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:

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:

HK construction, LLC. Is a Fort Myers Florida based construction company with a website that could be dramatically better with a modest level of investment in money, time, thinking, and design.

The site provides some good basic information about the company that is combined with visuals that appear to represent the kind of construction work it does.

This is a very basic site with just six main pages. Making meaningful content improvements would be simple, fast, and inexpensive.  If they were my client, this is what I would tell them to do:

You have certainly heard about Starbucks' recent challenges.  This former cultural darling and Wall Street highflyer has been selling a lot less latte of late. 

I do frequent Starbucks, although less frequently than before.  This probably has more to do with the price of almost two dollars for a medium coffee than it does with the quality of the Starbucks' experience.

Apart from the occasional distracting tattoo or disconcerting metal piercing, our local Starbucks' stores provide excellent coffee and excellent service.  None of that has changed over the past 10 years.  Nonetheless, founder, Howard Schultz became very concerned that this high-end coffee icon was not living up to its original ideals.

As smart as Howard Shultz is,you should pay attention to what they're doing--and then vow never to do the same.  Here's why:

Third Eye Management and Marketing must be blind to Internet realities.

Let's be visual. This week we critique a marketing company that has completely misunderstood online visitor behavior. It's all about misunderstanding the use of visuals. 

I can understand why an old-line manufacturing company might fall for some smooth talking Web design Company's advice. "We've got to show them some eye candy. This flash graphic is so compelling that your visitors will be willing to wait for as long as the 30 second Budweiser commercial to see what you've got cookin' on your site."  I can just hear 76 trombones playing in the background.

But this is a marketing company were talking about.  Surely they cannot afford to be this clueless.

Here's what goes wrong:

Astonishingly, Jay Conrad Levinson, of guerrilla marketing fame, seems to have forgotten everything he learned about the importance of content based on the latest eNewsletter I received from him.

I was particularly disappointed in the grizzled guerrilla marketer because I had recently attended a seminar he gave locally.  In that seminar he acknowledged the importance of content as a core component in any marketing strategy. That was gratifying to hear because we have been working very hard to promote the content marketing concept over the past year. 

Who stole the content?

So it came as quite a surprise that he left out most of the content in his eNewsletter.  Here are the three ways in which he really goofed up:

Starbucks, the Chicago Tribune, and some knuckleheaded commenters

I was planning to write an article about the Starbucks Hail Mary barista quality play that involved closing all of their stores for three hours. Talk about a drought!

But serendipitous searching pointed me in a completely different direction.

As part of my research, I was reading a thoughtful article in the Chicago Tribune online.  Noticing that there were seven comments, I thought they might add some value on the actual user experience following the closing experiment. 

No such luck.

With one exception, the comments were completely useless.  Perhaps worse than useless, they were stupid. Here's a sampling:

Richmond Public Relations may not be self absorbed in person.  But they are completely self-absorbed online.

If ever there were a profession where it should be all about the client and not about your company it would be public relations. While looking for great public relations sites, I fell upon yet another bad example of a self-absorbed company with an awful website.

I was amazed that a company that makes its living by providing relevant information for a variety of news outlets makes it so hard to get the same kind of information on its website.

Award-winning print marketing materials may fail completely when translated online.

Churchill Corporate Services provides a broad range of rental, relocation, and disaster housing services both for corporations and individuals. 

They have a corporate website and several micro-sites that are dedicated to specific business divisions.  Collectively, these sites provide a pretty comprehensive look at what the company does and how they can benefit their customers.

Before I had ever looked at their websites, I was alerted to an online brochure.  The print version of the eBrochure had actually won a second-place New Jersey award in 2005 for a direct marketing mail package.  Unfortunately, what worked well in print works poorly online.