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The typical Web site fails to convert visitors into loyal customers, leaving a potential fortune in business on the table. A site may win awards for graphic design, but still fall short. The key to Web success is compelling and useful information content, delivered in new and surprising ways.
e-commerce sites selling with Web content
- Crutchfield: A Friend in the Electronics Business
- While many e-commerce sites (think Best Buy or Amazon.com) can sell you a car stereo system, Crutchfield.com walks you through the entire process from choosing the right system for your make, model, and year of car to installing it yourself. By continually optimizing the site around content tailored to buyer behavior, Crutchfield takes the sometimes daunting task of purchasing a gizmo or gadget online and makes it fun for consumers.
- Alloy: Generation Y Marks the Spot
- With a target market of over 10 million girls in the United States between the ages of 12 and 17, Alloy has found a distinct editorial voice and has become one of the most popular sites for this dynamic demographic. The site makes its money through sales of merchandise (particularly fashion) and sponsorships.
- Design Within Reach: Form Follows Function
- For many people, great design has been inaccessible, either because it is difficult to find or because it is marketed with pretension-those not "in the know%uFFFD? about good design tend to feel left out. The Design Within Reach site makes it easy to poke around by specific designers or by room within a home and office or by furniture type.
- mediabistro.com: Pitching Content to the Media
- The mediabistro.com business (a career and community site featuring job opportunities, courses, and networking events for media professionals) was built from the ground up with content as the sole driver of growth. The company spends no money at all on marketing, instead focusing on supplying the content that media people want in a dynamic virtual community.
- Esurance: Insurance Content Replaces Agents
- Because they only sell online, the site's content must serve the role of the traditional neighborhood insurance agent: providing information, answering questions, working up quotes, and writing policies. Esurance created an online experience designed to make buying auto insurance as quick and painless as possible.
- Aerosmith: Content for Extreme Fans
- With more than 100 million albums sold worldwide over 30 years, Aerosmith owes much of its ongoing success to a loyal fan base. At the Aero Force One site, fans have access to exclusive content, merchandise, and opportunities to meet the band in person. When you're in the Aero Force One club, you have access to the best tickets and the ability to download exclusive photos, audio, and video clips.
- Thrifty Car Rental: Web Content as a Great Equalizer
- According to Brad Rosenthal, Director of Internet Strategy for Thrifty Car Rental: "The Internet has been a great equalizer for Thrifty." In December 2005, according to Rosenthal, 42% of reservations are placed through Thrifty.com, with another 20% coming from other online sites such as Expedia.com and Orbitz.com. The Thrifty site now has 10,000 pages and an 8.5% conversion rate. So that means that more than 60% of Thrifty reservations are booked online compared to 12% only three before. Rosenthal says that 1.8 million reservations are placed on the site per year. The Thrifty.com site uses a content management system (CMS) to localize content for visitors based on the click stream that is used. For example, if people are looking for a car in Seattle, then deals for Seattle are surfaced. The CMS system allows the over 150 people at Thrifty who are able to add content to enter it once into the system and then have it appear on the site in many places. Rosenthal says that the company manages content as an asset.
Web content in non-profits, education, politics
- CARE USA: Content Fights Global Poverty
- The CARE USA Web site provides a comprehensive window into the organization's activities in dozens of countries, which allows potential donors to understand exactly where their donations will go and how it will be spent. The Web-based content is used by the organization to sell and market its good works in order to solicit online donations.
- Tourism Toronto: Hit the Site and Hit the Town
- Tourism Toronto, the public face of The Toronto Convention and Visitors Association, is the official destination-marketing organization for this Canadian city. Tourism Toronto promotes the city to several distinct buyer demographics, including individuals who plan their own journeys, those who book travel for groups, and representatives from organizations interested in booking conventions.
- Kenyon College: A Literary Tradition on the Web
- Kenyon's site is organized specifically to appeal to the different groups of people the college needs to reach, including high school students (for admissions), alumni and parents (for donations) as well as students, faculty, and the local community. The site tells the college story through numerous profiles of Kenyon College graduates, students, and faculty, including high achievers from business, the arts, and academia.
- Sharp HealthCare: Putting Patients in Control with Content
- Sharp HealthCare, San Diego's leading healthcare system, includes seven hospitals, three medical groups, a health plan and a full range of facilities and services. The site is organized throughout to move patients from the information-gathering phase to choosing a doctor and making an appointment at a Sharp facility. While most healthcare sites are little more than an online brochure, Sharp leads the way to a more interactive an info-centric future with innovative use of Web content.
- Dean for America and Internet Presidential Politics: The New Grassroots
- Dean didn't win his party's nomination for President in 2004, but his influence will be felt in political campaigns for decades to come. The Dean campaign's pioneering uses of the blog as a grassroots political communications tool and gathering online credit card contributions from ordinary Americans was quickly copied by candidates for offices big and small all across the United States.
B2B: content drives buyers into the sales cycle
- Alcoa: Content Drives Large Deals
- The Alcoa corporate Web site provides extensive content--with all roads leading directly to the ability to conduct transactions online, a rarity for a B2B site, especially one with this level of product and client diversity. Alcoa's content helps the company sell and the results are measurable. B2B firms that want to facilitate online transactions can learn form Alcoa's success.
- Weyerhaeuser: Managing Trees with Internet Content
- What's really for sale on the Weyerhaeuser site is the company's commitment to the environment and managing the sustainable resources under its care. Weyerhaeuser is a business that relies heavily on natural resources to create its products. The company uses its Web site as a primary vehicle to communicate its environmental record and values to the communities it serves.
- ebuild: Everything for the Professional Builder, Including the Kitchen Sink
- A targeted advertising and sponsorship vehicle for the hundreds of companies that sell products to professionals in the building trade, ebuild provides a great example of how a targeted online catalog can become the preferred site for an entire demographic group. Product information fits into the hundreds of categories based on editorial decisions made by experts in the building profession, all designed to make finding the perfect product easy for visitors.
- Colliers: Commercial Real Estate for the World
- Colliers (238 offices in 51 countries) was among the first commercial real estate companies to recognize the importance of its vast resource of local knowledge in providing value for global customers. The content is organized to mimic the way customers think and is presented in a clear and concise manner.
- Booz Allen: Career Content
- A global leader in strategy and technology consulting, Booz Allen uses the Web to recruit and hire the most qualified people from over 100,000 candidates per year who submit profiles online. The company recognizes that its services are only as good as the quality of employees and is committed to the using the Web as a tool to accomplish this key component of its success.
- UPS Investor Relations: Delivering Stock
- The world's largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics services uses the company's Investor Relations site as a window into how the company is run, promoting UPS stock as a solid investment. In the post-Enron era, open governance and financial visibility signal corporate health and directly influence a positive reputation.
The steps to a great content-focused Web site
There are 14 steps here. You will have a terrific site of you do all the steps. But one of the great things about the Web is that you can build and grow continuously. So pick something and do it. Incremental improvement is better than stagnation.
- Articulate your goals
- Conduct a needs analysis
- Understand user demographics
- Create "personas" for each demographic
- Establish (or maintain) a site personality
- Develop appropriate "self-select paths" based on your personas
- Create a landing page for each persona
- Write for your personas, not for you
- Create content for all stages of the consideration cycle
- Offer multiple ways for visitors to express interest
- Photos, diagrams, charts & multi-media content tells your story
- Push content out via email and RSS
- Market your Web site
- Gather metrics for continual improvement
My books, my site, my blog, and my column
- David Meerman Scott
- Stuff about me, my books, my speaking gigs, and some free downloads on marketing with Web content.
- Web Ink Now
- My blog -- all about cashing in with Web content.
- EContent Magazine - After Thought
- My column in EContent Magazine
- Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers
- Gimmicky websites are out. Content is in.
In Cashing In With Content, I demonstrate how content-savvy organizations are succeeding with a strategy that drives visitors to action - to purchase, donate, join, or subscribe. - The New Rules of Marketing and PR
- My new book.
How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly
Foreword by Robert Scoble
Complimentary e-books
- The new rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly
- The Web has changed the rules for press releases. The thing is, most old-line PR professionals just don't know it yet. But YOU need to understand the new rules. To help you, I just published a complimentary e-book called: The new rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly. Please download it and pass it on.
Because the rules for relating to the public have changed so slowly over the past ten years (since the Web has allowed people to read press releases directly), practitioners who learned based on the old rules have been equally slow to change. In fact, most old-school experts have refused to change altogether. It is time to step it up and consider the promise Web 2.0 public relations holds.
Today, savvy marketing professionals use press releases to reach buyers directly.
Web Ink Now blog
How innovative marketers use content to turn browsers into buyers.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byBuy my books
Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers into Buyers
Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of 11/10/2009) 
Eyeball Wars : a novel of dot-com intrigue
Amazon Price: $24.00 (as of 11/10/2009)
Articles about Web content
Here are some articles that I have written for marketing magazines that may help put perspective around Web content ideas and techniques.
- MarketingProfs.com: How Web Content Can Shorten a Complex Sale
- Savvy marketing professionals understand that sales and marketing must work together to move prospects through the sales pipeline. This is especially important in the complex sale, with long decision making cycles and multiple buyers that need to be influenced. The good news is that Web content drives people through and shortens the sales cycle for any product or service -- especially complex ones that have many steps and take months or even years to complete.
- EContent Magazine: The New News Cycle
- I'm sick and tired of the media elite bitching and moaning about their diminishing role in society. There's lots of blame and finger-pointing going on at big media these days: people don't watch network TV news "because they work long hours"; newspaper and magazine revenues are down, which is "the advertiser's fault"; and everyone's favorite scapegoat - blogging - is "not real journalism." That's the world according to traditional media.
- RainToday.com: Don't Trust An Advertising Agency To Build Your Web Site
- Sure, the subject of this essay -- "Don't trust an advertising agency to build your web site" -- is a sweeping generalization. While some advertising agencies may build great sites, the majority fail big time and their clients suffer as a result.
- EContent Magazine: I Don't Google Madonna
- It seems to me there are exactly two ways to use and deploy content on Web sites. As marketers, I think we've focused too much effort on one way: answer my question, while not spending enough energy on the other: tell me something. Too often we're building sites that solve only half of visitors needs. At our own peril, we're not listening to the people who use the sites we build and deploy.
- Product Marketing Magazine: The Egoless Company
- The egoless company pays close attention to its marketing and sales approach. A quick look at a company's marketing materials, its website, and press releases, can be very telling. Is the focus on the problems customers face? Or do the materials simply describe product offerings from the company's perspective?
- EContent Magazine: The Web Isn't a Newspaper, It's a City
- The influence of business and political blogs has become too large to be dismissed. Blogging provides experts and wannabes with an easy way to make their voices heard in the Web-based marketplace of ideas. Companies that ignore independent product reviews and discussions about service quality found on blogs are living dangerously; information aggregators and distributors need to do some soul searching to determine where blogs fit in to their offerings; and info pros should be prepared to advise their organizations on the impact of blogs on a day's work.
- CMO Magazine: Turning Browsers into Buyers: How your Web content can influence the B2B buying process
- My commentary column Turning Browsers into Buyers: How your Web content can influence the B2B buying process is on the CMO Magazine Web site.
Riffs, rants, tips, and ideas on Web content
- Online Media Room Best Practices
- Online Media Rooms are an important part of any organization Web site and a critical aspect of an effective media relations strategy. Done well, a good Online Media Room will turn journalists who are just browsing into interested writers who highlight your organization positively in stories. However, the vast majority of Web sites and most Online Media Rooms fail to deliver compelling content. Sure they may look pretty, but often the design and graphics are in the forefront, not the content that journalists require.
- 10 Web Landing Page Tips to Drive Action
- I love marketing with Web landing pages. It's one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get a message read by a target market and a terrific tool to move prospects through the sales cycle.
- Best Practices to Demonstrate a Unique Web Personality
- As visitors interact with the content on your site, they should develop a clear picture of the organization behind the site. Is it young and playful or solid and conservative?
- Show, Don't Tell: 4 easy ideas to drive visitors to action
- A particularly valuable way to create content for your Web site is by addressing your customer's problems. And the most authentic way to do this is by applying the "show, don't tell" rule.
- Best Practices for Using Online Images to Turn Browsers into Buyers
- Effective content is not limited to words. Innovative marketers make use of non-text content, such as cartoons, charts, graphs, audio feeds and video clips, to inform and entertain site visitors.
- 6 Tips to Integrate Sales, Marketing, and Communications
- I've noticed that many B2B companies as well as consumer and non-profit organizations don't do a particularly good job of integrating their various communications programs and aligning them with the sales process. Sadly, the failure to integrate sales, marketing and communications, both online and offline will always result in lost opportunities.
- The Power of Blogging for Business
- Blogs also allow marketers to take content in different directions that will appeal to specific target demographics without negatively impacting the strategy and content of your primary Web site. As a way to experiment, to test new ideas, or to reach narrow niche markets, smart marketers use highly focused blogs. If your experiment fails, you can simply shut down the blob with little or no negative effect on your main site.
- Breaking Out from the Commodity Product Trap
- In an increasingly competitive marketplace, all businesspeople are searching for the elusive key to success. The search is particularly intense when the product or service is considered a commodity. Well, look no further for the key: Web content will unlock success in almost any product category -- even in a highly competitive industry where you are beset by larger, better-funded competitors. You just need the guts to provide valuable content for your customers to make your products winners in the marketplace.
- It's Not About You, It's About Your Customer
- Marketers can learn a lot by emulating the publishing industry, which knows that their business is all about getting the readers' attention. Like a publisher, work first to understand the audience and then use that insight to decide how to satisfy your buyers' informational needs through effective marketing programs. Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action, which requires a focus on describing answers to your customer's most urgent problems.
- 9 Tips to Effectively Pitch Trade Publications
- As many marketers know, having your company, product or executive appear in an appropriate trade publication is great marketing. Not only do you reach the publication's audience directly, you can also point your prospects to the piece or make use of reprints or Web links. Media coverage means legitimacy. The sad news is the vast majority of people don't play the game correctly. I cringe when I think back to some of my own wicked blunders. The good news is I'll tell you a few tips so you can be more successful.
- End the Press Release Gobbledygook
- I receive several dozen press releases in an average week from companies that want me to write about them in a magazine article, an upcoming book, or my blog. I'm interested in what companies are up to, but I'm just too busy to decipher press release gobbledygook. I normally give a press release ten seconds to catch my attention, but the surest way to get me to delete a release in frustration is to write in a way that I just can't understand.
- 6 Tips for Optimizing Your Next Speaking Opportunity
- Hitting the speaking circuit is one of the best ways to build awareness and generate buzz about you and your organization. Speaking opportunities are everywhere: at tradeshows, conferences and the monthly meeting of the local chapter of an industry or professional organization. Speaking can range from a solo one-hour keynote at a big event to being one of a panel of six experts on a detailed topic. But no matter how big or how small the speech, some simple rules apply.
- Please Do Not Read This
- There is strong evidence that 'negative' Web headlines and links often generate lots more clicks than 'positive' ones. Words like 'Worst', 'Not', 'Don't', and 'Only' are interesting and people want to know what's there.
- See the Content for the Trees
- The consolidation of vast amounts of data and information into simple visual representations is one of the best ways to cash in with content. Smart marketers who use visualization tools have the potential to alter the way we navigate information -- and the way we purchase. Taking the words and numbers of content and turning them into pictures, these new offerings make grasping content relationships much easier.
- Forget the Brand, Focus on the Customer
- "The Brand." Ugh. Just hearing the term makes me want to puke. "Branding" was the most over-hyped concept forced on companies by the media and VCs in the dot-com era. And that's saying a lot because almost everything in the online world was over-hyped a few years ago. The result was countless econtent executives who got their knickers in a twist about the outward manifestation of their brand including logos, image ads, and even tchotchkes.
Web Content Best Practices
- Web Content Drives Action. In the past three years, I have analyzed some 1,000 Web sites and interviewed over 100 innovative marketers about how Web content drives success. In every case, content is created, organized, and deployed to drive visitors to do something--be it to purchase, subscribe, invest, join, or donate. Innovative marketers turn browsers into buyers and their best practices provide anyone charged with creating a great Web site with useful ideas on how to cash in with content.
- There are a dozen best practices for Cashing in with Content below and each possesses the potential to benefit you, your Web site, and your larger organizational goals and objectives. Many Web site content best practices - including paying close attention to spelling and grammar, keeping the site updated and fresh, including an About page and FAQ page, and removing any dead links--are too obvious to warrant focus here.
Rather than spend time on basic techniques that are outlined in many general "how to" books on Web site creation, I focus on higher-level content strategies, which fuel successful sites. - When launching a new site, start with a comprehensive needs analysis
- Speak with one voice to create a consistent site personality
- Dedicate editorial resources to create consistent and informed content
- Encourage browsing by using appropriate self-select paths
- A separate URL or blog facilitates providing targeted content
- Push content to users to pull them back to your site
- Don't forget images; original photos are powerful content
- Consider making proprietary content freely available
- If you serve a global market, use global content
- Include interactive content and opportunities for user-feedback
- Use content to create viral marketing
- Link content directly to the sales cycle
Web Writing Resources
- Debbie Weil: BlogWrite for CEOs
- Debbie Weil explains what CEOs need to know about blogging
- Jonathan Kranz on Copy
- The author of Writing Copy for Dummies has a great blog
- Dianna Huff: The MarCom Writer
- Dianna Huff has a terrific monthly newsletter.
by DavidMeermanScott
I worked in senior roles at content companies Knight-Ridder and NewsEdge, learning how compelling online content tells stories. Now I help organizatio... (more)
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