So what makes some content offers stand out above the rest? It all comes down to perceived value vs. perceived risk. Read it now…

Who:

Evernote (www.evernote.com)

What they do:

Software to help “easily capture any moment, idea, inspiration, or experience whenever they want using whichever device or platform they find most convenient, and then to make all of that information easy to find.”

How I found them:

Word of (online) mouth.

Why they’re so great:

It’s very difficult to create a brand message that’s both targeted and flexible. Yet Evernote seems to have accomplished just that by telling us exactly why we’ll love it…without creating limits on how we can or should use it.

Take a look at their homepage for example:

It tells you exactly how Evernote will make your life easier and it does it in under 5 seconds. Is there more to the software than what’s summed up here? Of course. But there’s a time and a place for all that.

For now, at the beginning, it’s about the big picture. Clean, simple, organized. Just like your life can be by using it (which I do and love and can’t live without.)

What we can learn:

Even though Evernote is not exclusively a B2B company, their solutions are clearly designed for business as well as personal use. They made the (correct) assumption that people in offices are just as human as people browsing from their kitchen tables and dorm rooms. For Evernote users, it’s about the connection with your life and your work, about making sense of a world gone nuts, of swimming against a rising tide of information.

Creating order out of chaos.

Judging from their success, that’s a message that we seem to care about. A lot.

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I can’t. The truth is, it was born out of fear.

Fear of calling on strangers. Fear of rejection, of coming off as too pushy, of doing things I was uncomfortable with. Fear of losing face.

Marketing allowed me (or so I thought) to avoid all the messiness involved in actually selling something. If I could get good enough at copywriting and creating content offers, then I’d only have to talk to people who contacted me first…new customers served up on a silver platter.

No rejection. No pushing against my comfort zone. No pain.

And while I did learn how to generate leads, what I didn’t figure out for a long time was why it was so hard for me to follow up and convert more responses into conversations and new business. My resistance to putting myself in harms way was preventing me from enjoying the intended results of all those great campaigns, and my business suffered for it.

Your content should act like a bridge, a tool that initiates conversations by solving important problems. Without any follow up or real time engagement, all you’ve built is a wall…a sheer rock face of blog posts and white papers. It may feel like you’re connecting with the people in your market, but all you’re really doing is avoiding the interactions that matter most.

Create great content. Build your audience. Just don’t forget that the point of all of this is to start real life conversations. It’s about getting in front of the right people and generating new business the old fashioned way…by earning it.

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Who:

Palo Alto Software (www.paloalto.com)

What they do:

Business and marketing plan software

How I found them:

Their blog post: Palo Alto Software Reviews You! – Chocolate South

Why they’re so great:

Because they go out of their way to make their customers the stars. The result is a brand that goes well beyond business planning solutions and taps into the reason people start businesses to begin with…to fulfill a dream.

When “Amy Stankus at Chocolate South sent us a little something thanking our customer service representative Mandi Cody for a job well done,” the staff at Palo Alto could have just gobbled it all up and moved on with their day.

But they didn’t. They took the time to put Amy in the spotlight, and in the process put a real, human face on their product. They even shot a video documenting the experience of receiving Amy’s delicious gift…as well as the aftermath.

After watching this video, we don’t even have to meet Amy to imagine who she is, the reason she started her chocolate boutique, the struggles she encounters and the passion she puts into her craft. We see the chocolate, the handwritten card, the beautiful origami boxes, and we know who Amy is.

Amy is us.

The post wraps up, once again, with Amy and Chocolate South as the star…

What we can learn:

Your products and services aren’t about you, they’re about the difference they make in the lives of your customers (yes, even in B2B). It is their success and achievements that matter most.

Of course, customer testimonials are nothing new. But this wasn’t some staged video of a random customer nervously repeating rehearsed lines about how great Palo Alto is.

This was AMY! And CHOCOLATE!

Two things all of us can relate to.

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This was English professor John Keating’s (Dead Poets Society) response to J. Evans Pritchard, according to whom the quality of a poem can be accurately measured by first becoming “fluent with rhyme and meter” and then determining a poem’s greatness by answering two questions: “One. How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered? Two. How important is that objective?”

If you don’t remember the scene…

Of course, poetry can’t be plotted out on a curve like the results of some biology experiment. What makes for good poetry, or any other form of human expression, is impossible to codify.

And yet, when it comes to creating engaging content, marketers attempt to do exactly that. We become obsessed with forecasting conversions and ROI by breaking down engagement into a neat set of data and best practices.

Yes, there exist elements of structure that you should follow. Yes, we need to measure click rates, subscribers, ROI, conversions. And yes, we must pay attention to the quality of our headlines and calls-to-action.

But in the end, what makes your content truly engaging has more to do with poetry than with science. Meaning, the stuff that your audience really relates to, come from the gut. From passion. From caring enough to stand for something important and telling the world what you really think.

Watch the scene as those kids sit mesmerized, pages freshly torn from their textbooks, Keating unable to contain himself as he shares the ideas most precious to him; individuality, dreams, love.

Life.

Do the same. Move beyond personas and markets and rediscover what made you care to begin with. Connect with your audience in a way that straight data and facts can’t. Yes, you should also measure, adjust and test. But don’t make it about the formula and metrics. These are simply structure, a way to focus your thoughts. It’s the heat of your ideas that matter most.

Seth Godin does it when he writes about shipping. He truly, deeply, completely cares about what he’s writing, and his audience responds to that authenticity.

Andrew Hanelly at TMG Custom Media does it when he tells you, through a blog post, to seek inspiration by not reading so many blogs.

Moo.com did it when they included Buzzword Bingo (“Monetize!” earns bonus points) in my last order, making the otherwise boring process of buying business cards an experience actually worth sharing.

Your opportunity to compete for your audience’s trust has very little to do with facts and data. Anyone can retweet the current industry news or factoid. Few have the guts to lay it all on the line and tap into why they chose to get into that line of work to begin with. To rip out the pages from the textbook and get to the true heart of the matter.

What will your verse be?

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David Rogers’ article How to Make Piles of Money from Charging Nothing sums the concept up nicely:

“The freemium business model works like this: Everyone gets your product or service for free, forever. But those customers who really like it, and find most value in it, will have a strong temptation to upgrade to a “premium” (paid) service which has lots of additional goodies.  It is, at heart, a strategy of pricing by customer segmentation.  It also requires a lot of insight into your customers and how they use your product.”

Spotify let’s you listen to a certain number of songs for free, with a premium paid option for heavy users. Skype lets you call any computer in the world for free, with a premium paid option for those who want to call a real phone.

But this concept isn’t just limited to software and websites. Freemium is more than just a business model, it’s about the fundamental shift in how buyers expect to interact with and sample products and services. Whether you sell software or consulting or custom kitchens, if you compete with other companies that give away content for free in order to engage an audience, you are officially in the freemium business.

And the sooner we wrap out heads around the fact that our business model has changed, the better content marketers we’ll be. Effective content marketing works because it allows people to try out your solutions (ideas, insights) for free, with a premium paid option (your products and services) for those who value them most.

Why it’s the future

The freemium business model in one sentence: “Acquisition (attracting customers) comes first, and monetization (turning them into revenue) is second.” (Rogers)

Content marketing works the same way. You create content that attracts and engages your audience by first solving specific problems for free. Then over time, if your solutions are good and your paid products and services are epic, a portion of your audience will pay the premium for them.

The difference of course is that your free “version” is your ideas, not your services or products.

What makes all of this generosity on your part possible?

• Scalability. Online content delivery is essentially free. You can reach one million readers with your blog and white paper just as easily as you can deliver it to one reader.
• Value of content in search. Content does more than just give buyers a taste. It also functions as an essential part of your inbound search strategy and makes you much easier to find through search engines and social sharing.
• Amount of effort ratio to value delivered. If you were to conduct a live, 60 minute workshop with 5 people that takes you 20 hours to prepare for, your time spent per person would be about 4 hours. On the other hand, your 60 minute on-demand webinar may take you 30 hours to produce, but if it is viewed by 100 people, your time spent per person is only about 18 minutes. Online content multiplies the reach of your effort and delivers more value to more people in less time.

Why is Free So Scary?

When you trade in ideas and solutions, there’s a legitimate fear of giving away any of the answers for free and having nothing left worth paying for. But the truth is that for every few readers who will be perfectly happy consuming your ideas, making them their own and going on to tackle the problem alone, a portion of your audience will want the personal attention, the hand holding, the automated software, the customized plan. Your value is not limited to your ideas, but only to how well you are able to apply ideas to the specific needs of your paying clients and customers.

Your blog may teach me ways to streamline my sales process, but your software will fix the process automatically. Your white paper might teach me how to set up a will, but your document website will walk me through the process and let me print up the forms. Your webinar may teach me about new tax laws that could aversely affect my company’s profits, but your consulting will take all the guesswork out as you help me work through each step.

Another source of resistance is having to hold back and not always go in for the kill. Acquisition first, monetization second takes faith, a planned process, long term thinking and commitment. Many sales and marketing teams operate under a different set of realities, one that measures your performance by monthly goals and deals closed. Your CEO may not be interested in hearing that you are “nurturing your audience” by creating solutions…for free.

This, of course, is an internal cultural issue. The preferences of your C-suite has no affect on the realities of the marketplace and the expectations of your buyers. Your prospects couldn’t care less that you are under pressure to close sales.

They do care about whether they can trust you. If you’re not willing to earn that trust with minimal risk to them, they’ll simply move on to a competitor that is (assuming they ever found your site to begin with).

Why Adopting a Freemium Mindset Works

The good news is that despite the fear and obstacles, adopting a freemium mentality can give you an incredible competitive advantage.

• Build customer access. Content marketing is a lot like publishing your own trade magazine through which you are free to offer any of your products and services whenever you want. After all, it’s your adspace to do with as you wish. The potential ROI is massive.
• Testing ground for new and better products and services. One way to look at building a freemium model (content marketing, social media and community management) is as your own low cost R&D lab. Knowing that your products and services inevitably evolve or perish, building a large, targeted and engaged audience allows you to quickly and easily test new ideas and offers, get fast feedback from the right people and quickly learn which features have the greatest chance of succeeding in your market.
• Customer insight. Your freemium business model gives back far more than it takes by making it easier to listen to your customer base, discover opportunities and find new problems to solve.
• Competitive advantage.  How? By greatly reducing the risk of engaging with you and solving problems up front, not just after the sale.

There’s a plaque inside a sealed glass case at Petco Park (home of the San Diego Padres, which he bought in 1974). On it is a quote from Mr. Kroc that not only applies to success in life, but to content marketing as well.

Press On

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Consider these words when planning your content strategy. I don’t care how brilliant your blog posts, white papers or webinars are. In the short term, talent and genius make comparatively little difference.

It’s the evolution over time, the combined total greater than the sum of its parts, that leads to the real rewards of content marketing. It’s the commitment to see it through for the long haul that will bring the payoff. It takes time to work out the kinks, to find your voice, to come up with topics worth writing about.

It takes time to build an audience.

This, of course, is exactly how it should be. Think Seth Godin’s The Dip. The rewards are at the other end of the struggle, of the resistance, of the time when it seems like it’s all effort with no reward.

While others quit, get bored, lose focus or become distracted with the next shiny object, you’ll be the one left standing. The one that earned your audience’s trust over time by committing to creating incredible content, even when that audience could be counted on less than 10 fingers.

Press On.

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