it for me ?"

You can bet your business life that unless your website quickly and obviously answers that question, your odds of converting those visitors into customers fall famously between slim--and none.  The rest of your content marketing strategy may be lost unless you can answer that universal question. That's why you must include the too often missing ingredient.

What's the missing ingredient?

A brand-new book explains why this is essential and how to make it happen.

Boring is bad in person.  Boring is worse in the traditional media.  And, boring may be worst of all in in the new social media universe.  That's a critical content marketing message in the new book, Personality Not Included, written by Ogilvy public relations executive, Rohit Bhargava.

Rohit has the double responsibility of explaining why boring is bad and personality is essential while simultaneously proving that he has a personality.  In fact, you have a pretty good idea that his personality is just a bit out there by his choice of book cover, which spotlights garishly colored plastic chickens.

Goofiness aside, at the very top of the website, he explains exactly and succinctly why the book is important, "Personality Not Included is a new marketing book for entrepreneurs, marketers and all businesses about the importance of personality and a guide on how to use it."

Bring your most compelling content front and center and make it easy to search in order to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise at solving customer problems.

Jet Advisors provides a set of essential services for a carefully targeted group of wealthy customers: buyers of private jets.  I learned about the company from an old friend and colleague who, believe it or not, has actually bought two private jets.  This same colleague has shared that Jet Advisors is an excellent organization.

Their website, JetAdvisors.com, does a very good job of describing exactly what they do.  It is clean, well organized, and easy to navigate.  According to CEO, Kevin O'Leary, the website has also become an important source of new clients. They also do a monthly eNewsletter which reaches thousands of current and prospective clients.

Unlike the vast majority of business websites, JetAdvisors.com, provides a rich set of articles (originally in their eNewsletter) designed to help visitors and prospective customers to make intelligent decisions about purchasing private jets--and a whole host of related issues.

The two simple changes that would create a dramatic content marketing difference

Microsoft makes your job easier thanks to its superb content marketing efforts.

Microsoft's continually improving content marketing strategy empowers its Web visitors to improve their own marketing efforts significantly.  This is true whether you ultimately choose to use a Microsoft product or not.  Here are 3 important lessons you can learn from Microsoft:

1. If a giant with the clout of Microsoft believes a content marketing strategy is critical to its success, it is absolutely essential to those of us in much smaller organizations.
2. You can improve your online marketing by carefully observing and adapting the best practices of other related organizations.
3. If you can give away something free, that will bind your customers to you for the long-term, by all means do so.

In another post today, we focused on the importance of words versus pictures.  Not just any words will do.  You need to be certain that the words, sentences, and paragraphs connect with your customers. (Click here to read that related post)

The folks who do this for a living are copywriters.  In the age of the Internet, believe it or not, these writing pros are more important than ever.

Political pundit Peggy Noonan, has written recently about the new Pope's visit to the United States.  She suggests that he is the perfect Pope for the Internet because he is all about words.  His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was much more about visual imagery and the meaning that it can convey, according to Peggy.

Whether or not she's right about the Pope, she is absolutely correct about the importance of words on the web.  Ideally, we would all employ high-powered copywriters with web specific skills so that our content marketing strategies play out perfectly on the Internet.

Your website can survive without pictures.  It cannot survive without words.  It will not thrive without exactly the right words.

This page from a computer sales site becomes completely meaningless when you strip away the words.  Yet, the power of words eludes most web developers.

In a recent post by Bret Gilbertson of the ConversionRate blog, he discusses the fact that most web developers with whom he competes place little or no emphasis on providing relevant content.  They are all about flashy design and technology.  He notes why they are completely missing the point:

I spoke earlier this week to a business person who is launching an executive coaching practice.  As I was explaining to her how important it is to establish a comprehensive web presence, I realized that the idea seemed very intimidating to her. 

So, to prove to myself that it did not need to be intimidating, I set about creating a very rough prototype website, using WordPress, to see how long it would take.  From start to finish it actually took about 19 1/2 minutes.

I know what you're thinking, "You do this all the time so how hard could it be for you?"

Fair enough.  I can probably do it faster than somebody who has no experience with WordPress.  But, it is also true that even an absolute neophyte can launch a basic blog-powered website in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.  What would have taken a professional software developer with HTML coding experience days or perhaps weeks to accomplish 10 years ago can now be accomplished in a fraction of that time.  And what would have cost perhaps $50-$100000 or more can be achieved anywhere from free to $5,000 plus.

Here's what you can do in 20 minutes or less.