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Nine Steps to Featuring Customer Successes on Your Business Blog

Author: Guest Author; Published: Feb 10, 2009; Category: Business, Guest Post, Marketing; Tags: Blogging, Case Studies, Economy, Marketing; No Comments

This is a Guest Post by Casey Hibbard of Compelling Cases Inc., author of Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales & Marketing Asset. For more tips on creating and using customer stories, sign up for her monthly e-tip or get RSS feeds for her Stories That Sell blog.

Running interviews with industry experts and other individuals of interest to your audience is a great way to get engaging, keyword-rich content on your blog. You don’t need to go far to find viable interview subjects. In fact, one of the best sources is right in front of you— your own successful customers.

Sharing a story about a customer’s experience boosts your credibility, educates your audience, and validates what you offer. Plus, it makes your customers the stars of your blog. They are sharing a completely positive story about their best practices efforts— providing coveted positive PR.

Here are 9 steps to interviewing and featuring your best customers:

1. Choose your topic – Choose a lesson or point you want to make to your audience.
2. Pick the customer – Select the customer that is the best example of that lesson in action.
3. Get the OK – Make sure the customer is willing and able to be featured, and let them know what topic and questions you’ll be covering.
4. Schedule the interview – Schedule an in-person or phone interview.
5. Ask the right questions – These questions are the foundation of a great success story:
   What’s the customer’s business?
   What are their goals and challenges as a business?
   What challenge was the customer hoping to solve, or goal accomplish, with your solution?
   Briefly, in what ways is the customer using (or did use) the product or service?
   What is the end result? Try to quantify any business benefits.
   Next steps or plans for the future?
   What advice would the customer offer to other businesses going down the same path?
6. Write the story – You can either write it in story format, or interview format (easier for non-writers). Either way, follow a storyline, taking readers from an orientation of who the business is, its goals and challenges, how the solution made a difference, and the successful outcome.
7. Don’t be overly promotional – Always keep the focus on the customer and its successes, rather than how great your product or service is.
8. Get approval – If the customer needs to approve the content before it runs, send it to them and ask for feedback by a certain day.
9. Post it!

Outside-In Design for More Usable, User-focused Websites

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Feb 8, 2009; Category: Design/Development, Marketing, Usability; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture, Usability; No Comments

There are few things more difficult than setting aside your own knowledge and assumptions to look at things from someone else’s perspective. (If that were not the case, political "discussion" would be far more productive…but I digress.) It’s critical to the success of a website that it serve the needs of its audiences, but too often website information architecture (IA) is approached from an inside-out perspective (what we want to tell people), rather than from an outside-in perspective (what people want to find on our website).

It’s human nature to assume our own point-of-view is shared by most people, especially if they are smart (like us). But it’s a poor framework from which to design a usable website that engages site visitors. Who among us has not heard a business owner proclaim that he is the best representative of his website’s audience? If he likes it and gets it, he insists, his site visitors will like it and get it. However, people outside a company do not view the company’s information or message in the same way as people inside the company. They don’t know what company insiders know, and often they’re encountering the information for the first time.

Consulting web/IA designers may have an advantage over in-house designers in incorporating the outside-in perspective, because as outsiders, they carry fewer assumptions about a company’s message and information into the design/IA process. However, few designers are completely immune to making assumptions that don’t serve a particular audience’s needs.

So how do you ensure outside-in design and information architecture? Talk to people in the website’s audience: by formal interview, by online discussion, by engaging them in blog posts, by twittering, however you have to do it. Listen carefully. Be open to what they say about your website and messages, especially when it makes you uncomfortable. Compliments are nice to hear, but complaints will help you make your website better, if you take them seriously.

Find enough complaints from people outside the company, and you’ll find the keys to making a more usable, visitor-focused website.

Lessons from General Custer: Why Should You Have a Business Blog?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Feb 3, 2009; Category: Business, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Blogging, Change, Economy, Marketing; 4 Comments

There’s much talk and growing evidence that businesses that blog are realizing business benefits, including increased sales. Most business owners I talk to, however, are hesitant. They’ve heard about the "next big thing" before, so they’re not ready to get excited about blogging, and they have business to tend to. Their lack of excitement often takes hold after I’ve explained that it may take 6-12 months for blogging benefits to accrue to their bottom line if they do it well, which includes an 8-12 hr/week time commitment. If the results aren’t instantaneous, why bother?

I’m reminded of the classic cartoon [apologies to my Native American friends] in which a machine gun salesman is rebuffed by General Custer amid incoming arrows, saying "Can’t you see I’m too busy to talk right now?" What would you expect of a man who wore his hat so that the first wind that came along would send it flying? This is not a guy who focused on what was important.

The marketing landscape is shifting, or has already shifted, depending on who you talk to. Traditional "outbound" marketing—which includes print advertising, telemarketing, radio and television advertising, direct mail, email blasts, and non-interactive websites—are increasingly being ignored by consumers. Outbound marketing can still work if done effectively, but not to the degree it used to. When was the last time you opened a direct mail ad to see what the offer was? Or sat through the 10 minutes of commercials that accompany a 20-minute TV program? Or read a newspaper ad? You may have done some of those things recently, but if you’re like most people, you’re doing them a lot less than you did 5 or 10 years ago.

People have other options for finding information when they’re ready to buy. For an increasing number of people, their first step in a purchase is Google. If they’re looking for a book, which they can buy online, they probably won’t add a city to their search. But if they’re looking for a woodstove, they probably will. If you’re a local merchant who sells woodstoves and your website has a lot of recently added and updated content on woodstoves, you’re going to show up high in the search results. If you’re a local merchant who sells woodstoves and have a website with little useful information that hasn’t been updated since it was launched 5 years ago, or if you don’t have a website at all, you’re not going to have an opportunity to make the sale.

Increasingly, successful local businesses are the ones who are "findable" on the Internet. Becoming more findable on the Internet is sometimes referred to as "inbound" marketing. Blogging and other inbound marketing activities, accompanied by very basic Search Engine Optimization, are a proven way of raising the findability of your business and, by the way, they cost much less than outbound marketing. Let me help you pull that arrow out of your back (hold still!), then we really should talk about your business and how blogging can help it thrive.

Reducing Development Time by Effective Planning in Multiple Team-Member Development

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Feb 1, 2009; Category: Business, Design/Development; Tags: Business, Design/Development; No Comments

When developing a website or web application on your own—or with another person you’re used to working with—planning can be pretty informal without endangering the project. When you find yourself in a project that includes several team members, however, more formal attention to planning becomes critical.

Effective planning prior to development can reduce development time, eliminating time lost due to miscommunication, rework, and restarts. The planning phase should include all parties involved in development, though planning responsibilities may rest more heavily on some team members than others.

Planning is not just meeting and talking. If it’s to be useful, there are some basic tasks that need to be accomplished:

1. Develop team-wide understanding of, agreement on, and support for website audiences, goals, and priorities.
2. Define audiences as completely as possible in terms of demographics, personas, technological acumen/comfort levels; also goals, needs, and contexts of the users. Ideally (sometimes critically), research in audience definition should precede project planning.
3. With understanding of the audiences, develop a content/technology plan about how to best serve their needs.
4. Information architecture (IA): plan how content will be arranged and accessed on the website, utilizing wireframes to map out site structure and pathways to content for various types of site users.
5. Resolve technical and budget issues that might arise from the content/technology plan; may mean adjusting goals, priorities, or deliverables.
6. Establish and gain team-wide commitment to a timetable for development and launch.

Though much of the planning process takes place at the beginning of a project, it should be recognized that revisiting the plan at regular intervals and adjusting as necessary is characteristic of a sound and effective development process.