It seems that I’ve been mowing the lawn every five days, most likely because I probably am.  Before the mowing begins, I dutifully pick-up all the sticks, no shortage of them this summer, along with some waste from the neighbor’s dog who obviously prefers our yard to his, or maybe it’s a her.  Over the years, this type of preparation has no doubt spared me a trip or two to the walk-in clinic.  But it also allows me to focus on the art of lawn mowing, which is, of course, nothing more than winning the pennant for the best lawn in the neighborhood.  Like the Cubs, I’m winless; the good news is that it’s only been for nine years.

I approach the writing of content the same way.  Like the Boy Scouts say, “Be Prepared.”  It doesn’t matter what the delivery platform is for your content – a TV commercial, newspaper ad, brochure or Web site – if you’re not practicing the process of VOC, you’re not developing content the way the pros do.  VOC is Voice of Customer and it’s where all good content begins, and ends, because your approach to VOC shouldn’t ever end.

Content that might be compelling to you isn’t necessarily compelling to your customers.  But how would you know one way or the other?  You wouldn’t unless you asked them.  How frequently do your customers want to receive your content and in what delivery form?  You won’t know until you ask them.  And how do you know what subject matter resonates the strongest so you can purpose your content accordingly?  You won’t know unless there’s a mechanism for your customers to respond to you — like a blog, a feedback loop or a social media portal or gateway.

All of this VOC work is done upfront when you’re launching a content marketing strategy, but it’s also done all along the way to make certain your content remains on target.  And there’s no shortage of acquisition strategies to compile and synthesize your VOC data.  Focus groups, less formal listening sessions, one-on-one interviews, on- and off-line surveys, trade show intercepts are just a few of the techniques for acquiring VOC.

So, now’s the time to stop selling and telling and start listening. Preparation is critical to great content marketing; in fact, it’s the only way to play it safe.  So is picking up sticks and other unwanted debris before you mow, which I’ll take any day over shoveling.

I think I’ve found the absolute teen Dream Job. No, the absolute Dream Job for anyone at any age. Being paid to shop and to show the world what you bought and why you bought it. That’s exactly what the teen stars of YouTube “hauls” do. They produce show-and-tell videos about their latest “haul” from the mall. Almost 159,000 hauls have been posted to the channel. And this week, JC Penney joins teen-oriented companies like Forever 21 and American Eagle in using this YouTube phenomena as a core marketing strategy to capture their part of this fall’s expected $50 billion “back to school” consumer spend.

JC Penney retained six teen girls from across the nation to create their new back to school haul videos (jcp.com/teen). The haulers were given free transportation, lodging and JCP gift cards and let loose in a store near Penney’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. And now they’re showing — and telling about — what they purchased at JCP to gear up for the new term.

Any person with a webcam can become a haul video expert. Tennessee “haulers” Elle and Blair Fowler are the teen pioneers of hauling and have attracted such a following of their peers and the moms of their peers that they’re now in high demand by marketers of everything from fashion to cosmetics.

Haul videos can focus on the results of shopping at a specific retailer or for a specific product category. Imagine the opportunity to take the haul concept beyond the teen market.  Why shouldn’t a marketer or retailer of “all things baby” recruit a team of moms to talk about the latest product trends and actually demonstrate product features? Wouldn’t a grocery chain want a team of people-who-love-to-entertain to post videos that feature their supermarket shopping haul for a specific event they’re hosting – even sharing the recipes that necessitated the trip?  How about having some of the most avid DIYers haul about their last shopping spree at the hardware, building supply or paint store?

Since marketers are taking the original authentic YouTube phenomena to a more commercial consumer-generated concept, under Federal Trade Commission guidelines, paid haulers must disclose in the video if they got free products or other compensation from retailers.  So the real question is: Will commercializing consumer-generated content, like hauls, come to have the same trust as non-commercialized YouTube content or the same mistrust as traditional advertising?

What do you think?

The majority of female consumers use the Internet for pre-purchase research. No big surprise there — it’s a stat that’s been popular for years. In response, you’ve created top-notch content that helps your female audience make an informed purchase. And you’re sharing that content on a variety of platforms — your website, Twitter and Facebook page. But are you sharing the right content on the right platform? Are other platforms sharing your content? And are you generating third-party digital conversations that drive business?

 If “sharing” your content consists of cutting and pasting the same piece from web, to Twitter, to Facebook, you come across as repetitive and as sorely lacking an understanding of your audience. Take, for example, your female audience. On average, they spend between six and sixty minutes doing online research, searching for coupons and browsing email newsletters before they actually hit the stores. What influences their purchases? Seventy-seven percent of women are more likely to seek a product in the store after they’ve read a review of that product on a community forum or message board and 67 percent of them are more likely to actually purchase that product after reading about it online.

What’s driving that? Community web sites, forums and message boards that include online coupons, blogs and customer product reviews — such as iVillage and SheSpeaks — are influential digital channels. Women are looking to their peers for the low down on products.

 What that means is you can’t be the only voice with something to say — you need to inspire others to talk about you. And you need to do so using social media and your website. That’s content marketing coming full circle — engaging consumers in conversations that drive more conversations. Conversations that inform the consumer, that inspire the consumer to share their opinions and insights, and that ultimately influence purchase behavior.

 Does that mean women aren’t using your site or Facebook page? Certainly not. Fifty-one percent of women “like” grocery, health/beauty and household products brands on Facebook — and they go there to share opinions and experiences or connect with other customers. Think about that the next time you post to your status feed — what information are those who “like” you looking for and how do you generate conversations on your Facebook page that create a social setting that’s conducive to consumer feedback?

 And your web page? That’s a different experience — and thus requires different content and a different voice. Because your website is less “social,” the majority of women visit it to gain more information about the brand, seek coupons and promotional offers. They’re not looking to voice their opinions on your site, simply to get the information or deal they seek. If you do it right, they’ll then give a shout-out to that experience, your brand and your product on Facebook and other community sites.

Make it simple. That’s it. The single thing that will increase the “share power” of your Facebook posts is to keep them as short and simple as possible. And we’re not just talking word count here. We’re talking about capturing the essence of your idea so that it’s compelling, yet simple to grasp.  So compelling and easy to understand that the reader will share it in the social sphere.

 Social scientist and viral marketing guru Don Zarella (donzarella.com) conducted a study of Facebook data over a long period of time and identified some key features of posts with “share power.”  I found five of the findings especially interesting. 

 Add Numbers to Your Title.  That one was easy to apply to this article — even though using a numeric in this instance wouldn’t typically make it past a proofreader.  It seems that Zarella found that in Facebook, titles with the digits 1 to 9 outperform text only titles. Not very creative, but more effective, I guess. 

Write to a Second Grade Reading Level.  When he matched the level of sharing among posts with reading grade levels, Zarella’s results revealed that the higher the share rates, the lower the reading level.   Facebook posts written at second grade reading level generated about 32 percent more shares than average.  The first paragraph of this article, when tested using the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test scores about a 5^th grade reading level — which, if it were a Facebook post would have resulted in about 15% more shares than average.  Guess I need to shorten my sentences and use more words with one syllable. 

Post on the Weekend.  Facebook users are most likely to share posts on Saturdays and Sundays.  While Zarella found that the volume of URLs introduced into Facebook are highest on weekdays — especially on Wednesdays and Fridays — stories published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook 15 to 40 percent more often. Then again, this could be due to the fact that more than half of U.S. businesses block the use of Facebook and other social networks in the workplace.

Verbs Speak Louder than Adverbs.  The use of action words trigger the most sharing, followed by important nouns.  In fact verbs trigger about 2 percent more shares than average and adverbs trigger almost 3 percent less than average.  Trigger is an action word, isn’t it?

 Sex Sells. Okay, this is not so surprising.  But from a linguistic content standpoint, posts with the word “sex” are at the very top of the list for posts with share power.  What’s surprising is that “sex” is the least often introduced word introduced into social media feeds.  I used it twice here in an attempt to reverse that trend.

My father was a preeminent food and drug marketer with Foote, Cone & Belding, and then later on in a solo consulting practice.  He was actually the man behind Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn, but that’s another story for a different time. My father believed that the best ad written was from a farmer selling his horse.  The headline read Horse For Sale and under the headline there was a picture of the horse, and under the picture of the horse was the word Horse.  In other words, just get it all out there, go sell something, and don’t horse around. Times have really changed.

Two colleagues of mine in Madison, Doug Tangwall and Wendy Soucie, are taking a deep look into effective selling, and getting results, which is probably the basis for their company’s name – End Results Marketing. Their approach to generating sales leads is called Nurture Marketing, and although this strategy has been around since the mid-nineties, it’s a 180 from my father’s approach or those sales methods like the Ben Franklin and Bear Trap sales closes.

Doug defines Nurture Marketing as educational promotion designed to improve customer outcomes and cultivate affinity for a business. That makes sense, and it’s in complete lock step with the belief that we spend so much time trying to be understood and not enough time understanding. In other words, stop the hard sell and substitute that approach with a little hard listening. As Doug says, “Think of nurture marketing as the exact opposite of traditional marketing. Instead of ‘buy my stuff’, it’s ‘what information can I provide to help my customers succeed’?”

By all accounts the approach works. By combining research into a client’s business, including research into their target audiences, promotion, thought leadership and social conversation, Doug and Wendy have obtained 14-17 times the sales leads than traditional tactics.  Yes, it takes time to nurture these relationships, but being a trusted advisor is going to pay off more than merely being a product hawker. “The buying process has changed and our sales process needs to change accordingly. Most of us educate ourselves about products now before we ever call anyone. Sharing knowledge is increasingly important to differentiate your business. The concept of nurture goes hand in hand with social media outreach,” adds Wendy.

But don’t just think about that in terms of generating sales leads — continue the Nurture Marketing process all the way down the line. I have a friend who, in the interest of expediency, left home on a road trip and realized 40 minutes later – at the convenience store counter – that he was wallet-less.  A representative from his financial institution actually made the trek north to deliver him some cash.  Can anyone say, “customer for life?”  That’s nurturing the relationship.

So, here’s a little Nurture Marketing tip. Use social media to conduct some primary research about your prospect, then take some time and extrapolate some useful data from secondary sources.  Synthesize the information and develop a few critical insights that you can share with your future customer, but don’t share all of them – you might need to meet again.  They’ll see you as a thought leader, as a company who is genuinely interested in them, and as a person who is in it for the long haul.  No doubt the sales and marketing process has changed, now we need to make certain we change along with it.

A recent study found that a business with 1 million Facebook fans translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year — and that most fans generate extra impressions for businesses because they share status update posts with their friends.

OK, so you don’t have a million fans, but what this study illustrates is that as long as you are leveraging your Facebook fans by posting information that’s relevant to them, and engaging them with updates on new products, services and promotions — there is, indeed, value to having fans. Question is — are  you leveraging your Facebook page and its fans? The key is staying ahead and in front of your fans. If you only post once a month — you’re invisible. The other side of that coin is that if you’re constantly posting to Facebook and/or posting information that comes across as a hard sell or is simply irrelevant, then your fans are going to stop being your fans.

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In either situation, you only have eight seconds to accomplish what you set out to do.  Stay on the bull for eight seconds before getting thrown off.  Convert customers in eight seconds before they leave your landing page.  The similarity stops there.  Eight seconds on a bucking bull is a long time.  Eight seconds of a customer’s attention on a landing page campaign is not.  Digital marketing specialist Silverpop (http://www.silverpop.com) estimates that almost half of visitors to landing pages will “bail” in that first eight seconds.

It seems that many of us email marketers are doing a pretty good job of getting email recipients to click on the link to our landing pages, but we could do a lot more to make our landing pages more fully engage visitors and generate conversions. Silverpop’s Strategy Research Team evaluated landing pages of campaigns launched by 150 B2B and B2C companies to determine what we need to do to pass that eight-second test and offered 14 key insights into how we can do that.  Here are some of those landing page recommendations easiest to implement:

Landing Page Location.  Here’s the most basic rule — never send your email recipients to your home page. The landing page should be completely relevant to the email content.  A home page is too general to deliver a specific message.  Link to existing Website pages that offer content relevant to the campaign — better yet, create new landing pages created specifically for your campaign. The Silverpop study found that more B2C than B2B companies used their home pages as landing pages.

Repetition of Email Copy. You’d think that this would be a no-brainer, yet almost half of the campaigns in the Silverpop study didn’t repeat the compelling promotional copy that was used in the email.  Repetition reinforces the conversion goal by repeating the call to action. And speaking of call to action, those landing pages with just one primary call to action, placed prominently “above the fold” (page view without scrolling down) and repeated later in content “below the fold” were the most successful.

Copy Length.  Here’s where the eight seconds really counts.  Think what you can read in just that amount of time. What our prospects see at the top of the screen should clearly communicate our strongest value statement and the reason for conversion.  Nearly three-quarters of the landing pages in the Silverpop study were no longer than 250 words, keeping the message succinct and clear, and reducing the need for scrolling. 

Use of Subheads in the Copy.  Using subheads — especially in pages of more than 250 words — not only takes the prospect through your message quickly, but improves the readability of the page. So do other devices like bullet points, copy highlights and call-outs.  In the Silverpop study, almost one-third of the pages that featured more than 1,000 words did not use subheads or other graphic devices to break up the copy. 

Including Hero Shots.  In previous studies, Silverpop found that the presence of photography can have an impact on click rates in emails.  They found the same impact on conversion rates on landing pages — but only when the images are consistent with the overall message of the email and landing page.  Otherwise they cause confusion and site abandonment.

Your conversion objective may differ from one email marketing campaign to another.  Sometimes it may be a transactional objective.  Other times lead generation or simple brand awareness. The one thing that won’t change is the amount of time you have with your prospect to actually make that conversion.  So the extra time you spend on creating compelling landing pages is well worth the eight seconds you’ll earn.

I’ve always found the haircut process to be, well…odd.  I get about 12 haircuts a year.  Except in the seventies when it was far less.  I don’t have much left on top, so when I skirt out of the office for an ear-lowering, the staff in unison quips, “See you back in 5.” They think it’s hilarious, I think it’s getting old.

It seems I get my haircut by someone different each time, but that’s OK because it’s the only time I get to wear a cape.  I mean, who wears a cape other than the two Jacks – Palance and the Ripper – and they’re both dead.  Other than that, the haircut process seems rather benign and always begins with, “How’s your day going?”  I usually want to answer, “It sucks”, but I need to be mindful that there’s a person towering over me with a freshly sharpened scissors in one hand and a razor in the other.  I can answer the next three questions in the blink of an eye.

“At an ad agency.”

“Yes I am, to a wonderful woman.”

“Hah, four in college.”  And so it goes.

So how does this relate to content marketing, arguably the most significant marketing breakthrough of the century?  Amazingly it does and that’s what’s so amazing about it.

The first step in any content marketing strategy is to segment, understand and know the type of information your audience wants and needs.   At the haircut factory, it’s all men, they like their sports, they’re probably borderline — or full line —cheapskates, and they’re too busy to make an appointment or they have so much time on their hands, they don’t need an appointment.  Mission accomplished.

Next, you need to generate or repurpose some content and distribute it to your audience. No shortage here.  There are 14 TV sets, plenty of conversation – had the razor not been inches from my ear, I’d swear the conversation next to me was about the best fast food, but it could have been someone from the west being lassoed.  And there are guy magazines, not that kind, but Car & Driver, Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine.

And just like good content marketing, there’s a little product selling, but not so much selling as informing.  They always ask me, “Would you like some product today?”  I should say, “What would I do with it, put in on my legs?”  As content marketing dictates, solve the unmet need.  They should say, “Tom, I’ve got some product that will volumize your hair, it’s been tested on humans, not animals, and it’s organic, sustainable, and half the profits go to Haiti relief.”  Sold.  Know thy audience.

In content marketing, you need some type of delivery platform for distributing your relevant information.  In this case it should be a blog.  Let’s go with Splitting Hairs (for the readers consumed with detail), or Side Burns (for the angry young man), or Split Ends (for the sports enthusiast), and then there’s always Hair of the Blog (for the morning-after crowd).

The point is this, if the local barber shop has the capacity to be a content marketer, chances are your business does, too.  So, it’s time to take a little off the top – the top line of your marketing budget that is – and apply it to content marketing.

What’s not to like about LEGOs? Most of us have spent more than a few hours playing with them.

A brand recognized around the world, and one that inspires global brand loyalty — something a competitor like Mega Blocks does not — there’s much to be admired. Who would think that LEGO was a master of content marketing? Or that they successfully started content marketing about 20 years ago with their Bricks Kicks and Mania magazines?

Spend a few minutes on the LEGO Club site and you’ll learn a lot about content marketing. Not only does the site appeal to kids, it packs a punch with parents too (just like the LEGO bricks themselves). The LEGO club site allows LEGO fans to “connect” with one another — they can see each other’s Cool Creations or find a calendar of family-friend events that are all about having fun with LEGOs. They can sign up for emails, become a BrickMaster, submit a news story (i.e., become a brand ambassador), get building tips and ideas, share photos of LEGO creations, enter a Comic Captions contest, or get the inside dirt on cool designs and new products. They can also download LEGO screen savers, wallpapers and activities (like “build your own shield” designs), play a wide range of games and view comics and movies. Everything a lover of LEGOs could possibly desire.

How did I discover all this? I have my sister to thank for sharing the BrickMaster idea — on Facebook no less. I couldn’t resist — I had to check it out. Coupons, six sets of LEGOs and an annual magazine! My kids loved it.

And once I was there, we were blown away by the Design by Me function: you can download digital software to design and produce your own LEGO creation, including the nifty little catalog that helps you build it. Better yet, they encouraged kids to “honor their moms” with a custom-created LEGO set. Not only could I get a great Mother’s Day gift, what a great birthday gift for my kids and their friends! We are hooked.

And it doesn’t end there. We kept exploring and found the My LEGO Network — yes, a social networking site for children that let’s them share everything that’s LEGO to them — they can create their own web page, share designs and ideas, and even trade virtual LEGOs.

The point is this — we just kept exploring and never found an end to content we couldn’t wait to devour. And we keep going back.

I know what you’re thinking — “I’m not LEGO.” No, but if you can produce content that helps your customers and prospects solve a problem, anticipate a need or address other interests germane to your service and product offerings — they will come. And come again. That means supplying them with original content you’ve created and also sharing third-party content that you know will tweak their interest. It means helping them learn and making it fun and easy to do so on a wide variety of traditional and digital platforms — be it catalogues, websites or social media channels.

Get creative with your content. Build it. Share it. And “LEGO” of it in the digital sphere.

Do you consider yourself a Creator, Critic, Joiner, Spectator or Conversationalist? In a recently published Ad Age article, Josh Bernoff provided a chart that defined each of these levels of social media participation. According to North American Technographics Empowerment Online Survey, seventy percent of U.S. adults online are categorized as Spectators — they read blogs or tweets, listen to podcasts, or watch video from other users at least once a month. Less than one in four adult online users are categorized as Creators — those who publish a blog or web pages, upload original videos, audio or music, or write and post articles or stories.

Why are 3 out of 4 online users passively absorbing the content that 1 in 4 is providing? Perhaps it’s because an overwhelming 3 out of 4 of us really don’t understand what social networking is all about.

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