Rob Leavitt has been writing about the lure of cheap content for the last couple weeks.
His latest post reminds me of an old plaque that often hangs in tattoo shops, “Good Tattoos Aren’t Cheap. Cheap Tattoos Aren’t Good.”
B2B marketers can learn a lot from this old saw. My partner in crime often says, “Tattoos can be removed, but Twitter is forever.” Bad tattoos will eventually embarrass you. Great tattoos spark years of post dinner party conversion. Same goes for content.
But what makes an outsourced content developer worth your while?
Any product or service with a great value proposition succeeds because it’s ’simply better.’ And being better means that your service is supported by at least three pillars:
1) The product consistently performs as it should.
2) The product is easy to buy and operate.
3) The product is backed by great customer service.
Ask yourself, “Does my cheap content provider match up?”
1) Content should perform as it should
Content should attract links
And where do links come from? People. Even if you’re optimizing your content for the search engine spiders, the days of gaming the system are quickly setting. Sure you can add links to your industry directories, but if your content isn’t catching the eye of real, live people with authoritative domains your search ranking will steadily fall behind other companies who are.
Cheap content doesn’t earn the votes of thinking, discerning beings. If a cheap blog post isn’t getting links, reconsider your choice.
Content should attract and retain visitors
Links help customers find you. Links get people to your site. What keeps folks coming back for more is remarkable, ‘purple cow’ content. Designing purple content requires a deep understanding of what’s important to your customer and why they find it valuable.
At a minimum you’re solving an immediate problem with a simple How-to guide. But customers, especially B2B customers, have complex systems, value chains and organizational decision trees that require your attention.
This kind of insight comes from your own halls or from a developer who has spent time creating in your space. Take a look at your analytics. What keeps them coming back for seconds? Can your firm do that repeatedly?
Content should convert customers
We’re playing this online marketing game to solve a problem and make money, right?
That means converting customers – either enticing them into a nurturing cycle or convincing them to open their wallets.
Managing conversion requires an understanding of personas as well as how people buy online. If your content provider isn’t thinking about the flow of persuasive copy and is only churning out keyword dense blog posts, consider looking at someone who can help you with a broader strategy.
2) Is the content easy to buy and operate?
In the context of content, I’d say that ‘buy and operate’ can be translated to ‘consume.’ Every human being learns differently. That means that we need to create multiple forms of media – from copy, to video, to audio, to charticles that transform data into something your audience can understand and use quickly. Using only one medium is a missed opportunity.
Going to a $5 a post firm isn’t going to get you the variety of content you need to capture the minds of your customer. Multiple forms of specialized content takes time, thought, and dialogue to create.
Considering that you need more than just a lot of blog posts to keep customers happy, is it worth it to work with a firm that only requires a credit card number to get 12 articles?
You’ll still have to invest time creating something remarkable.
3) Does my content provider give great customer service?
From awareness to satisfaction and reviews, customer service should pervade the entire sales cycle. If you’re not satisfied with the work, what happens? A fire and forget mentality from your provider means you’ll be hunting out another vendor in no time. And if the instant chat on your vendor’s site makes you feel super special, how does their content make your customers feel.
On our own sites we can all learn a little something from Zappos. Their story is legend. And in B2B we often miss opportunities to translate their lessons into our processes –
– How does your content allow your customers to “try it on”
– Do your operations back up your promises made in every whitepaper or video?
– Is the voice on your blog the voice of the real people behind the screen?
– How does your content surprise and delight?
As we adopt inbound marketing strategies, we’re repurposing and optimizing our content. It will be crawled, indexed and cached. Is your provider going to help you make sure you don’t wind up on the marketing equivalent of http://ugliesttattoos.com/?
