How to be Important on the Web

by Jim Mac Donald

People want details. That is the most overlooked truth in the hype of internet marketing. It is also an old-fashioned secret: Specifics make you stand out from competitors. Even so, business efforts to build a simple web presence often get buried in an excess of promotional misfires.

That kind of waste, thanks to the increasing maturity of the internet, will make a difference for those guilty of fluff marketing. The difference will hurt, but fortunately the internet also makes it easy to fix this and strengthen your position as well.

How? Just give people a straight line to knowledge about your business. Go behind the scenes. Provide content. Content is better than a string of marketing superlatives. It gives people something they can relate to, unlike conventional hype. Look up “best” on Google and you’ll get 2.4 billion hits. This is marketing road kill – everything you don’t want to be.

Content on the other hand – which reveals unique aspects of the products or services you offer – creates a distinct web profile. People find you fast. Even better, content helps prospects get useful information, so it puts you on their radar. Also, by being rich in words rather than swollen with multimedia, content reaches people right away – it is virtually immune to internet slowdowns.

What’s your story? Answer that and you have content. Whether you sell insurance, bake muffins, lease farm equipment, design jewelry or make tiddlywinks, you can set yourself apart by telling the world more about your company, your industry or your customers. Don’t be surprised if you have several interesting focal points. Here are some sample business possibilities:

• Tips about the best plants and shrubs for a particular climate (gardening service);
• Description of machines and processes used to manufacture archival cardboard boxes (museum);
• How to make digital photo albums, put pictures on the internet and send them by email (camera store);
• Personal experience – both traumatic & humorous – while helping to carry a large banner along a parade route in tough weather (flag shop);
• Explanations given by people who bring back formal wear in bad shape (tuxedo rentals);
• Security issues involved with the transfer of sensitive business documents (notary).

There is an endless amount of material that can be turned into content. Finding it is easy. Knowing the best ways to use it, though, takes thought.

Why content makes you important

Facts beat promises

Content gives you credibility, in part, because so many enterprises misunderstand it, believing that apparent – rather than real – content does the job. A laundry list of prices, options, benefits, products, plans, milestones, awards or achievements can seem impressive. A company may even be convinced of its own, probably inflated, worth – if nothing else. As for marketing genius, credit goes to whomever persuaded the business owner to pay for a grab bag of fancy PR labels.

Here’s the problem: Who cares about labels when a box is open? A business that offers content stands out even more from the rest of the pack by showing what’s inside the box.

It’s fair to say labels help when people are skimming for information. Unfortunately, this is also the trap of razzle-dazzle marketing, a small truth made to outshine larger realities. The interesting thing about internet content is that, when faced with overwhelming data, we stop looking for easily compared common factors. Instead, we start to differentiate rather than skim: We check inside the box for something special.

Primary identifiers give way to secondary ones. Suddenly content counts. Why is widget “A” used to make an important gizmo? Why not widget “B?” The actual reasons attract more interest than boasts of a bigger, faster or more durable gizmo.

Good content is immediate, credible and personal. It locks in serious consumer awareness with facts, not promises.

The white list advantage

By favoring information over hype, content keeps you on people’s good side – on their white list, so to speak. That would hardly matter except ordinary marketing has pushed consumer tolerance to the edge. No rest for the eye because floors are filled with posters. No rest for the ear because sound effects, music and announcements displace silence. No rest at home because strangers call in hopes you’ll open your pocketbook. No time to think because there is more pressure to choose laundry detergent than vote.

“Marketing is war,” goes the argument. Sure, against competitors. But we target consumers. Marketers want to run up numbers, so carpet-bombing everyone’s sensibilities into dust is not a big issue. Whoever gets the most hits wins. At least until the next round of statistics.

How does content make a difference? A lot of ways. First, when just a hint of overstatement can switch off interest from disaffected consumers, content avoids the backlash. Second, content can reinforce affinity so you needn’t risk promoting your company too aggressively. Third, it hooks into web dynamics to forge a dialogue between visitor and site owner.

Good content has extraordinary value on the web. Unlike stratagems that seem to model consumer behavior after cattle herds, it avoids prodding of any kind, whether deceptive, crude, or even subtle. It simply responds to a desire for information. This helps validate your business, builds consumer momentum without investing a penny in conventional marketing and lays a foundation for your company’s message.

Danger of the poisoned well

While the difference between showing content and selling yourself may be easy to spot, the line between them is unclear. That grey zone is trouble when a company looks at ways to turn connections into revenue. One slip might close the door, literally and figuratively. It helps to remember the bottom line usually is best served by sticking to business. In other words, if content puts the nature of your work center stage, stress the work, not PR & advertising.

It helps to clarify the role of content within your promotional system if you want to ride its wheels towards marketing nirvana. Careless attempts to convert prospects may blow a hole in your efforts by contaminating the original content. People drop out because, as usual, marketing subterfuge sounds alarms. You don’t gain the white list advantage. You lose most of your audience at the outset, so there’s little left to convert. What’s more, a mixed agenda sparks wariness, at odds with sound brand management, which may cause harm in the long run.

On the other hand, content brings people to your internet door and so simplifies marketing tremendously. The selling point that counts is that you know your business. Let content make that clear. Earn credibility and your top challenge will be finding the simplest way to start a dialogue: no artifice needed – just contact info.

Benefits of free-standing support

Relevant content works reliably within any marketing setup. By nature it is focused. More importantly, it is independent of context, making it incredibly versatile – a virtue most directed material does not enjoy. It can be fine-tuned for complex marketing systems or simply dropped into a basic one. It is compatible with support roles because it aligns automatically with the business itself.

That also ensures timeliness. First, content stays relevant to prospects so long as the core business is stable. Second, it only goes out of date in the larger marketplace if the company does. Clearly, neither issue would matter by then. Third, it is non-binding: you can adjust content at any point and to any degree without affecting other elements in a master plan. This makes it easy to use without tying up extra resources for coordination and updates.

Content makes you important by being pertinent, credible and accessible. It is cost-effective because it is long lasting, scalable and easy to manage. It is practical because it does well regardless of other marketing efforts, neither requiring their support nor conflicting with them.

Interactivity: the importance of boxes inside boxes

While search engines don’t care where they find various pieces of content on your site, visitors do. An abundance of information is good. Still, it can’t all be equally important, so how do people make sense of it? Especially since individuals likely value the same facts in their own ways. Too much in one place and what is inside the box won’t look so interesting.

Two of the web’s enormous advantages over traditional communications come into play here. One is the simple fact that content is searchable. That brings visitors. But the other – interactivity – is like a booster rocket. It gives you powerful new ways to shrink, expand, multiply and divide content.

Why does this matter? Because content alone is not enough: You fall off the radar if people do not see at once that your site is useful. Luckily the web lets you organize information into easily understood chunks. Virtually speaking, instead of one box you have many – some side-by-side; some prominent, others less so; some inside other boxes.

These become building blocks that visitors choose at their own pace to create a personalized experience. How well you arrange them determines whether you solve the “quantity vs. quality” problem. More significantly, as with signposts, the better the direction, the further you jump ahead of competitors.

Interactivity makes this work. It means you can keep content out of view until it is needed. A visitor decides to look inside a “box” – so to speak – and sees only related information. That could be enough. Other boxes with more in-depth content may also be available. Each individual uses these options to follow a unique path through your site. And interactivity lets you accommodate every twist and turn with no extraneous data causing confusion.

So far as time invested reflects value, then the time a person spends at your site heightens your importance. Good organization improves utility. Deeper content provides a longer trail. Both attract people and keep them interested, often for repeated visits.

Telling people you care

Web content and interactivity combine to produce an extremely useful marketing environment. It sidesteps the typical situation where a prospect is force fed a series of pitches in the hope that one works. Instead visitors can browse through various pages, choosing to focus on information that matches their needs. You don’t have to wonder if someone is a real prospect or guess what specifics a person has in mind. Good content helps people frame their own questions. Once they contact you, it’s likely you can stick to providing answers and closing the sale.

There is also a paradox. If you try to help things along by slipping pitches into the content, you make your overall promotional efforts weaker, not stronger. You have fallen into the trap of telling prospects what to think, described by Robert Miller as the “80% Syndrome” in Conceptual Selling (Warner Books, 1989, p. 65). Research repeatedly shows, says Miller, that sales staff given time with clients use 80% of it to talk up a storm. Many would applaud, thinking a sales rep who does not take center stage and stay there lacks initiative. But do the math, says Miller: Given a precious half-hour of an executive’s day, it means the most important person in the room – the buyer – has just six minutes to express any thoughts.

Conceptual Selling says the customer’s point of view matters above all in sales. It is fatal to offer a concept of your company’s products or services that does not match popular perception or an individual client’s belief. If you tell people what you think they should know, rather than let them paint their own picture, you bury your business.

Well prepared content lets visitors set their own agendas. In effect, they get to talk, offsetting the “80% Syndrome.” On the flip side, incorporating promotional efforts diminishes content, essentially telling prospects their choices are less significant than your own. On balance, you have to consider which way actually improves your internet status.

Content on a web site gives you the best of many worlds: a platform to manage huge amounts of data; technology that can tailor, from fine detail to easily grasped outlines, an assortment of perspectives according to user need; responsiveness that sets the stage for future contact; and an embracing immediacy that encourages exploration and underscores credibility.

KISS your ego goodbye

Content is low maintenance. It stays that way so long as you “Keep It Simple.” (Add “Stupid” – nothing personal – and the infamous KISS acronym explains itself.) Revving your head to overdrive is an exercise in diminishing returns. With a reasonable effort to organize and present content, you’re done. Want to add more? Go ahead any time. The basic framework’s in place, so it’s a breeze.

The internet also makes it easy to accumulate data about what attracts visitors. That can be extremely useful, but for the most part is separate from the view advanced here – that web content is a great way to gain recognition.

Statistics come after the fact. If they start to influence content, then you are back to the “poisoned well” scenario mentioned before, switching from giver (of knowledge) to taker (crassly commercial by trying to make money). Visibility, yes. Good standing? Not necessarily.

Worse – since content is about simplicity – you also have moved from KISS principles towards the high maintenance world of ongoing data analysis and marketing metrics. On the plus side – should you use such numbers to help determine business strategies – site behavior can be a gold mine of information.

In any case, it is a still good idea to examine site logs. You want content to provide details on your business or industry, give people useful insights, share something of your vision. Visitor stats may reveal weaknesses in your presentation that a small restructuring can fix. The key is to be mindful of your original aims, avoiding knee-jerk reactions to the numbers.

For example, think of your site as a pyramid with the first page on top. Perhaps an item seven levels deep draws lots of traffic. This means visitors have clicked down through many layers to find it. You put it on level one, where in a moment of self-congratulatory wisdom, you think it belongs. Most of us would agree, even allowing for a touch of ego satisfaction. Now the item enjoys a prominence that seems fitting.

Suddenly, though, people ignore it. Why? Because your first setup included prerequisite information throughout the site that eventually led visitors to the item, obscure as it was, but only when they were ready. It turns out that complex inter-relationships you once understood without a thought lose their clarity through the distorting lens of numbers.

Wag the dog

Numbers tempt us with the appearance of order – concrete and far easier to manage than the broad truths they represent. There is the danger, where marketing intelligence – such as consumer feedback and trend analysis – plays a big role in day-to-day business, that content will be skewed into a group of computable data points. The result is no match for the original’s sophistication.

That’s why – when sites provide an endless flow of figures and a dizzying range of interpretations – content works best by staying true to origins. Otherwise numbers slowly gather an authority that masks cause and effect as time passes, during which the dominant issues become link strategies, usability metrics and tweaks to improve search engine rankings.

We may unwittingly let numbers become objectives where once they were just byproducts of goals we pursued. The trouble is once you – metaphorically – reverse the telescope, content looks a lot less impressive through the wrong end. (To be fair, this can work fine if you have the luxury of a creative sandbox in which to play with ideas and turn things around. Who doesn’t want to see a tail wag the dog?)

Ways to get content

Content can cover a lot of ground – from case histories (how people use your widgets) to ancient history (the first widget). A couple of things may lead to problems. One would be the mixed signals caused by dragging promotional bells and whistles through the material. The other is information linked to current events or conditions. New products, temporary opportunities, announcements and so on will almost surely look out of date before long – bad for credibility. Keep the time frame neutral if you must mention them.

Even barring obvious pitfalls, getting good stories from ideas is not simple, nor is it guaranteed. One fix: Don’t start from scratch. There’s an excellent chance books and periodicals (magazines, weeklies and daily papers) have what you need. Opting for popular media provides an extra benefit: writers who use everyday vocabulary. They are trained to avoid jargon, buzz words and specialized industry terms that put off consumers. This strategy includes trade publications with ads aimed at general audiences.

By the same standard, narrowly focused information (readership or subject matter) needs care, especially if advertising is absent, inexpensive or mystifying. Community papers and newsletters fit here simply because the bulk of writers lack mass media experience. Urban “giveaway” magazines appeal to many, but lean towards colorful personal views rather than practical content (club, entertainment and movie listings don’t help much). Finally, high-level expert articles, trade pieces and academic works often seem centered on impenetrable truths (hard enough, but also dead wrong at times – if only we could see through the confusion).

Ultimately your own judgment counts above all. There is plenty of great writing in unlikely places, so any material that works for you is worth considering as content.

Guidelines

The more rarefied your industry and client base, the more effective it becomes to shed complex language. The resulting ease of use helps separate you from competing sites. Also, the extent of your success will likely be reflected in visitor endorsements. That was once word-of-mouth advertising. But now, with internet and email postings, the effect is better known as viral marketing. If this kicks in, you can gain a thousand-fold advantage in days, even hours.

You don’t need a lucky break, though. Accessibility creates long-term benefits no matter what. People come back to things they understand, so a good user experience improves your site’s popularity. And while simplicity rules, words that tie uniquely to your product or service should not be discarded, however odd they seem. Uncommon terminology bumps up search engine values. A strong blend of specific information and mainstream writing (1) brings people to your site, (2) holds them and (3) generates wider recognition.

You may be ready to develop content yourself if you have – or can afford – a top-notch communications team. It’s far more efficient, though, to gather content from sources like those mentioned earlier. So long as you use popular language (you’d need an extreme argument for avoiding it) that steers clear of pure detail and vague simplifications, consider any topic about your own company, your industry, or clients. Suitable material, or ideas, likely fall into these categories:

• facts, such as chronology, research and product development (How they doubled the size of widgets, but not the weight. The discovery that allowed widgets to be mass produced. The big secret that makes widgets work.);
• human interest stories (The day widgets made me a hero. How a widget saved my marriage. Why my kitchen widget went to Mars.);
• commentary, opinion and tips (Experts rate the best widget collectibles. When to replace a widget. What users say about widget brands.);

Examine the results carefully: Poor writing will hurt you because it annoys people. But even great work won’t do everything: Content is just part of the picture. First you become important. Then you become indispensable. What opportunities you give people to do business with you, the ways you motivate them to choose your company over others, and how you build lasting customer relationships matters as well.

Fancy labels and eye-catching flash amount to a flicker of internet presence. In baseball terms, you might as well be the batboy or a jersey-clad fan. But with content, you are a player – you get a full cut at the plate. No guarantee you’ll load the bases, earn a walk or hit a home run, but you’ll have your chance.

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