Business owners should write their own content!

Surprised? So was I!

A haggard business owner promptly responded with these tired words when I introduced myself as a content writer during a recent IT product conclave. I inquired further, intrigued. He explained that he had worked with a few content writers in the past and found that despite their language expertise, they were not able to get what he was looking for - especially the technical details and the values required for technology marketing. Hence his solution was to write content all by himself. Needless to say, I was shocked. But it also opened up many other questions.

1.  Is it a scalable option for business owners to create their own content?

2. Why would business owners consider this option?

3. What are the risks involved when business owners decide to take content in their own hands?

4. So, what's the solution?

Here are some researched answers that could be of help:   

       

As a business owner, you have to be at many places at the same time, multitask, and focus on a million activities from hiring to technology to finance. Your skill sets would be best used to set up the technology-enabled business at the entrepreneurial stage and to scale up when you meet success. In addition, donning the hat of a content writer is definitely not a practical approach or a long-term solution.

But business owners who are pushed to consider this option do quote unsuccessful content experiences. The reasons could vary from rushed decisions while choosing a content writer, incomplete briefing, sketchy content plans, and zero content goals to an inconsistent content approach and poor means of measuring content effectiveness.

The risks involved are plenty.

a. Any new venture starts at the peak - your energy levels; enthusiasm and inspiring ideas are at their best. But when there are a million other details to take care of, your content focus looses steam and your content engagement suffers.

b.  As a business owner, you are the authority on the subject. But with this expertise comes the dilemma of what to convey to your audience and how many experts get caught with detailed technical explanations that their audience cannot and need not relate to. Complicated content will not connect with your audience.

c. Content writers modulate content presentation - from textual paragraphs to visual imagery and videos. This content expertise has to be taken advantage of.

d. Content writing for ecommerce or content writing for web includes the ability to fine-tune - edit and proofread content for language, spelling, and grammar. While many examples exist where business owners write great content, this activity is best trusted with a skilled content writer, else you will have a poor patchwork of hazily collated content.

The following article takes the example of website content writing to explain the drawback of business owners writing their content: https://growthhackers.com/posts/business-owners-never-ever-write-copy  

So, what's the solution? Well, you are the expert on what you have to provide to your audience, who your audience is, and how you would want your audience to respond to your content. The content writer is the expert on how your story can be crafted. A healthy interaction will leverage the expertise of both the content writer and the business owner to create great content.

a. Ensure that you spend a lot of time at the ideation stage, working with your content writer to clarify the purpose of the content approach, what your story is, how it will be told, to whom, and when.

b. Ensure that your content writer submits a content plan and calendar.

c. Assess samples before you get started on the assignment - to ensure that the content tone and approach reflect your style.

d. Assess content engagement at every stage and, yes, be ready to change your plans.

e. Finally, trust your content writer's expertise to establish connect with your target audience through well-crafted content.

Content writing for customer engagement is a focused activity, requiring unwavering attention and time. A skilled content writer for an ecommerce business or for a digitally enabled sales is a listener, analyst, planner and visionary who can partner with you, craft your values and build trust with your target audience. The purpose of content is to tell your story skillfully to your audience - you have the story, your skilled content writer has the skill. All you need is an effective collaboration of the two.             

For more detail visit @ http://www.addkraft.com/

https://in.linkedin.com/in/addkraft

http://www.contentwritingforecommerce.com/

Positive Reinforcement: Content Mantra for e-Commerce Companies

"Do well in your exams and we'll get you your favorite bicycle"

"What a wonderful child you are! You cleaned your room all by yourself!"

"Better share your toy with your sister, else we'll give away all your toys"

Yes, we've spent a good part of our childhood being witnesses to many million examples of positive and negative reinforcements. But wait! Look around and you'll see subtle and direct examples of this concept all around you, in infinite forms, even today:

End-of-the-year appraisals and performance incentive

Wear a helmet and avoid being pulled up by the traffic police

Shop at your neighborhood supermarket regularly and get discount coupons

In fact, some reinforcements have such powerful impact on our thought process, preferences, and subconscious mind that they even shape our personalities and influence most of our important life decisions. Given the immense significance of positive and negative reinforcements in all aspects of our lives, how can the e-commerce world be far away? Go to any site and you'll see indirect hints to loud proclamations sending us messages:

                Sign in today and get a discount!

                Book today to win early bird prizes!

The argument on the more effective form of reinforcement - positive or negative - is a never-ending saga, but e-commerce content definitely seems to be leaning towards positive reinforcement. These sites use content to focus on three main aspects of human nature: the need to have a sense of belonging, the need to pamper one's self-esteem, and the need to be recognized. We love to be motivated and to be "stroked". In turn, we often return the favor by making the motivator our favorite person, someone we would want to hang out with and look up to while making decisions. This is the primary advantage of using content with positive reinforcements - your sites will definitely get repeat visitors who will soon turn into dedicated followers.

Let's look at a few examples:

1. Most Indian e-commerce sites are already sharpening their thinking pens, now that the festive season is around the corner. The sites are overflowing with positive reinforcement content - mega sales, out of the world discount, unique designs, and festival countdown to the discount date (the site actually has a stop watch ticking away!) - there is a lot of goodies to look forward to!

2. A footwear site encourages customers to share pictures of their experience wearing their products - out on trekking, at the restaurant, at their office desk, etc. The response is phenomenal since these pictures appear on the home page of the site.

3. A food retail website encourages us to choose our preferred food "box" - combo sets of fruits, vegetables, meat, etc. The site helps us in planning our weekly food plan and promises the luxury of receiving our planned boxes at our doorstep. It ends with the message that it is "the easiest way to eat brilliantly!"

4. A site selling coffee calls itself a "for-giving company" and encourages visitors to be part of a unique social cause -  every time we enjoy delicious coffee we also contribute to a noble cause.

5. A site-selling cookie just says "Yummy" - what better encouragement than this! But it does get better...they also make us the offer of a gift box with the words, "It all sounds sweeter when you say it with our freshly baked cookies"

These are all genuine promises of remarkable experiences we will be taken through when we use their services or products. All these subtle to loud-and-clear messages are examples of great content that aim for our heart and are bang on target. Content writing for ecommerce is about on creating great content with positive reinforcement messages; you will definitely reach your audience much faster and with a much clearer message than with any other form of content.

For more detail visit @ http://www.contentwritingforecommerce.com/

http://www.addkraft.com/

contact@addkraft.com

DON’T SELL YOUR SAAS PRODUCT - GIFT YOUR AUDIENCE A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE OF THEIR LIFETIME!

Gone are the days when Asian Paints sold just paints! Today they offer a wide range of user experiences for sale through their paints. Customers now choose the experience package they prefer – the shades and hues that match their personality, textures and combinations that support them emotionally in the various rooms of their home, and options to experience an online preview of how their painted homes would look like even before they make a decision. Yes, “user experience” has emerged the winner in the race to gain your buyers’ attention. Technology or product features and benefits are no longer attractive terms to SaaS or technology product marketers. Although a few IT folks tend to take marketing discussions to their technical world, as a marketer, my vote is always for user experience.

A common mistake many start-up IT product companies make is to go overboard trying to convince customers about just their product and the core technology, especially if members from IT team are part of the decision-making panel at the customer’s end. Many a time, such attempts fall flat, unless the new product is game- changing innovation. I present one of our recent experiences when we worked on technology marketing for a SaaS start-up company and were successful when we adopted the user experience strategy. You may appreciate and make a note of our conscious decision to avoid details about technology throughout this experience.

A year back, when we pitched for a SaaS project in the travel & logistics segment, we were using tough technical language and detailed specs – the result was a big flop. CIOs and IT leaders from the travel industry turned the sessions into long-winding sessions questioning the technology used and providing advices about alternate technology solutions based on their whims and fancies, but most of the prospective users chose to stay within their comfortable technology zones. We then decided that trying to sell product and technology would only lead to never-ending discussions. We chose an alternate approach.

Today, a year later, we tasted success with fantastic results on another project. Yes, we are just completing an exciting project for a start-up in the GCC region. The start- up provides a certain set of services and products with a unique concept to a target segment. It has both a b2b and b2c focus, targeting an entire population and a set of business buyers. The backbone of the project is a SaaS framework and its technology is wide encompassing with user-friendly services and apps. After 6 months of go-to-market with this project, as a marketer, I am happy to see positive feedback from the business owners and early adopters.

So what did we change, what lesson did we learn, what magic happened through the course of the year?

We made key changes in our product and service positioning and our marketing communications. We consciously avoided focusing our pitch on the advantages of SaaS or the product and service features. We stayed away from terminology jargons and IT/SaaS lingo, which confuse and create mistrust among the target audience.

We instead moved towards a customer-centric and user-persona-based content marketing. As content specialists, we prepared our content marketing briefs after studying our client’s service/product offering and the user/buyer persona. We prepared our content pitch focusing on user experience – how the experience would improve the users’ quality of life, what benefits would it bring to their lives, the convenience and time-saving features of the service, and how the users can feel pride by being part of the user group. In summary, our marketing content spoke about how this service/product would impact their lives positively and benefit the society.

The framework of the product and service pitch was hence built around end-user experience and positive influences, with just a few mentions of the product features. We realized that there are about 100 million ways of connecting with the buyers and gaining their trust, the buyers, instead of forcefully convincing them with just technology and product talk. We then designed the marketing strategy and UX/UI experience, moved on to go-to-market planning and narrowed down the final list of digital marketing techniques that helped immensely in conveying the client’s value proposition to the end users.

To our surprise, there was hardly any instance of long-drawn technology-relateddiscussions, counter-arguments, or suggestions that often kill an otherwise successful pitch. All the query arrows from the IT members were successfully broken by the much-appreciated imagery of the end-user experience, clear value proposition, and strong content writing that blended business strategy with user persona.

I must say here that content writing for technology marketing helped our customers (product owners) significantly. Nailing the final content plan was the central focus for the initial period, where the product management team, digital marketing team, support team, and leadership team were part of the go-to-market content framework evaluation and signoff. Content metrics were monitored with respect to content propagation at each stage – that is, awareness stage, product interest stage,desire-to-buy stage, and so on. Stage-appropriate content was created, published, and communicated to thousands of users, again channeled based on their persona, to deliver the desired results at each stage.

Result The customer

(SaaS product owner) almost immediately began to see positive results when the list of early adopters was surprisingly long. They were attracted by the influence the product would have on their daily life, and not by the Opex or Capex features. The marketing strategy and techniques used were cost effective

since not even one sales person was recruited to meet customers in person. The entire sales funnel was handled by digital processes, CRM strategy, and, yes, backend technology.

The customer is now moving on from the acquiring mode to the retaining mode. They are also expanding to neighboring countries and are known as a solid service provider rather than a technology company.

Role of strategic content writing in this success story

Our technology marketing to convince end users was through content marketing. Our content strategy was to deliver personalized content based on the buyers’ persona. Different personas were tracked through CRM and custom-fit content that conveyed the customer’s story and their value proposition were made available to end users. We created virtual user experiences, developed intrinsic value experiences from the designers of the products, built the content package, and shared them with potential buyers. Creating content strategy and content writing - was key - our technology content writers provided innovative content to engage the audience at every stage of buying cycle.

In summary, we never sold SaaS products and their technology advantages; we just marketed customer experience, and yes, answered our end consumer’s questions about how this product can enrich their lives. This strategy spelled success in our current initiative.

A retrospective note:

A few years back, an interesting advertisement for a car caught my attention. A sales person was shooting a barrage of pointers about all the features of a super luxurious car. At the end of this rather exhausting monolog, all that the buyer wanted to know was, “how much mileage would I get per liter?” The sales person stood stumped! It always pays to know what the buyer is looking for and provide just that experience – this will always establish an immediate connect with your buyer.

Author

Technology marketer at www.addkraft.com