The Beyonce album is by far the weirdest Anchorman 2 promotion yet.

— Jensen Karp (@JensenClan88) December 13, 2013

Yes, I’m an Anchorman fan. Another big release this week, but we’re way off topic now.)

Let’s talk a bit about Sharecare’s AskMD mobile application.

Like Beyonce’s secret album, AskMD came out of nowhere, and now it’s getting much attention. I’m not impressed easily, but I find the app is worth the hype. Why? Because AskMD’s healthcare content goes where no other media will.

If you’ve ever worked for or with a health organization or a media property, you know a big no-no is to imply your content can diagnose problems or recommend treatments. You wind up with some disclaimers and vaguely recommend seeing a health professional. That approach opens a big gap between the knowledge people gain as they research answers to their health questions and the actions they take (or, unfortunately, don’t take).

AskMD closes this gap by treading new ground—a virtual consultation. You can ask about your specific condition or symptoms, get content with a preliminary diagnosis or assessment, and then connect with the right doctor near you. AskMD also packages the content from your consultation so it’s easy to share with a doctor at an appointment. (To boot, you can track your conditions and medications in case they might affect your doctor’s recommendations for treatment.) AskMD connects knowledge to action in a user-friendly way.

In Clout, I put my vision for content in healthcare like this:

Imagine having the right combination of content and data to help

• Patients make healthy everyday choices and manage appointments.
• Patients cope with chronic disease including appointments, prescriptions, and connecting with other patients.
• Clinicians prevent, diagnose, and treat problems more accurately and efficiently

AskMD is a mike-drop-level step toward bringing this vision to life. I look forward to seeing what’s next from Sharecare.

Download the AskMD iOS app or use it on the web.

The post Sharecare Changes Game in Healthcare Content with AskMD appeared first on Content Science.

Joe Pulizzi

To get a jump on content marketing, study the past—in the days long before the Internet and even television. While content marketing has emerged as one of the most modern of marketing buzzwords, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of Epic Content Marketing, points out that a company like John Deere has produced consistent content marketing since 1895—every month like clockwork. Through creative storytelling and producing content that exactly matches the needs of its customers, John Deere built its reputation in an era lacking mass media, email campaigns, and Twitter.

The good news? Pulizzi says we’re all in the same boat figuring out how to apply content marketing’s historic lessons. But he urges us to understand that content marketing rests upon timeless principles—principles we can learn through companies like John Deere and Jell-O. In this interview with Content Science, Joe clarifies the definition of content marketing, discusses some of its historical lessons, and outlines how enterprises can begin creating an “epic” content marketing plan.

Why is it important to clarify the definition of content marketing?

If you ask a group of marketers to define content marketing, each one will answer differently. Some people think of email marketing, some people think of content strategy, and you’ll hear confusion about terms such as content marketing, content marketing strategy, and content strategy. Content marketing concerns marketers trying to drive behavioral change through content in their organizations. It’s a different practice than content strategy and broader than a specific channel such as email. Content marketing focuses on enhancing or changing customer behavior in some way through content. Otherwise, it’s not content marketing.

Why should people focus on content marketing before jumping straight to social media or SEO?

We recently finished our fourth year of Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs’s B2B and B2C content marketing research and found that the majority of brand marketers lack any documented content marketing strategy at all. And we wonder why so much horrible business content exists! As part of articulating your business’s content marketing strategy, ask why you’re creating content. What’s the business objective? What’s the projected outcome?

Most of the content that businesses produce talks about their products and services. Customers don’t care about your products and services. They care about themselves. That’s why it helps to create a strategy that clearly outlines what customers want. That’s why we see kittens and little babies on corporate pages and social media channels. Businesses just fill in those content buckets and say, “We want engagement.” Instead, they need to ask what kind of engagement they want.

With SEO, I’m scared when I see a brief that says, “Here’s our keywords. Go!” Instead, I want to see a defined persona about customer pain points, the mission of the content initiative, the niche where the company aims to establish themselves as the leading expert, and the metrics. Because if I’m the person creating the content, I need to know what success means and how it’s measured. Unfortunately, I find that SEO practitioners often have a limited notion of content marketing. They focus primarily on getting found online. Sure, that’s one goal of content marketing, but many other goals also need to be taken into account.

Joe Pulizzi’s latest book, Epic Content Marketing

When you researched the history of content marketing, what lessons did you find from the past that we can learn from today?

Today, businesses want to brand themselves as the go-to expert for their customers. John Deere did it. They are the largest circulated media brand publication in the entire farming industry. Consistency wins, and you can’t get more consistent than publishing every month since 1895. That consistency and creativity made a big impact on where they stand today. In an era without television, mass media, and email addresses, John Deere had to tell very creative stories to keep their customers’ attention.

Jell-O is another great example. In 1904, salespeople started going door to door giving away free copies of Jell-O’s recipe book. The book wasn’t a sales brochure—it contained truly helpful recipes. Of course, some of the recipes had Jell-O included in the ingredients. Through the dissemination of these recipe books, they became an overnight million dollar brand.

The content marketing we see today has nothing on what was happening with John Deere or Jell-O. At the turn of the 20^th century, these companies trailblazed in an era when this kind of content marketing approach was unprecedented. Some of the greatest brands in history were built on the back of amazing storytelling. That makes content marketing a long term investment with a long term outlook.

Today, brands are so short-sighted. But when analyzing these long-term strategies, I found they absolutely paid off for companies like John Deere and Jell-O. And content marketing isn’t new. It’s really all about how we engage our customers where they’re at— and with content they like. We often make content marketing more difficult than it needs to be.

How can companies evaluate and measure the success of their content marketing?

There’s no silver bullet, but the biggest problem I see is content programs built off metrics (such as web traffic) and not objectives. You need clear objectives, and they usually boil down to three:

• Is my content driving sales?
• Is my content reducing costs?
• Is my content creating happier customers?

If it’s not doing one of those three things, then why create content? Hardly any companies ask those questions. Sure, multiple reasons may exist why they’re creating the content, or they might be experimenting. But they need to say so in a documented strategy.

Even by answering these questions, 100% ROI on content marketing is not possible. However, businesses can show that content helps move customers through the buying cycle faster or content subscribers stay twice as long on your site. Most organizations overlook the importance of a subscriber strategy and just move from campaign to campaign. But there is opportunity in understanding the difference between someone who subscribes to your content (in whatever channel) versus those who don’t. That analysis will tell you a lot about your content effectiveness and about your customers.

 3 Steps You Can Start Today

If you feel your enterprise has lagged behind in content marketing, Joe  and I concluded our interview by discussing the three next steps that you can take.

1. Make someone accountable for content marketing. Whether or not you create a new position, you need to make somebody accountable for the content marketing role. If no one is accountable, nothing will get done.

2. Stop creating any more content until you create a plan and know what content does for your organization. Many businesses churn out inconsistent content and they’re not sure if it’s working. Create a thoughtful plan around your content with clear marketing objectives and metrics.

3. Perform a content audit. Before you create any new content, you also need to know where you stand from an asset standpoint and use this information to become smarter about the content you need to create. That means performing a content audit to figure out what you have and don’t have—and make sure you understand the difference between a content audit and content evaluation.

With a good content marketing strategy and audit in place, you’ll eliminate the risk of creating redundant content and better understand where you need additional content marketing resources. To read more about content marketing, check out Joe Pulizzi’s book Epic Content Marketing and stay up-to-date through the latest posts at Content Marketing Institute.

The post Want to Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level? appeared first on Content Science.

 It’s the holiday season!

With the whoop-de-do and hickory dock.

 - lyrics from Happy Holiday

What comes with every holiday season? Holiday gatherings! Parties, festivities, and potlucks galore. And, inevitably you’ll come across someone a bit like this guy, Cousin Eddie:

While Eddie is hilariously extreme, we all find ourselves this time of year talking to folks a bit like him at times. Folks who

• Are so self-absorbed they talk only about themselves.
• Oblivious to your perspective, goals, or needs.
• Talk about irrelevant or inappropriate topics, often with outdated facts.
• Try to push or sell something, even if only an idea.

As a result, these folks come across as bombastic, boring, or both—even if they really aren’t. And, much of what they say probably doesn’t linger in our memories. Of course, we’re not eager to talk to them again soon, either.

So, we know we don’t enjoy the Cousin Eddie treatment at a party. Why would we think visitors to our websites and other digital channels would want that treatment? If you think about it, there’s a “Cousin Eddie Epidemic” in web content for many organizations. Symptoms include

• Presenting content organized more by your company or institutional structure and less by user goals or mental models.
• Speaking about yourself, your features, your services and never relating them to your users (especially your users’ goals, problems / needs, and interests).
• Covering topics that aren’t useful or relevant to your users (or making useful topics hard to find).
• Bombarding people with invasive or irrelevant ads and emails.
• Sharing outdated facts or information.

In my experience, organizations don’t intend to be like Cousin Eddie. These symptoms are the consequences of not implementing a strategic approach to content. The bad news is, intentional or not, these symptoms will frustrate and even anger your users, which can result in everything from plummeting user satisfaction to low response to your emails to lost sales or conversion opportunities. (That’s only the tip of the iceberg.) The good news is these symptoms have a cure—a well-operationalized strategy for influential web content.

So, if at your next holiday festivity you run into someone like Cousin Eddie, no need to panic and spill your eggnog. Excuse yourself, spike that eggnog, and resolve not to give your users the same treatment.

The post Take a Content Cue from Cousin Eddie appeared first on Content Science.

Lauren Moler

At first glance, a distributed publishing model, over 1 million pages, and varied, diverse audiences present an intimidating content challenge for National Instruments. But Web Content Producer Lauren Moler tackled this challenge using mental models (inspired by Indi Young’s book Mental Models) that visualize the connection between specific user tasks and content. For Lauren, using these mental models helped quickly identify content gaps and more effectively reinforced the importance of meeting user needs.

In this interview with Content Science, Lauren discusses mental models in more detail and explains how this tool helps her tackle complex enterprise content problems. Her insights help reinforce why backing up your content decisions with data is so important—not only with quantitative analytics but also by providing a qualitative analysis of user needs.

To address your enterprise content challenges, you use mental models that connect content strategy to human behavior. Elaborate upon the concept of a mental model and explain how it can help enterprises address content issues.

A mental model maps user tasks or questions to the content we publish on our site. The visual becomes a series of boxes (see below) that each represents a user task. Those tasks are stacked up in towers and grouped together at the top of the mental model. At the bottom are pages grouped to match the tasks.

Lauren’s mental model illustrates the connection between content and user needs while also highlighting content gaps (in red).

We map the mental model directly to the buying cycle, so this visualization shows us if we’re creating content focused on what users need. It also helps us build a roadmap for creating new content to fill the gaps. That way, we’re not creating duplicate content when we already have answers for users on our site. Now we’re trying to use the mental model to understand what potentially needs better refreshing or curating.

What does a mental model provide that’s missed by not using it?

The key element is focusing content on user tasks. Before, content for a particular project varied depending on who was in the room or where we were at that time with the business. We’d have different ideas of what content needed to be published that weren’t based on research. The mental model helps us make sure that we’re focusing on user tasks and filling the right content gaps. We learned a lot in talking to sales and got great insights into what’s really important in the buying cycle.

The mental model also helps us understand potential areas for reusing content. While we started out using mental models on a just particular part of our site, we’ve expanded that to include almost the entire National Instruments site. With that kind of overall view, we started to see content patterns where the user needs were the same. That suggested areas where we could reuse content.

National Instruments – like many technology companies – offers products with complicated technical specifications and features. How do you avoid the all too common problem of overly technical or dry technology content?

Understanding user needs helps us with this issue. We convinced people to write less technical and feature-focused content by showing them our users’ questions and needs. We support our user insights with search data, analytics data, and qualitative data that we’ve collected through surveys and usability testing. When you show stakeholders the data, it’s really easy to demonstrate what happens when you write an article one way versus another way. Also, I like to show what people search for after they read a technical piece of content to better understand what information we failed to provide.

In your presentations, you often talk about the limitations of redesigns. With so many people still thinking that a redesign is the one answer to their content problems, what do you tell those people?

I suggest using case studies about companies that have had similar problems with redesigns. Cite internal examples as well. When companies redesign a website, they often focus on the top page layer and ignore what’s underneath. Solving the content problem underneath the top page layer is simply too large to handle in a redesign. For us, that’s over 1 million pages, so it’s impossible for us to completely redesign everything. It’s too large.

Of course, there are still times when people think they must redesign. In those cases, I suggest trying to slow the process down enough to do some user research and define a content strategy upfront. Try to get a good handle on what content you already have. When enterprises see a lot of problems with a website, the natural inclination is to tear it down and start over from scratch. But through the mental model process, we learned that we have a lot of really good content on our site. If you redesign, let decision makers know that they may risk losing a lot of really good content that currently answers user questions.

You often talk about content in a very collaborative way, and you tell people to “involve everyone.” How do you involve “everyone” while still maintaining control and discipline over introducing and implementing a content strategy?

Create clearly defined roles. In the case of the mental model, we involved everyone but had a core team of about 4-5 decision makers. If we brought new people into the process, we helped them understand the role we wanted them to play and clearly set expectations. We also have a distributed publishing model at National Instruments. That makes it impossible to gatekeep all of the content that goes up onto our site. It’s something we’re hoping to change, but we have to currently work around that reality. If everyone can publish, that means getting as many people in front of our content strategy as possible so they can see it and become a part of it.

Given these parameters, the process turned out much better than I expected. The mental model process speeded things up a lot. We spent less time having ambiguous conversations about what our content should be doing. Instead, we have something concrete that makes it easier to get a large number of people behind a content idea. I was also surprised by how willing people were to participate. But it makes sense. Once you talk to people about user needs, you realize everyone cares about your customers as much as you do.

At the end of our interview, Lauren added, “Any amount of content strategy you can implement within your organization or into a project, do it. Even if it’s not 100%.” If you need inspiration to start somewhere, Lauren’s progress at National Instruments illustrates the importance of studying user needs, using that data to justify content strategy, and filling in content gaps to help shore up critical parts of the buying cycle. Lauren’s experience also reinforces the need to use data as much as possible in order to help people understand why content matters.

Visit National Instruments to explore its content.

The post Mental Model Mapping appeared first on Content Science.

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The 6^th Annual Intelligent Content Conference
February 26-28, 2014
San Jose, CA

Covering three days, Intelligent Content 2014 will feature 70 presenters, 30 exhibitors, and 4 training classes. This year’s theme is “Breaking Down Barriers,” focusing strategies and tactics to help better connect users with the content they need. In my session, “Oreos and Milk: 5 Reasons Why Content Strategy and Content Engineering Go Together,” Philip Wisniewski (Kanban) and I will discuss how the disciplines of content strategy and content engineering work hand-in-hand to create a remarkable content experience. Fitting with the conference theme, we’ll talk about breaking down the silos between planning a content strategy and engineering the implementation.

IA Summit 2014
March 25-30, 2014
San Diego, CA

Once again finding myself in Southern California (see a pattern here?), this 15^th annual summit will reflect on the past, present, and future of information architecture. The summit recognizes that we are poised at an important moment. Businesses and organizations are more focused on user needs and content strategy than ever before. In my workshop, “Content Evaluation: Understanding Whether Your Content Works,” I will help you answer a tough question you might get from clients, content stakeholders, or bosses: “Is our content working?”

Content Marketing World Sydney
March 31-April 2, 2014
Sydney, Australia

Making the leap from Southern California across the Pacific Ocean, I’ll find myself next in Sydney, Australia for the Content Marketing Institute’s conference Down Under. It’s a stellar gathering of the world’s best content marketers—both practitioners and consultants. I’ll give two presentations: “Going Big: The 3 Es of Content Scaling” and “How to Conduct a Content Audit.” Both of these presentations discuss and offer critical techniques that help enterprises build the right foundation for a successful content strategy, especially to reach marketing goals.

The post Content Conferences Coming Soon appeared first on Content Science.

David Hobbs

What’s the key to making good decisions about your content? Evaluating whether your content is effective—something we at Content Science have been thinking a lot about lately.

And when you’re considering the overall site? Your visitors’ full experience and the underlying tools and teams? David Hobbs says the key is approaching your website as a product, rather than a project.

Hobbs is the whisperer behind major web transformations at the World Bank, Library of Congress, and other enterprises. But a website is not a finalized project after launch. A product management view, Hobbs asserts, provides the foundation for managing change and achieving constant improvement for your website over time.

Hobbs recently shared with us how that perspective relates to content and evaluation as well as his insights on managing content through the big launch and for the long haul.

What’s the concept behind website product management and the handbook you’re releasing?

Big websites often turn out to be Frankenstein’s monsters, with all this stuff bolted on. And then the problem gets even worse—people start launching one-off sites because they can’t get things working. Before you know it, you have a huge mess. Website product management is an approach to your web presence that’s more comprehensive.

Websites need to be managed for quality over time, like any product, broadly and long-term. All decisions need to anchor back on the business case and why we have a site. It’s not just a single launch. Even for big launches, I always talk about phasing in changes so that it becomes everybody’s expectation that we’re always going to be making changes. And it’s not just because we are changing CMSs—we’re always going to be adding things.

Can you give me an example of product management thinking related to content?

How do you streamline day-to-day activities like content publishing? That’s something that organizations often do not concentrate on, and it’s so important. There might be a really kludgy content system that a lot of people use every day, but the organization instead concentrates on some new feature. Well, shouldn’t you first improve how you publish every day?

Also, if the website is managed more coherently, there’s more opportunity to track publishing. For instance, if you want something published every month for different sections, you could have a dashboard where the system generates messages that show the results. Tracking is more difficult if you have a more disjointed installation.

You’ve talked about looking at a lot of different information to help evaluate your content. Are there any areas you find particularly helpful?

One of the things I like to look at is the long-term engagement funnel with visitors. Are they going from first getting to know you to indicating some level of interest like signing up for a newsletter? Then, do they amplify your message and become a strong advocate for you? With this kind of lifecycle thinking, you can look at whether or not your content effectively moves people through that funnel.

Do enterprises need to change their mindset toward evaluating content?

In my upcoming book on website product management, there’s a “Should I publish this?” checklist. The mentality of knowing you’re going to be evaluated and, therefore, being more careful about what you publish is good. You get the feedback loop of, “Should I publish this? Yes, and this is why.” And then evaluating later, “You said this was the objective of the content. Did it achieve that objective or not?” This kind of feedback loop is important.

How should enterprises approach content when planning big website changes such as redesigns or a new content management system?

The biggest thing is that the organization needs clarity on what they are trying to do. That sounds obvious, but that’s not usually the way organizations approach projects. Usually it’s something like, “We need a new CMS, so therefore we have to move all the content.” It’s a garbage in-garbage out mentality. If you are making big changes, now is the time to think, “What is it we want out of this big change? What do we want it to do?” All decisions with respect to content should flow out of that thinking.

For example, if you are doing a redesign to focus on a particular audience or a new product line, think about what content you really need. It might be a good time to drop content. Or you might find you need some content that isn’t there. You are anchoring on what you are trying to accomplish. From there, decide what content you need, what content to drop, and how deeply you need to change the content that’s there. You are not just looking at the project as moving what’s already there into the new system.

Organizations often miss this opportunity by thinking of a redesign or re-platforming as purely an aesthetic or back-end change. They don’t really think through the content implications. One client of mine had gone through a redesign and re-platforming, and they implemented a lot of new topic pages. Their reasoning was that it’s technically easy to have a lot of topic pages. But after launch, a lot of the topic pages were blank, really low quality, outdated, or in bad condition. I worked with them to define some quality metrics around these topics, which allowed us to work with stakeholders to cut 85% of the topics. By having these metrics on an ongoing basis, they can decide whether different topics should offer high-quality content. If not, they can be cut.

If you’re planning changes to your website — big or small — be sure to keep David Hobbs’s points in mind:

• Focus on your goals and objectives. All other decisions should flow from there.
• Think through content implications, even if changes seem more design or technology focused.
• Plan for evaluation. Refer back to your objectives, and look at a lot of different information to see if your content changes are working.

David Hobbs is also author of the Website Migration Handbook. Learn more about him at hobbsontech.com.

For more on content strategy for a redesign, check out Colleen’s chapter, “Rework Your Content So It Works for You,” featured in The Smashing Book #3⅓.

The post Is Your Website a Project or a Product? appeared first on Content Science.

Going Big: The 3 Es of Content Scaling
You applied content marketing to a project or campaign. It succeeded. Now, how do you scale your success? The 3Es of content engineering, evaluation, and empowerment will help you put together the right tools, teams, and decision-making techniques for scaling.

How to Conduct a Content Audit
What’s your content situation? Finding out starts with a content audit. Learn the auditing process from start to finish and, most of all, how to extract useful insights for your content strategy.

The speaker line up includes insights from content marketing pioneers such as Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. The general sessions will feature case studies from outstanding organizations.

And, did I mention it’s in Sydney?!

Whether you’re in the Australia / Asia Pacific region or looking for an unforgettable trip for both business and pleasure, I hope to see you in Sydney. Registration just opened, so don’t miss the early bird (or should that be early kangaroo?) rate. This event will sell out.

Register for Content Marketing World Sydney >

Now, for that Vegemite sandwich, courtesy of my favorite Aussie pop band, Men at Work…

The post This Calls for a Vegemite Sandwich appeared first on Content Science.

Jared Spool

When you want to buy a camera, are you more likely to ask about what camera has the best burst rate? Or will you ask which camera will best take pictures of a soccer game? Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering, says that too many companies act as if customers care more about features such as burst rate. His answer? They don’t.

On a website, guided selling attempts to identify customer needs, offer a solution, and persuade the customer to buy—much like traditional in-person selling. Through his many years of experience and research, Spool notes that many companies still weigh guided selling algorithms toward features rather than the customer experience. But, it’s only by simplifying the choices of products and offering content that connects to a customer’s needs that allows websites to begin emotionally connecting with—and selling—to people.

As one of the foremost authorities on user interface design, Jared Spool took the time to share his insights with Content Science about the fundamental role of content in guided selling, scaling problems as companies increase the number of products they sell, and how companies (especially ecommerce companies) must transition from a feature mindset to an experience mindset.

Guided selling becomes more important as the buying experience on the web and on mobile devices continues to evolve, as you often put it, from features to experience. How does the success or failure of guided selling impact the customer experience?

At first, guided selling seems simple to organizations but it quickly devolves into something much more complicated than what they expected. That’s because organizations think that sales, especially in-person driven sales, is basically script driven.

For example, if a person walks into a store to buy a camera, the customer might say they want to take pictures of a birthday party where kids will play soccer. Then a nephew will blow out some birthday candles and open presents. The salesperson translates those pieces of data. A soccer game means sports action, which requires a high burst rate and fast exposure. Blowing out candles requires effectiveness in low light situations. Then the salesperson can point out 3 cameras that work best for that situation out of the 45 sold in the store.

Theoretically, you can take that script and hard code it into guided selling. But the way you ask those questions, the way users present answers, and the way the experience evolves quickly dictates whether you actually have a grasp upon what makes your products interesting to your customers or not. In our above example, the customer is not buying burst rate and low light exposure. They’re buying soccer balls, happy kids, and candles. They want great pictures. That translation of features to experience is a really difficult translation, and the biggest challenge for guided selling.

How would you describe the role of content in guided selling? How does a content strategy fit into this concept?

If you take content out of guided selling, then you don’t have anything. Guided selling is just an algorithm to figure out which content to display. Filtering algorithms don’t work if they lack content, and they also don’t work if the content isn’t clearly designed for the filtering algorithm.

If a small camera manufacturer features five cameras in its product line, the cameras are probably distinct and more easily translated into guided selling. But with a large camera manufacturer like Canon or Nikon, it becomes much more difficult to guide someone to choose between specific models—especially when adding new products to already saturated product lines. The distinctions between products become subtler.

If users understood features, you wouldn’t need guided selling or customized content. Instead, users would just peruse a chart of features. Guided selling maps features to a bigger experience, but it becomes complicated because the mapping is not necessarily straightforward. If a retailer like Best Buy sells 135 cameras from different manufacturers and the features aren’t even a part of a common language set, then what one person calls a feature another person may call something else.

It sounds like this represents a scaling problem for content within guided selling.

It’s a huge scaling problem. With ecommerce, the more choices you offer people, the less likely they will make a choice. When they do make a choice, the less satisfied they are with the choice they’ve made. This is called the paradox of choice. A lot of evidence shows if you give people more choices, you get into trouble. That doesn’t mean you should eliminate all choices, but 10 choices are definitely worse than 3.

If Best Buy sells 135 cameras, how is the average camera buyer supposed to choose between them? With so many products, it’s hard to even just do prices. If you go into the camera category and sort by price, your lowest priced items are actually not cameras but cases and filters. At this point, you have to create more complicated filtering mechanisms to take those non-camera items out of search and only present cameras. And what about phones with better cameras than many cameras on the market? How do you create the filtering mechanism for that? It’s a really complicated process. When companies say, “If we give our customers choice, it’s a great thing,” it’s really not.

When you recently researched ecommerce sites, what were some of the most important insights you gleaned—both good and bad—from how these online retailers used content to help sell?

We found that the most effective product description pages were aimed at how customers actually make buying choices. Ecommerce sites feature a spectrum of product descriptions. On one side, you have carefully crafted product descriptions written by the retailer that really talk to what retailers have discovered about their customers. These descriptions do a good job of answering customer questions when they shop for products.

On the other side, retailers just take copy produced by the product manufacturer and pump it into their CMS. Sometimes it’s a sentence, and sometimes it’s 10 pages. In almost all cases, the product description does not fit with the customer’s process of choosing between product offerings. Those descriptions usually speak to an individual product while ignoring the fact that the person is probably considering other products.

For example, Crutchfield.com does a good job of crafting content to user needs. They have fewer products to choose from, so they can spend more time on each product and make customers really understand the differences. The same people who answer the phones for their catalog business also write the content, so they understand how customers buy.

Crutchfield’s customized product descriptions focus on the needs of users.

However, in most guided selling situations involving product descriptions, the merchandizers create the content without any contact with customers. That’s why this content uses buzzwords and feature terms like “burst rate.” If two different cameras have a 14 frames per second burst rate versus a 10 frames per second burst rate, then how do customers know they should pay extra money for those extra 4 frames per second? Those manufacturer product descriptions don’t usually speak to that. But if you say that 10 frames work fine for a kid’s soccer game but 14 frames works better for high school athletics photos in a yearbook, those distinctions make more sense to the customer.

As Jared Spool points out, even the most complicated, technical guided selling algorithms all point back to the need for good content. Taking the time to understand your customer’s needs and creating content that speaks their language remains one of the best investments you can make, even in situations where enterprises sell hundreds of products. Scaling up shouldn’t mean desperately pumping product descriptions into your CMS, as Spool says, but instead should create an opportunity to simplify how you talk about your products and address any customer needs, no matter how subtle or nuanced.

For more articles and presentations from Jared Spool and his team, visit User Interface Engineering.

The post Burst Rate vs Soccer Games appeared first on Content Science.

I’m excited about the book’s focus. But, book titles are tough. I considered many, as you can see here.

Ultimately, I chose Does Your Content Work? because my goal for the book is three-fold.

1. Cut through gobbledy gook of digital analytics and evaluation research methods.
2. Convince content executives to take more ownership of content evaluation.
3. Equip content executives and practitioners principles to assess and explain their content’s effectiveness.

Also, I’m giving a virtual workshop about content evaluation, especially for those who work in agencies, in November. Did I mention it’s FREE, thanks to GatherContent? Hope to “see” you there.

The post Does Your Content Work? appeared first on Content Science.