I think we can all agree that the health insurance reform legislation of 2010 will touch each and every one of us. It will impact both businesses and individuals.

If you are a business owner, it is vital that you understand how it will affect you and your employees.  Why? Because, unless you are a very small business, you will either have to provide healthcare insurance or pay a penalty for failing to do so. You will have to make some tough decisions in the years to come about how to handle your employees’ health insurance needs.

Because of the dramatic impact of this legislation, there is an urgent need for comprehensive and understandable information so that business owners can plan intelligently.

This creates a uniquely powerful opportunity to provide relevant and compelling content for your current and prospective customers. You can demonstrate thought leadership at a time when business owners are desperate to find an information source they can trust.

One local agency is doing exactly that.  Gulfshore Insurance in Naples, Florida is doing a superb job of content marketing at the exact moment that the health insurance paradigm shift looms large for everyone in the United States.

When you go to their website, you can find a broad range of information about the kinds of insurance coverage they provide, how they help you manage risk, and exactly who they are. That is always important.

But, what is urgent right now–and for years to come–is trustworthy content about healthcare reform. Gulfshore Insurance brings that information front and center on their homepage with their Health Reform Tools and Resources link. 

That link leads you to a wealth of information that is both comprehensive and timely. In the case of health reform, timeliness is vital because so much is undecided, in process, and apparently changeable.

The timeline chart below is a great example of the hard work they have done to help their clients understand what’s in store.

In short, Gulfshore Insurance is executing a content marketing strategy that genuinely benefits their customers and will therefore benefit to them well into the future.

Billion-Dollar Bank/Insurance Agency Completely Misses the Same Once-In-A-Lifetime Content Marketing Opportunity

BB&T is a huge regional bank which has in recent years acquired numerous local insurance agencies. In Southwest Florida, they bought an excellent local firm whose management team and employees continue to provide great products and services.

Unfortunately,  they are missing an unprecedented opportunity to show authentic thought leadership. During this turbulent time in American history when healthcare and healthcare insurance is changing forever, they are missing in action online.

If you go to the old local web address or the parent company insurance agency address, you will find absolutely nothing about healthcare reform. Moreover, they have eliminated any kind of local information on the website to tell you about the kinds of professionals that you would deal with in Southwest Florida.  If you drill down several layers, you can find telephone numbers to call but no e-mail or individual contact information. Even worse, they tell you absolutely nothing about the local company.   If I were not already familiar with that company, I would be at a complete loss to know why I should become a client.

The bottom line:

The Good–

• Gulfshore Insurance is showing authentic thought leadership that will resonate with clients and prospects for years to come.
• By providing lots of relevant, localized information, Gulfshore Insurance enables search engines to rank them highly and prospective clients to find them easily .
• Gulfshore Insurance shows up high on the first page of local search results for terms such as health insurance, business insurance, and personal insurance. Great content has a lot to do with that.

The Bad–

• BB&T has lost that same once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show thought leadership and engender trust.
• They provide almost no information about their local presence in Southwest Florida.
• Their search engine performance is abysmal. Neither their current website address nor the predecessor local website shows up at all when you search for health insurance in Fort Myers or Naples–our two largest local markets.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson!!  Car salesmen approaching!! 

I’m guessing that I didn’t even need an evocative photo for each of you to conjure up your own happy showroom memory.

My own recollection is fresh since I’m considering (ugh!) a new car purchase. At a local car dealer, no less than 5 sales guys tried to foist themselves on me.  I was just one salesperson away from hightailing it out of there.

Car dealers and manufacturers spend a fortune getting you in the showroom door. Imagine if they invested equally in delivering a valuable, in-person content marketing experience.  One can dream.

But, because we can learn from the awful as well as the awesome, here are some content marketing lessons to take away from the typically painful automobile showroom encounter.

5 Lessons to Learn from the Agony of Anti-Content Marketing Car Showroom Visits

1. Don’t make it blindingly obvious that you are desperate to sell a walk-in—read web visitor—prospect anything you can manage to squeeze them into.  Your web visitors want you to make them smarter about possible solutions to their problems so they can make smart buying decisions.
2. Find a fun, unique way to offer helpful info from the get go.  Don’t replicate the same old, same old kind of greeting that you get in a showroom.  I can’t remember a car salesman ever beginning with a useful offer of information, research, fun factoids that might bring me out of my protective shell. Your website can find a zillion different ways to invite and inform your visitors.
3. Provide useful, non-salesy takeaway information that isn’t all about you or your company.  Wouldn’t it be great to get some tangible product information in a showroom without having to survive a gauntlet of desperate-seeming sales guys?  Make it easy for your visitors to take away great content via eBooks or whitepapers without an obtrusive request for buying intention or detailed contact information.
4. Display in-depth knowledge of your products and services in the context of your customers’ concerns. I’ve been astonished by how often a car salesperson is clueless about car information that the dealer or manufacturers should know is top of mind among customers.  Your website is the perfect venue to provide easily accessible, but ultimately in-depth content that answers your visitors most urgent and important questions.
5. Don’t have a pop-up as your web visitors are about to move on that says the non-automotive equivalent of: “What will it take to put you in a car today?”  Apparently, car sales reps are instilled with the assumed truism that if you let a prospect leave the showroom leave without getting them to make an offer, you’ll never see them again. 
   I’m pretty sure that’s because they hated dealing with you so much that they would rather have root canal without anesthetic than relive the showroom assault. 
   On the other hand, offering your web visitors relevant and compelling content that leads them naturally closer to trusting you will encourage them to return.

I”m probably naive about this but I really believe that smart car dealers could deliver a positive–and mutually rewarding–content marketing experience if they made the buying process all about the customer and his needs.

But, there is one thing I am sure about. When you show that you genuinely care about your online customers by benefiting them from the time they first land on your site, a significant percentage will come back to spend time on your site and to buy.  

I continue to be surprised by the number of marketing and advertising companies who have websites that hide examples of the great work that they do behind a bunch of content clichés that fail to distinguish them from every other similar company. 

I recently stumbled upon the website of such a company who is missing its primary content marketing opportunity. They have great stuff, but it’s really hard to find.

Content marketing is all about providing relevant, compelling, and easily accessible information to your prospective customers.

In this case, what is genuinely relevant and compelling is the work that this agency has done on behalf of of its clients. That  visual content represents potential solutions to the problems that its Web visitors are facing.Unfortunately, the content that counts is lurking behind some same old, same old verbiage.

The copy below is from the actual website that I happened upon  They appear to do some really good work. But,  as a potential client, I would have to be truly driven to find that work. First, I would have to wade through all the generic copy that promises pretty much what any good marketing/advertising company could do for me :

“Fill in the Blank” Advertising Company creates custom marketing solutions from strategy through execution to help build and transform your business needs. Let us get to know you inside and out. Let us become instrumental in helping you develop breakthrough solutions to meet your brand objectives and increase your profits. With smart planning & execution, we strengthen your image and reputation as the world around us changes. Change is reality.

We differentiate your company from the competition……

A genuine irony flows from the website copy that makes the promise: "We differentiate your company from the competition."  Sadly, there is almost nothing in the copy that differentiates this agency from its competition.

Actually,  there is a differentiation to be found on this website–but not easily found. That differentiation consists of the proof behind the copy clichés, that is, the actual work that this agency has done. But, you have to struggle to hard-to-find it.

Making It Too Hard to Get to What Really Matters

To get to the good stuff,  you must click on a small  link called, "The Work,"  that sits at the bottom of the page. There, you will find a wealth of visual examples of excellent marketing and advertising projects done for a broad range of companies from relatively small to very very large.  You can even watch videos of commercials that are memorably amusing and interesting.

Moreover, the agency’s work examples include several very well-known brands that add implicit credibility to their skills and experience.

There is another missed opportunity, however. In an era of quantification, none of the work examples are accompanied by information about the objectives of the work and successful outcomes. I’m sure that there were plenty and that they would provide plenty of trust building content for potential clients.

The simple lesson: When you have great work to show, make sure that it is front and center on your website so that impatient visitors find it immediately. Then, use that work to power the copy that populates your homepage and the rest of your site.  Content marketing fails when you cannot find the content that counts quickly and easily. Only pirates love buried treasure.

In other words, when you can show specific successes, you do not have to rely on generic copy that fails to differentiate you from dozens of other similar companies.

Oh,and be sure to avoid clichés like the plague.

Or Maybe I’m on a special list of empty-headed business people.

But I’m hit by way too many email marketing campaigns that must assume that I’m exceptionally gullible. Perhaps I’m the only person that hates this stuff, but I’m going to share the agonizingly long text of an intelligence-insulting promotional email so you can judge for yourself.

Several normal emails kicked off the campaign promoting an online workshop. That was fine. I’m interested in the topic and am ok getting marketing missives.  But, then came the first ‘oops’ email follow up with a lame ‘I goofed’ message. And then the pathetic ‘boo boo mistake’ attempt that you see below in appropriate scarlet letters sneaked into my in box.  Does this woman really think I will fall for this?

Please marketers. I’m begging you. Write great copy. Be persuasive. Show me value. Share your wisdom. Ask for the order. All that is fine. Just don’t take me for an idiot with this kind of tripe which they must teach in ‘Take Your Customers for Chumps Online Marketing School’:

Am I the only one that hates this stuff?

Hi Newt,

I made a big boo boo mistake this afternoon.

Just as my team and I were getting ready to close down
registration for the Website Creation Workshop, I
accidentally sent an email out to the wrong list.

Now let me explain….

I got started a bit late in the promotion cycle with one
of my partners and we didn’t do our preview
interview call until just yesterday.

Since the call that was to introduce me to her readers was
only a day before the registration deadline, we talked and
we both agreed,  that extending the deadline by a couple of
days was the right thing to do.

I really would rather have not done this, but its my own
fault for scheduling a teleseminar the day before the deadline.

Because as I said in a post on the blog earlier today,
[Link removed to protect the innocent]
I need to finish getting the Workshop ready. And in particular
my team needs time to get the remaining Student Project
websites setup.

So today as I was sending out the email to the sublist
of people who were "Friends of Lynn" only, I
accidentally included a whole bunch of other email
sublists that I actually wanted to *exclude*. Aaggh!

Now a whole bunch of people got this "deadline extended"
email that probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Here is what I am doing then. I am extending the deadline
for you too until 11:00am Eastern Time, Saturday morning,
March 25th.

[Link removed to protect the innocent]

I really do need the time to finish getting ready for the
Workshop, but I feel it is only fair that you get this
extension now too. I and some of my staff will just have to
work more this weekend.

We’ll get over it though. And after you register we will
have your Student Website ready as soon as we can.

Here is the link for you to register…

[Link removed to protect the innocent]

This Taking Us for Idiots Email Marketing May Work, But I hate it All the Same

I guess this must work often enough to keep annoying me with it. On the other hand, it might explain why email marketing too often deserves a dubious reputation.

I just received an email promotion that was so wrong-headed that it makes a perfect negative case study.  As always we can learn from what is terrific or, in this case, not so terrific.

Here are 4 Major Email Promo Mistakes that You Should Avoid:

• The header: This is the email header I saw in my inbox: “invitation for March 17”.  It doesn’t tell me what is happening on that date or why I should care. Since I, like all of you, receive way too many emails, I have no earthly reason to open it. 
  Your header must entice the recipient to open your email by showing quickly that your reader will benefit. It plays the critical role of a headline in a news story or an advertisement and is even more important because it’s the only thing your recipients may see in their crowded in box.

• The sender: The sender was Pearl Collier, but I neither know her nor can determine who she works for by looking at the sender name. That makes me nervous. If I take the trouble to cursor over the name, I can figure out that her email address seems to come from a large local R.E. developer. But, I bothered to do that only because I was motivated to write this article.
  Your send address mustn’t be mysterious. Unless you are mass mailing to folks who are inclined to open something from you because they know or respect you, you should use inexpensive software such as Constant Contact or MailChimp that lets you show a company name as sender in order to give you credibility.
• The message body: This tells me nothing other than the fact that an unspecified event is happening in an unspecified location at an unspecified time for an unspecified reason. I can see that the sender is connected to ‘Verandah’ but I don’t necessary know what Verandah is or what on earth the event is all about.
  Your message body should include everything your target needs to know to motivate them to take the next step whether it’s to attend an event, visit your website, get a free report, etc., etc. Make it obvious and enticing.
• The attachment: Since I don’t know this person and am paranoid about viruses and evil spyware demons, I will not open something that might wreck havoc on my PC.  Even if I knew the sender, she hasn’t given me enough explanation about why I would benefit to justify opening it.
  Your attachments should be rare or non-existent in promotional mailings. Put what you need to communicate in the body of the message. Make it super easy for your recipients to do what you want them to do.

A Sadly Missed Content Marketing Opportunity

What’s really unfortunate about this promotional mailing is that it is almost certainly promoting an event that is important for the company, expensive to produce, and most likely enjoyable to attend.  But, few recipients are likely get past the marketing hurdles that make it hard for them to justify taking action.

Don’t let this happen to you. Make sure that your header and your message body provide relevant and compelling content that motivates your prospects to take the next step toward becoming your customers.

This lame attempt at artificial online intelligence was amusing, but appalling.

I was awake late one night not too long ago and wound up on a marketing product site that didn’t want to let me go. Up popped the following dialogue between the fictional Lacey and my canine alter ego.  Her enthusiasm for her product never flagged in spite of my devious doggy replies.

See if you’re smarter at spotting a prevaricating PC pooch than ‘Lacey’ was in this actual dialogue (or dogalogue).

Woof, indeed. 

I was perversely inspired to write this because of a recent gorgeous direct mailing I received from local French restaurant.

They did a lot of things right. There was some beautiful photography that captured the essence of this charming little bistro. They described how the restaurant and its cuisine were uniquely appealing. They shared some impressive awards and recognitions for their excellence. They included their Web address. And, they even provided a little map that showed me exactly how to find it.

There was only one thing missing. But it was the most important thing: They failed to make me an offer that would entice me to dine at the restaurant. In fact, there was no offer at all.

So here’s a lesson we all learned long ago from the Godfather: make me an offer I can’t refuse and I will respond promptly and positively. For this restaurant, there were certainly plenty of possibilities. It could’ve been free appetizers, free glasses of the house wine, buy one entrée get one free, 50% off a bottle of wine or free desserts. But they offered me nothing.

Even worse, there was no call to action, offer or no offer. On one side of the 3" x 7" promotion piece the name of the restaurant served as the headline. On the flipside, the only thing resembling a headline was "recipient of many awards".  They didn’t ask me to take any action at all.

For me and I’m sure for most of the recipients who aren’t familiar with this restaurant, we will probably toss the promotion piece without taking any action. It appears to be a pretty expensively produced item so that means between postage, design, and printing they have spent a lot of money. But, I think most of that money was wasted because they neither asked me to come to the restaurant nor offered me any compelling reason to do so.

I am not a direct marketing expert, but I do know this: If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, you increase the likelihood of taking the action you want me to take by orders of magnitude. Moreover, if you had told me to bring an offer-containing promotion piece to the restaurant, you could have measured the results of your marketing efforts precisely. Finally, whatever you gave away would have been more than balanced by the money I spent on everything else during my visit–not to mention the money I would likely spend on future visits.

The direct marketing lesson: When you make your prospective customers an offer they can’t refuse, it will work for you just as effectively as it worked for the Godfather all those years ago.

I became aware of the Metwell website as a result of a promotion they had sent me via Twitter. Their website is full of unintended ironies as they offer online marketing advice which the website appears to ignore.

It’s also a good example of a website with a pretty good layout that is undercut by a lack of focus and a serious shortage of relevant and compelling content.

I found it hard to understand exactly what Metwell does or how they could help me after a quick–and then a more in depth–visit to their website The company seems to know content is important because their site attempts to provide a lot of content, at least on the surface. But they misunderstand the essence of content marketing by failing to make their content relevant and compelling to prospective buyers.

Here’s what I find to be most problematic:

• They have a big visual slideshow on the top left of their home page but this doesn’t necessarily relate to what they do. Rather, it seems to be a sharing of widely varied business news/concepts.
• Below this big section, they have a very quick slideshow which reviews seemingly unrelated services they provide. But once the slideshow is finished there is nowhere else on the home page that tells you what they do.
• Below that slideshow they have an article titled, "What to Do with a Good Idea." This is fairly interesting but I still don’t know if they can help me as a businessperson take a good idea to market or not.
• To the right they have a headline, "Hire Your Kids?" This relates to potential small-business tax benefits. But, again, I have no idea from what I see on the home page whether this company is either willing or capable of helping me with tax issues.
• At the bottom of the page, they have a section called Differentiate Your Business. Unfortunately, on their own website’, they fail to differentiate their business from thousands of others who may do exactly the same kind of things.
• If you click on the Our Services button, you get a bullet point list of the many and varied services they provide. But, it is so varied that you would be hard put to trust their expertise in each and every one. Moreover, because they offer absolutely no explanation of what they do for each of those bullet points, we are really left hanging.
• The website includes no information about any of the company principals so that we are completely in the dark about their knowledge and experience as it might relate to our needs.

How they miss the point on the importance of relevant and compelling content

High up on their website they have a news section in which the lead article (with unintended irony) is titled, "What Makes a Great Website. The entire content of the article, pasted directly from their website, is as follows:

• Hire a professional and we will build you a great website.  Rembember, five mediocre website designers working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one super-star.
• Avoid being clever – use insight.  Many websites scream "look at me" our goal is to design your website and customers will say "here’s what I’m looking for"
• Update your site continuously. Keep your content fresh and always have new products on your virtual shelves.  This will generate business and keep the search engines visiting your site and better ranking
• No great website was ever conceived by more than 3 people.  One voice, one vision.
• Metwell will design a great website for you and maintain it or show you how to do it.

Not only is this article bereft of content, it appears to be more infomercial than legitimate information.

From those five bullet points, one derives a single piece of advice: Customers  arriving at your site should say, "here’s what I’m looking for." The rest of the content seems self congratulatory and clichéd. Moreover it’s incomplete.

If they meant to share with us the essence of a great website, they fail to do that. If they meant to tell us why they are perfectly positioned to create our website, they don’t do a good job of that either. In fact, they failed at proofreading because the very first bullet point misspells the word ‘remember.’

The final irony of their website is that several of their bullet pointed services relate directly to website design and development

The lesson we all have to learn is that good design is critical, but without great content even the best design is simply wasted effort.

Storytelling is a key component of effective marketing and often of the very best advertising. But, you have to be really careful in the use of storytelling for a brief TV commercial that addresses millions of viewers who are not giving you their full attention from the get-go.

That’s why the State Street SPDR commercial featuring a cute Jack Russell Fox Terrier misses the mark.

If you are Garrison Keillor, you can take a long time to tell a story about Lake Wobegon in which none of us know where you’re headed and are willing to give you as much time as you want to get to the point.

TV commercials do not have that luxury. Unless your story is so intrinsically compelling that we will follow along without knowing where you’re headed, you are likely to lose us at least conceptually early on. So it is with the State Street commercial.  Moreover, unless you have an incredibly sophisticated audience, your story must make an obvious customer benefit connection. The State Street commercial does not.

This 60 second spot was shot in vintage black-and-white with an unintelligible French lyric playing in the background. It stars a Jack Russell Fox Terrier who is on a search for the perfect toy for his best four-legged pal. I’m guessing that those of us who are crazy about dogs can spend a pleasant 60 seconds following the ultimately successful search for a buried bone that proves to be preferable to a half-dozen doggie toys delivered earlier.

But, the main reason I paid enough attention to get to the point of the commercial was that I thought it would be great fodder for a blog post. And, not in a good way.

The basic idea is that finding the right dog treat is just as important and just as challenging as finding the right tailored ETF investments for the appropriate customer. But we have to spend virtually the entire commercial following the dog and trying to understand what the heck the French singer is singing in order to get to the pay off–which has nothing to do with a pair of dog buddies.

Here are the three biggest problems I have with this commercial:

1. For the first 45 seconds of the commercial you have absolutely no idea what it’s about. If you are in a relaxed mood and love dogs, that may be okay. But for most viewers, it’s critical to get to the point early in be obvious about the benefit to them.
2. When they do it to the point about 15 seconds left, they make an implicit analogy about a dirty old buried dog bone (that only a dog could love) and their high-tech, sophisticated ETF solution. That’s quite a stretch to make in terms of analogies.
3. Unless you already know what an ETF is and how they can be custom tailored, this commercial won’t tell you anything. And, even if you do know, the wrap up line “precise in a world that isn’t,” doesn’t really provide you a clear benefit or differentiation from other suppliers of targeted ETF’s.

This is a lovely, sweet commercial that those of us who are soft on dogs and on French music can appreciate. But it’s a very inefficient use of 60 precious seconds of commercial time.

A much better example of putting a dog to work is Duke, the golden retriever in the Bush’s baked beans commercials. Click here to see why we believe that is so effective.

if you have an extra 60 seconds to see if you think I’m right or wrong, click on the video below. What do you think? Does it work for you?

When much of the web was experimental and Web surfing was still recreational, it might have been okay to have a website that was creative for its own sake–even when it was unclear about its purpose.  Not so today. 

We face three key realities that must shape our thinking about a good versus bad website

• Websites are our most important marketing tool. They will increasingly replace most traditional marketing.  Therefore, you have to get it right.
• Your prospective online buyers are pressed for time and won’t waste it trying to figure how they will benefit from what you do. 
• You have just one chance to influence your prospective buyer.  If they are not impressed, they will mosey on down the Internet.

A video company: The website that works poorly

Our supplier of video services shall remain unnamed.  When you arrive at the site you have to wait for flash video to load.  Although it loads pretty quickly, the presence of flash is still an unnecessary barrier to getting the information you need to make a buying decision. The home page itself lacks any description of what the company does or how it will help solve my problems.  We are presented with bouncing vertical lines at the end of which are vertical navigation links which are placed on their side and thus unnecessarily difficult to read.

The name of the company at the top of the site is clever but unclear.  And, although it’s tagline does include the word ‘video,’ as a business owner I would not know for sure what sort of video they are talking about and whether it would be something that would benefit my company.

In fact, you cannot find exactly what the company does until you click on the bouncing ‘about us.’  Then you do get pretty good description of how the company can help.  However, you might already have given up at that point. 

I know what you’re probably thinking: why doesn’t the home page feature a video or at least a still version of a powerful video that you could click on and quickly see that kind of work that they do?  In this case, you have to click on their ‘portfolio’ to access a sample of videos.  But, again, nothing starts right up and you have to work too hard to view any of the examples.

Creative companies often assume that offbeat ‘creativity’ proves that they can deliver a creative solution that will benefit your company.  Unfortunately, almost none of us have the time to investigate what value may lie underneath the surface ‘creativity’.  Unless those elements illustrate precisely how the company will provide solutions, they stand in the way of convincing us that we should become a customer.

Key lessons to learn for an effective website: Be quick. Be Clear. Be Compelling. Be convincing.  Many of your web visitors want to buy. Make that buying decision a no brainer for them.

If you are looking for a great example of a small business website that really nails its, check out our article on Adventure Training Concepts.