Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI

By ashutosh | Published: June 8, 2009

Joe Pulizzi, a thought leader, speaker, writer and evangelist for content marketing, is founder and chief content officer for Junta42, a content marketing/custom publishing community search engine and resource, helping businesses of all sizes learn how to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. Joe has authored several useful resources, including a free eBook and several articles on his blog.

His presentation titled Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI on slideshare contains concise and powerful hints on planning your web content strategy.

Some salient points from the presentation:

What is content strategy?

  • Content strategy is planning for the creation of useful, usable content.
  • Not just WHAT you’re going to publish and WHERE, but WHY.
  • Content strategy isn’t just deciding what you’re going to include. It’s deciding what you’re going to leave out.

Website Foundation

  • What are my business objectives?
  • What are my users’ (customers’) goals?
  • Any content that doesn’t meet these needs is just getting in the way.
  • Avoid wasting money on designing, creating and maintaining unnecessary content.
  • Keep project teams aligned throughout the process.

Website Content Strategy

  • What content do we want to create, and why?
  • How are we going to create it?
  • What will happen to it once it goes up on the site?
  • Plan strategically for required content, scope realistically, then scale according to time and budget.

Website Content Strategy: Content Audit

  • Possibly the most important thing you can do to avoid scope creep and minimize risk
  • Catalog web pages, print materials, all communications
  • Conduct a gap analysis
  • Don’t commit to content you can’t create or maintain

Content Specifications and Creation

  • Get real-world content specifications as early as possible
  • Identify who is responsible for providing, reviewing, and approving the content before writing begins
  • Train or hire web writers … it’s a very, very different process and medium from print
  • Keep the content audit up-to-date to eliminate redundant workflows among various communicators
  • Ensure quality and quantity control, informed by clear recommendations and overseen by dedicated resources

Business Impact of a Content Strategy

  • QUALITATIVE
    • Engages all stakeholders early in the website project process to ensure alignment, investment, and accountability around content creation and maintenance
    • Provides accessible documentation for all project team members to help judge proposed content effectiveness with regard to business objectives and user goals
    • Results in higher quality content, which improves customer satisfaction, sales leads, online service and support, trust in brand, and so on
    • Creates true content accountability for all project members early in the process
    • Facilitates future state content planning (editorial oversight, expansion, maintenance
  • QUANTITATIVE (anecdotal)
    • Projects driven by web content strategies are completed in up to 25% less time than design-centered projects
    • Assuming stakeholders and business requirements remain the same, scope changes during content creation phase happen less than 10% of the time
    • Client satisfaction with final product is close to 100%
    • Measurable project objectives are realized within 3-6 months post-launch (with appropriate supporting communications)

Do not miss the opportunity to download his free eBook titled “Seven Content Strategies to Build Trust with Today’s Savvy Consumers”

Posted in Evolving Enterprises, Information & knowledge management, Web Content Strategy | Tagged | Comments closed

Employee Engagement – a Towers Perrin study

By Administrator | Published: March 9, 2009

Towers Perrin is a global professional services firm that helps organizations improve performance through effective people, risk and financial management. Don Lowman, who is Managing Director of the Human Capital Group in Towers Perrin recently wrote on his blog about how he has spent half his life working at Towers Perrin.

This is no wonder, for one of the most innovative area of work that Towers Perrin specializes in is Employee Engagement.

Their Global Workforce Study (2007-2008) titled “Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance” is an insightful study into how businesses can leverage its people to their full potential and derive business results. It is based on a survey of over 90,000 employees in 18 countries.

The following extracts summarize the key points in the study:

Read More »

Posted in Evolving Enterprises, Information & knowledge management | 1 Comment

CRM does not improve sales performance

By Administrator | Published: January 20, 2009

Dave Hurlbrink writes how conventional CRM or SFA applications are not designed to serve the needs of a sales person. The value proposition of a “360 degree view of your prospect/customer” is not what the sales person needs to improve his performance.

A sales person is already juggling with multiple opportunities in the pipeline that are fighting for attention and that take long to close. What the sales person needs is a way to simplify the information and make it actionable. And he needs to be able to get this without feeding in a whole lot of data in the system.

Dave suggests the following:

What these salespeople require is a sales-centric application that helps them with the issues critical to their personal and departmental success such as:


  1. What’s the next specific step I need to be taking with each prospect in my pipeline and when should I take it based on the natural, not forced, progression of my prospect’s buy cycle?
  2. What information do I need to gather next from my prospects that will provide and build on the contextual knowledge I must have in order to best help them visualize how my products or services will help them achieve an objective, satisfy a need or solve a problem.
  3. What information do I need to convey next to my prospects that will provide and build on the contextual knowledge they need to properly and fully understand how my products or services will help them achieve an objective, satisfy a need or solve a problem.
  4. Which of my prospects should I prioritize my time and attention to based on how they’ve demonstrated their levels of interest?
  5. What members of my extended sales team do I need to involve now in my sales opportunities and what will they need to accomplish?
  6. How can I delegate administrative but necessary tasks to optimize my sales time with prospects?

What is required is a customizable template that the sales person can use to track the progress of each opportunity with minimal data entry. The template needs to act as a sales guide and a reference for the sales person to use when evaluating and prioritizing opportunities.

The template can easily capture the progress of the opportunity through various sales stages or milestones, and automatically measure the time taken to move through the pipeline. This gives the sales person a measure of the pipeline velocity – or the speed at which the opportunity is moving through the pipeline. This is a very important metric that can help the sales person prioritize opportunities.

Recognizing that the sales person is the primary constraint in scaling up sales, any system can serve to improve sales performance only when it improves the throughput of the sales person.

Posted in Evolving Enterprises, Sales Activity Management, Workflow Management | Tagged , , | Comments closed

B2B Marketing – a four-point transformation strategy

By Administrator | Published: January 18, 2009

Laura Ramos – VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research focuses on effective lead management, lead nurturing, sales and marketing integration, the development of targeted messaging and winning value propositions, installed base marketing, and the use of digital media and the Web to build customer engagement.

Laura writes about her recently published report that recommends a four-point strategy to B2B marketers to avoid becoming obsolete. She advises against merely increasing marketing spend by creating new campaigns or clever advertising will not deliver results. And suggests that blindly getting into online or social marketing will only de-focus the marketing strategy.

To avoid obsolescence, B2B marketers should undertake four transformative steps:

1) Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight.
Today, stalking prospects with outbound, undifferentiated messages yields unpredictable results. But this is what happens when marketers rely primarily on list providers, database marketing services, or other sources of information for targeting buyers. To make campaigns pay off, marketers need to collect and analyze more information about what separates their best customers from the others. Build a marketing database to do this. Big firms may need to look at something from Aprimo or Unica, smaller firms can get by with less. But get a handle on your prospect data in 2009.

2) Shift from simply generating demand to managing it.
When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know exactly which ones have the most potential, regardless of whether marketing outsources the leads or not. To convince sales that marketing-qualified leads are worth pursuing, marketing must execute multifaceted campaigns that engage — and qualify —prospects while extending marketing’s responsibility further along the sales pipeline. Top marketers focus on managing demand, not generating it. They also score their leads numerically, systematically.  I’ve talked about this before, but you can see how you rate here.

3) Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations.
Business buying cycles are long, and marketers use this to their advantage when they weave together digital and physical channels to engage buyers emotionally, deliver brand experiences, and form ongoing relationships. Integrated marketing success in B2B depends on leveraging the strengths of different channels to build an ongoing conversation with buyers. To do this well requires organizational alignment, an outcome-based strategy, deep customer insight, analytic planning, and consistent measurement. Find out how you stack up here.

4) Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles.
As Social Computing moves into the business world, B2B marketers dial down on acquisition and step up to community marketing. To set community marketing strategy successfully, marketers must know whether target customers willingly participate in social activity on the job.  We have data to share with you about how buyers behave socially while working. Come preview it at our teleconference.They also need to set social objectives that align with business outcomes, and evaluate tactical and technology choices last.

Posted in Evolving Enterprises, Sales Activity Management | Leave a comment

Challenges in scaling up sales

By Administrator | Published: January 13, 2009

Are you facing these challenges in scaling up your sales process?

  • High cost of sales, low margins
  • Lack of clear product/offer differentiation
  • Complexity in mapping customer requirements to product/offer
  • Long sales cycle with unpredictable outcomes
  • No consistent sales performance, difficult to forecast
  • High level of stress in sales team, high turnover
  • You can make/provide as much as you can sell

In short, if scaling up sales is the major bottleneck to scaling up your business, then here are some ideas to help you understand and tackle these challenges better.

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Leveraging the Web – How to get your web site to work for you!

By ashutosh | Published: August 7, 2007

A presentation made to a group of enterpreneurs to highlight the steps

Transcript:

  1. Leveraging the Web A presentation by Reach1to1 Technologies (P) Ltd.
  2. Web Site Strategy Target Audience ● Business Objectives ● Design Requirements ● Content Management ● Site Promotion ● Performance Measurement ● Site Examples ● Questions & Answers ●
  3. Target Audience General public ● Visitors with service-able requirements ● Visitors with current requirements ● Current customers ● Share holders and investors ● Current Employees ● Prospective Employees ● Competitors ●
  4. Business Objectives General Public ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services –
  5. Business Objectives Visitors with service-able requirements ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Identify possible services – Establish credibility to deliver solutions –
  6. Business Objectives Visitors with current requirements ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Identify possible services – Establish credibility to deliver solutions – Identify specific requirements – Establish specific solution –
  7. Business Objectives Current Customers ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Identify possible services – Establish credibility to deliver solutions – Identify new requirements – Establish new solutions – Online services (order tracking, support) –
  8. Business Objectives Share-holders and investors ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Establish financial stability and performance – Project business growth potential –
  9. Business Objectives Current Employees ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Establish financial stability and performance – Project business growth potential – Update about news and events – Educate about products and services –
  10. Business Objectives Prospective Employees ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Establish financial stability and performance – Project business growth potential – Show career opportunities – Provide mechanism to apply online –
  11. Business Objectives Competitors ● Establish corporate identity – Position the company and its services – Attract skilled personnel from competitors – Establish position of leadership in chosen – areas Role model to follow for best practices –
  12. General Design Requirements Simple, elegant design ● Fast loading pages ● Easy navigation structure ● Direct search facility ● Layered information ● Continuously updated ●
  13. Content Management Web site is not a one-time project ● Update regularly to maintain position of ● leadership Updates should be done by internal staff, ● without requiring web design skills Let everyone contribute, moderated by an ● editorial team Create an internal process for content ● management as an extension of current responsibilities
  14. Site Promotion Where do we get visitors from? ● Search Engines – Online Marketing – Corporate communications (emails, letters) – Events – Press coverage –
  15. Site Promotion Search Engine Ranking ● Depends on content – Frequency and relevancy of content – Specific reference to terms that visitors are – looking for Site uses search-engine friendly hyper-text – tags RSS Compatible – provides pre-indexed site – and page-wise information
  16. Site Promotion Online Marketing ● Email newsletter – Cross links with other web sites – Online advertising – Articles on other sites –
  17. Site Promotion Corporate Communications ● Every employee, customer, supplier and – partner is a referral point They need to know about your web site – Email signature to contain link to web site – Letter heads and visiting cards – Company brochures –
  18. Site Promotion Events ● Exhibitions and forums – Web site kiosks – Sponsorships – Technical and Industry Seminars –
  19. Site Promotion Press Coverage ● Online press releases – Interviews – News articles – Magazine features – Advertisements –
  20. Performance Measurement Site objectives to be measured by ● performance metrics Number of visitors – Number of subscribers – Number of leads generated – Number of updates – Page-wise statistics – Navigation path statistics – Search engine keywords – Reference site from which links received –
  21. Example – Products APW President Systems Ltd ● Manufacturer of Technology Products – Market Leader in Enclosure systems – Initial content and design by Reach1to1 – Web site managed by in-house team with – assistance from Reach1to1 High level of employee participation – Regular updates –
  22. Example – Services Epitome Global Services Ltd. ● KPO Services for Asset Management Industry – Established by reputed businessmen – Web site used as primary sales tool – Initial design provided by Reach1to1 – Web site managed by in-house team with – assistance from Reach1to1 High level of employee participation – Regular updates –
  23. Questions to Answer Whom do we want to target? ● What do we want to achieve? ● What information is currently available? ● Who can participate in the project? ● What is the time line? ● What is the budget? ● What do we do next? ●
  24. More information at http://www.reach1to1.com
Posted in Information & knowledge management, Web Content Strategy | Comments closed

Characteristics of Evolving Enterprises

By Administrator | Published: March 20, 2006

Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of TIBCO – a highly acclaimed enterprise software company, has written a new book The Power to Predict: How Real Time Businesses Anticipate Customer Needs, Create Opportunities, and Beat the Competition. If we’re to go by his previous book The Power of Now, its a sure best seller!

A review of the book by Dennis Howlett says:

Essentially the book is a collection of stories covering a broad spectrum of industries and their efforts to see the next thing that is likely to impact their business, take corrective action or seize opportunity. It includes companies like Pirelli, casino giant Harrah’s, Spanish ex-pat bank Solbank, FedEX, Southwest Airlines, amazon.com, E&J Gallo Winery, Essent Energie. I wish they could have talked about a host of others I came across but am not allowed to mention. Believe me when I say TIBCO has a customer list to die for. More important are the characteristics these companies share:

  • Customer-driven – not focused but driven
  • Embrace cultural change – they don’t fight change
  • Management by exception – the routine stuff is assumed to be taken care of
  • Innovation – they don’t shy away from change
  • Merit-based alliances – there’s no entitlement in a relationship
  • Meritocratic and entrepreneurial – no consensus here
  • Leaders provide opportunity – organizing staff to empower themselves
  • Short planning cycles – event driven and highly responsive to market conditions

These are all characteristics I believe the modern professional practice should aspire to if it is to be super successful.

… an ideal set of characteristics that we would like to attribute to our favorite term Evolving Enterprises. Some of the visionary clients that we have the privilege of working with, like APW President constantly exhibit these very qualities, and continue to prosper in the face of ever changing market conditions. We salute their vision!

Waiting to get hold of the book…

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Expense Claims Workflow

By Administrator | Published: March 17, 2006

Companies having employees distributed in small teams across multiple locations, such as sales teams, or project implementation teams spend a lot of effort in tracking expenses incurred by employees. Each expense claim needs to be verified and approved, so as to attribute it to the appropriate account head and apportion it to a profit center, such as a prospective customer or a project.

Some of our clients have sales teams and project teams that are located in different cities and towns acrosss the country. We have observed their process for routing expense claims to be slow, resource-intensive and cumbersome. The employees are typically expected to fill in vouchers and attach supporting documentation such as bills and submit them for approval. These claims are then approved by a local authority and then passed on to the central accounts department.

From our observations, having supporting documentation is a necessary evil. However, most of the paperwork is required primarily during initial approval by the local authority, and subsequent consolidation by centralized accounts can be much simpler if all the expense claims are digitally recorded in a central repository that is accessible to all locations.

The Expense Claims Workflow that we built provides the following procedure for expense claims:

Expense Claims Workflow

The workflow proceeds as follows:

  1. The employee situated at any location logs in to the application, enters expense claims using a simple form, that could be integrated with any other workflow such as the Sales Activity Management workflow, or Order Processing workflow.
  2. At the end of the week, the employee takes a print-out of the report showing the expenses incurred during the week. He hands over this report, along with supporting documents such as bills cash memos, etc. to the local area manager. The area manager logs into the same application and views the claims and verifies them against the supporting documents, where relevant. The area manager may mark expenses as:

    approved icon Approved: The area manager may approve all or part of the amounts claimed. Those expenses approved by the area manager are forwarded to Accounts on a weekly basis. (The collective printouts of the expense reports along with the documents are forwarded by courier each week).

    expense clarification icon Clarification: Expenses marked for clarification are sent back to the employee for clarifications. The employee gets an email alert with a link to the expense in question.

    expense denied icon Denied: Expenses marked as ‘Denied’ by the area manager may be reviewed later with the employee as required and can then be re-submitted subsequently.

  3. The Accounts department at the head office receives all claims approved and forwarded by area managers from all locations. Accounts then looks up these claims in the same application. Accounts can then mark each claim as:
    expense approved locked icon Approved and Locked: Expenses approved by accounts are considered Passed and Locked. Approval may be granted for the entire amount or part of the amount only. The area manager then cannot modify the approval status.

    expense clarification icon Clarification: Some expense claims may be returned to the concerned area manager or employee for additional clarification.

    expense denied locked icon Denied and Locked: Expenses denied by Accounts are considered final and locked. The area manager then cannot modify the approval status.

In the above workflow, all concerned persons, such as the employee who entered the claim, the area manager, or other persons with supervisory roles and permissions, may track the progress of each claim through the entire workflow. A stipulated time frame can be set within which claims are to be processed through the system, failing which alerts are generated and the defaulting claims are escalated to top management.

Finally, the expense information is tagged against other information in the workflow system, such as:

  • Employee who incurred the expense
  • Location / Division where the employee was located when the expense was incurred
  • Expense Account Head
  • Customer or prospect that was served
  • Sales opportunity, project, or order against which the expense was incurred
  • Travel, customer visit or other event that resulted in the expense claim

Due to the fact that each claim has all this information tagged to it, a detailed analysis can be provided that tracks the levels of expenditure by various above fields.

We shall soon post sample screen shots, analytical reports and graphs that the system generates.

We would like feedback and suggestions regarding any additional features that we could incorporate that may make the system more useful in different usage scenarios.

Posted in Affordable Technology, Agile Development, Evolving Enterprises, Laboratory Information Management, Sales Activity Management, Workflow Management | Leave a comment

Implementing Sales Management – Where to Start?

By Administrator | Published: March 12, 2006

We recently got an enquiry from Manoj, a small business owner based in Bangalore. He runs a successful business that provides networking solutions, as well as another firm that provides contractual staff to large corporates. He wanted to know where and how he should start implementing ERP in his organization. “Can you ask me some questions that will get me started?”.

Small businesses owners like Manoj are seeking solutions that will help them grow and join the surge in the Indian economy. And most of them assume that the solution to their scaling up needs is the one-size-fits-all ERP solution. After all, do we not keep reading about how every large manufacturing company in India has spent millions on large scale ERP implementations? If it seems to work for them, maybe it should work for us too.

As technology providers, we know that “One size does not fit all”, as Andy Hayler likes to point out. But as a small business owner, what issues does one have to consider?

Here is the discussion we had with Manoj:

  1. Firstly, let’s begin by looking at what your existing pain points are. What fires do we need to douse? Where are we the most inefficient? What issues are waiting to become emergencies?
  2. What do we want to achieve in the next 3 months, next 6 months, etc.? How fast do we want to grow in size? How many people? How many locations are these people spread across? What is the level of computer-friendliness do the people have at different levels?
  3. Next, we look at the information base. As we grow in size, the main point of failure is lack of information availability. When we are a small team, its easy to keep in touch with every detail. As we grow in size, we lose touch with small details. The first issue to tackle is to plug the leaks of information flow from the bottom to the top. Now that’s not as easy as it sounds. Problem is, the information needs to be captured where and when it is being generated, in a format that can be re-used and analyzed. That means, you need:
    a. The infrastructure and systems to capture information at every point in the extended enterprise
    b. People who actually bother to enter the information
    Out of the above two, the latter issue is far far more difficult to achieve, especially with the kind of business processes Indian companies follow – ie, no processes – which is great when you’re small, but its un-scalable.

    So, we need to find a path of least resistance in creating the system to capture the information. This means finding a good balance between information value and ease of use. Creating a monster of a system makes it extremely difficult to implement. Its far healthier to do it stage-wise, in a way that we can change the plan as we go ahead, based on where we find least resistance and maximum value.

  4. Where do we start? Obviously, information that is directly related to business transactions is of paramount importance, without which the business would not run. So I assume that the basic accounting system must be in place. But accounting is an extremely inward perspective of the business. The main drivers of a service-oriented business is customer responsiveness. How fast, and how efficiently are we able to respond to a customer’s need and find and deliver a solution that fits . Unless you have some other pain points that need immediate attention, the area to look into is the process of capturing customer information and the process of servicing and retaining customers by keeping information about them up-to-date and accessible at any time.

So what do you think about this approach? We would like to hear…

Posted in Affordable Technology, Evolving Enterprises, Sales Activity Management, Workflow Management | Leave a comment

Business Scalability

By Administrator | Published: March 5, 2006

Nicholas Carr had an interesting post on Scale and Scalability, where he points out the difference between the two similar sounding terms

It used to be you’d beat your competitors by achieving greater scale in your operations, enabling you to spread your costs over more products and thus push down the cost of producing each product. Scale was tangible, a manifestation of plant and equipment and other real assets. Today, you strive to beat your competitors by creating an idea or a model that can scale without constraint, expanding easily and flexibly to handle ever more business. Scalability is intangible.

So scalability is achieved as a net result of the entire business process being scalable, instead of merely increasing “production capacity” or efficient “resource planning”. As Nicholas points out, this scalability is easier to achieve in a pure technology business like Google, where building a good business is not all that different from building a good data-processing system. But in other industries that involve human actions and physical products, achieving this kind of scalability is not that straight-forward. The ability of a business to achieve scalability is directly proportional to its ability to create a standardized workflow that can then be scaled up to deliver higher throughput.

Scale and scalability both have strengths and weaknesses as business strategies. We know the strengths and weaknesses of scale pretty well by now. We’re only beginning to understand those of scalability.

It is our endeavour to try and unravel precisely this mystery for our clients. Its an interesting adventure!

Posted in Evolving Enterprises, Workflow Management | Leave a comment