The importance of content

Why is is it that design and programming technology are often seen as  more important  than web site content?

It frequently seems to be the case that clients spend time agonising over design issues and stranger still dictating  programming matters that they seldom understand, but then tend to ignore the content. Their customers and prospects on the other hand  want to discover as quickly as possible if the site has what they want. More specifically what benefits the company's products offer in meeting the customer's needs. Web site visitors want to get to the detail quickly without following complicated navigation - they want to get to content that is relevant to them. There are three important things to communicate - [1] how your products can benefit them, then to build confidence, [2] how your customers have successfully used your products and [3]  your company's capability, status and reputation within your market sector.


Because most buyers start their buying process by using the Internet to research what is available, even in the b-2-b sector, it is wise not to presume all prospects are familiar with your particular products and product names and can therefore find the way through you categorisation of products. Start by explaining what the products are for, differentiate yours on benefits and add links to any required, or optional accessories. White Papers can be useful for giving more background detail and Data Sheets for specific details of products. Endorsement made by users of your  products  will help to convince prospects to progress towards buying or specifying. Third party end user endorsement can be presented in several ways such as case studies, news stories and social media by using quotes, articles, pictures, interviews and video. Finally it is useful to establish the authority of the company as experts in the sector by providing thought leadership content. Involvement in conferences, independent reviews by the leading journals or web sites in the sector, supportive content from industry gurus and 'how to' style content all help to confirm thought leadership and occupy the moral high ground.


So before designing the site and worrying about the CMS it is better to start with developing content, then moving on to the site plan, design and building the site. It is also a lot more efficient to hand over the complete content to the web site builder. All too often content arrives piecemeal which both extends the project and escalates the cost.

Have I got a great advertising deal for you

It might seem odd how often display advertising space salesmen just happen to have one remaining space left  to sell before the issue closes.

We have remarked previously how selling is more concerned with the present and marketing concerned with planning and the future. The advertising space sale, pitches the salesman against the marketer. The salesman is looking for an impulse purchase when he calls and will tempt the prospect with a much reduced price - because they are 'just about to close the issue', which also happens to have a feature that is very relevant to the marketer's products. Interestingly many marketers are tempted and buy, justifying the space purchase on the grounds that it is a good deal and the issue it appears in is right for the company.

The wise marketing manager will have planned a campaign, analysed the media, negotiated series rates and booked the space at an advantageous price compared to rate card, all within a pre-determined budget. So when ad hoc deals are proposed it is easier to decline, content in the knowledge that the campaign is already set to achieve the company objectives, not help a salesman hit a target. But there is another interesting aspect to this advertising space 'fire sale' and that is the relative cost compared to other marketing activities. Because the special 'buy now' price is steeply discounted compared to the rate card and also usually less than a negotiated series rate, it sounds like a good deal. The rate card for a full page display advertisement in a leading UK engineering publication for example is £3950 and in another £4250. A 12 month series drops to around £3100 a page. Now good negotiation could significantly reduce this much further but it will still be a significant sum. A sum of money that could actually buy quite a lot of other marketing services. Oddly  because many marketing people are aware of advertising prices, the discounts and deals they seem more willing to pitch up a thousand pound for space than invest a few hundred pound in something new that could actually generate better returns.

Dropping a few advertisements from a campaign or schedule is unlikely to weaken the campaign but could free up some modest marketing budget to invest in new and different ways that could prove more valuable.

Measuring marketing – are we on target?

We live in a culture where so much business activity has a numeric target attached.

Targets are everywhere today. Not just in business, they have even spread into the public sector services where targets for appointments in the NHS for example are seen as measures of how well health services are being delivered – not do patients get better. The thing is people who have to achieve these targets often invest more effort and imagination in finding ways around the target than in focussing on the work task itself. A few decades ago companies seemed to be driven by doing what they did, well. Whether it was designing better products or providing ‘old fashioned’ superior service it was more guided by a shared work ethic than a numeric goal. Then the accountants moved up from the back office to board and CEO level and brought with them the language they understood best – reducing everything to a set of numbers.  It was a compelling idea which politicians adopted to mange public sector services as well.

Think about banks. At one time banking was a profession that carefully managed funds and ensured loans were made to people able to repay them and with collateral that could be called in the event of a default. Then the terminology changed to talk about retail banking and selling financial products. They developed a sales target culture and hired sales people rather than bankers. Meanwhile the investment arms developed a casino culture. Targets were met or exceeded and motivated by generous bonuses. And look what happened. Even my milk bill left by the doorstep deliveryman starts, “ Please can you help me reach my targets by making payment this week.” Yes there are targets everywhere and marketing has not escaped either. My big question is, do they work?

“I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half.” This quote is still occasionally rolled out. Whether half is wasted is not the point. What is worth thinking about is that successful marketing campaigns use several different communications methods, so when enquirers are asked, “where did you hear about us?” quite often they don’t actually know. But just the same systems demand that they should know, so they offer an answer anyway that contributes to statistics. Instead of looking at the net result, such as “did the company make a profit?” individual elements of campaigns are scrutinized and costs per lead determined. Another quite different example is in justifying new product development by producing return on investment analysis. Anything less than 18% was a non-starter in one large organization I worked for. And guess what - every application reached this magic figure because sales targets were revised upwards until the numbers worked. Then there was the five year plan which took year 1 as the current budget year because it couldn’t be different. But partly because it was written last year it was probably already off target, but years 2 through 5 merrily forecast as rising year on year starting from that already off target benchmark. Nobody ever forecast a downturn. Huge effort went into developing these plans including competitor market shares to 2 decimal places – an implied precision based completely on guesses and a figure the competitors themselves would not recognise. Then all this questionable data was used to produce targets. Experience suggests that the data itself, assumptions and forecasts upon which targets are set lack the credibility that a numeric target implies. What then of the data used to measure achieving targets?

Thanks to web statistics Internet activities give rise to a new mass of data. Once more the implication is that this is precise and accurate. It is data collected on our behalf and provided free. Although companies can set rules, they do not collect or evaluate how the data is collected. Another example is email delivery and open rates. Sometimes non-delivery messages are received when in fact they did arrive, some seen in a viewing pane without registering as open.  The reality is that marketing targets are being set based on dubious data and measured by data nobody in the company actually controls. Targets are useful but they shouldn’t become the objectives themselves.

The customers know best - do they?

Do companies that use focus groups develop the most successful products?

The answer is probably no. Gathering together a cross section of customers to determine the specification for a new product development is unlikely to result in a sure fire success. While customers can usefully comment on existing products or on even advanced prototypes, they are unlikely to provide the key to a winning concept. Similarly designing by committee can be a recipe for disaster, especially when it is composed of company delegates from around the world. I have seen too many such meetings where a shopping list of features is drawn up to incorporate pretty much every local quirk and oddity that some how have to be delivered in a product that actually works. Not only is a new product developed from this unpromising start likely to be burdened with a heap of features that are little understood or appreciated outside the country that asked for them, but the new products will still be much the same as what already exists. It might tick a lot of customer requested boxes, but thanks to all the bells and whistles also be more expensive.

The thing is customers are conditioned by what they are used to now, so their input tends to be for improvements - gradual evolution, not innovation. It is unlikely they will be familiar with new enabling technologies or advanced manufacturing methods that could actually revolutionise the market. Back in the 1960s Thorn Lighting, better known then for its mass market products such as Atlas and Mazda branded lamps, suddenly stormed into the theatre lighting market with Q-File - an electronic lighting control that immediately challenged Strand Electric the incumbent market leader. Developed originally together with dimmers that are often now forgotten, the landmark system was very much the brain child of Thorn's Tony Isaacs and his team. I worked with Tony on various electronic products in later years and understood they learned what was needed by spending night after night in control rooms observing, noting and learning.  In the boom years of construction during the 1950s and 1960s Thorn had grown rapidly with their Pop Pack fluorescent lighting package being responsible for much of the success. Prior to Pop Pack it was normal to buy lamps - the light sources - and fittings (luminaires) from different suppliers. Thorn simply put the two together in a single pack from a single supplier, then invested heavily in production plant that ensured they were also the lowest cost producer. Again it was a game changer.

Today Steve Jobs and Apple are classic examples of not only telling customers what they want, but creating a massive desire for their products. Nokia and others were dominant mobile phone manufacturers who probably carefully monitored what other phone makers were up to but didn't expect the challenge to come from a specialist computer manufacturer. Any more that is than the music industry expected the Apple Store and iPods to revolutionise music sales and create a whole new class of product.

So asking customers what they want is probably unlikely to result in a game changing product. Studying the markets and marrying actual needs and benefits with new technologies and production methods may prove more successful.