Many websites have trouble engaging each of their specific audiences in an effective way.  They often will simply try to market to everyone at once rather than crafting valuable, relevant content for each target audience. In trying to market to everyone, B2B marketers may be setting themselves up for failure. 

Website content segmentation is the practice of presenting your online content in a clear and concise manner specific to each of your website visitors.  A few of the basic principles of content segmentation are based on design, messaging, and presentation of content. It can help improve your engagement, better differentiate your brand from competitors, and improve your content marketing effectiveness. 

If improving your website segmentation is something you have yet to master, read on for tips to get you started.

1. Encourage visitors to self-select

Websites can be set up with segmentation in mind by role, problem, or industry.  Break through the clutter and create the immediate ability for your visitor to choose the content that applies to them. And place the options on your homepage. 

In this example from Randa Solutions, one click on the homepage lets teachers, administrators, and parents drill down into the details about how Randa’s educational data management can help each of them.

2. Speak directly to your target audience

Once visitors click through on your site, you have the opportunity to deliver targeted messages and valuable content. Share videos that speak to your buyer personas, create blog posts, write articles that key into specific pain points, or compile case studies that share customer success stories and testimonials. 

In this example from AppSense (a provider of user virtualization solutions), web visitors are encouraged to self-select their role — user, IT manager, or executive.  Each landing page then shares features, quotes, and case studies on persona-specific wants and needs, testimonials from related clients, and more — all tailored to that persona. By speaking directly to the audience, AppSense is using website content segmentation to ensure that all visitors will see the most relevant content for them. 

3. Keep segment-specific pages clean

While you may feel compelled to share ALL of your relevant content with your specific audience as soon as they click through, there’s a good reason why you should resist: a simple user experience is a satisfying user experience.

It is important to have a simple design to your website so that your visitors do not feel overwhelmed or bombarded with information all at once. Consider sharing your best content first, and include links to further reading so that your audience can decide what to read or view next.

For example, one of your main goals for the segment-specific pages should be to focus on sharing your value proposition, or reason why your visitors should buy from you. This can be simply done by incorporating your value proposition into the copy on the page.

The example below from DecisionLens shows a simply and prominently laid out drop-down menu that helps to keep site visits focused. The highlighted copy in the segment-specific page (below) shows the easy-to-understand value proposition. 

4.  Tailor your content, and provide diversity

Just as different industries and personas have different pain points or are looking for different product features, not all customers evaluate solutions in the same manner.  Marketers can overcome this by creating a variety of content types (such as quotes, infographics, or newsletters) to ensure their brand can engage properly with their target audience members, no matter how they prefer to receive and digest information.

Consider incorporating website content segmentation to help your visitors find the right type of information when they want it by offering these different types of content to your audience on your segment-specific pages. 

In this example from Janrain, the use of case studies and product feature descriptions gives visitors a deep view into specific segments. 

(For a great list of content types mapped to stages of the buying process, take a look at Eloqua’s Content Grid.)

5. Use interactive content

Consider developing an interactive tool such as HubSpot’s Grader suite, a blog, social media profiles, or webinars to demonstrate your thought leadership and keep your audience coming back for more.  These types of content are inherently engaging because your visitors are encouraged to participate, engage, comment, or interact in some form or another. 

The example below, from JDA (a supply chain management software provider) shows a useful self-assessment that gives users a quick test to benchmark their company against the best in the industry. 

Don’t let your content efforts go to waste on the wrong audience. To learn more about website content segmentation, you can watch this video from OpenView Labs and read our report on Website Content Segmentation.

Content is King, Design is Queen: How to Keep the King and the Queen in the Whole Game

Do you want to incorporate great design into the process but you’re not quite sure how to make it happen? Pam Didner walks you through the process she uses.

The ABCs of Working with a Graphic Designer (for the First Time)

Your designer is one of your best allies, and you want to have the best relationship possible. In this interview with Eduardo Barrios, Thomas Clifford helps you understand what you need to know.

Thinking Outside the Bento Box to Improve Content Design

Clare McDermott discusses what modular content is and why it’s so important.

The Story Behind Intel’s Museum of Me: How to Work with an International Agency on Creative

Pam Didner shares how she and her team at Intel developed the very popular — and creative — Museum of Me campaign.

A Content Marketing Autopsy of a Popular Infographic

One of the best ways to marry great content and design is with the increasingly popular infographic. In this post, Joe Chernov breaks down a well-done infographic and shares ideas on what could make it better.

Anything else you want to add? Share your ideas in the comments. And from all of us at CMI, Happy New Year!

This may feel overwhelming, lead to fatigue, and exhaust you to the point of not trying.

Don’t give up yet. There are five simple rules you can follow to ensure your messages will be the ones that do get through. Most of them concern something so imperceptible that we don’t even think about it: information design.

Information design, in this case, is about how the human eyes perceive the written word. Depending on how you arrange text on the page, your reader’s brain will make a millisecond decision about whether to keep reading.

Here are five things to make sure your messages survive in the whirlwind of marketing that swirls around us all:

1. Lead with verbs, not nouns

Which message are you more likely to read?

• The all-new Volkswagen Passat, 2012 Motor Trend Car of the Year.  - OR -
• Drive Motor Trend’s Car of the Year, the all-new Volkswagen Passat.

We respond to verbs more than nouns because verbs mean doing something. And it’s usually something we like doing.

2. Cut your copy significantly, and watch your sentence length

Most clients are going to ask you to write more, not less. I’ve led user experience testing, and I can tell you most people don’t read. They skim, and if they find content they want, then they will read. Even then, they can only take in so much.

Consider the following statistic, presented in three different ways:

• Once there are more than 14 words in a sentence, readers’ comprehension drops below 90 percent. (There are 15 words in that sentence).
• If you use more than 14 words in a sentence, your reader’s comprehension drops. (14 words).
• Don’t use more than 14 words in a sentence: readers’ comprehension will drop. (13 words)

You tell me which sentence was easier for you to read and comprehend.

3. Use no more than 1-2 sentences per paragraph

When the human eye skims over a block of text, the brain is quickly tallying a cost-benefit analysis. “Should I bother reading? Will I learn anything new? Is this more important than that new episode of “Modern Family”?

When you create blocks of text, you create blockades to your readers’ feeling comfortable with plowing ahead. Content marketing, for the most part, is supposed to be fun. Don’t make it feel like reading a college textbook.

4. Read your copy out loud

Reading out loud gives you a different perspective on your writing, and allows you to hear your voice in the head of your reader. Ask yourself, “Would I want to read this?” If not, then you probably need to cut somewhere.

5. Check that you have all the elements in the “Formula for Great Content”

Great content always has the following three elements. Ask yourself if your content is:

• Concise
• Informative
• Attractive

If you can check off all three boxes, you’ve been successful.

What readability standards do you follow when creating content and designing information?

Special thanks to Ann Wylie of Wylie Communications, who taught me many of these statistics.

As we know, 2011 is best characterized by the recovery that never came. The Greek crises and European woes, U.S. debt downgrades, and budget conflicts all conspired to put a damper on the year and set a pessimistic stage for 2012.

B2B salespeople and marketers seeking better times for 2012 are facing more of the same with buyers forced to “do more with less” for yet another year. They also are facing more fiscal scrutiny from executives — a condition that has been defined as Frugalnomics. Achieving success in 2012 will require recognition of the continued malaise, and implementing new content marketing strategies and tactics to help buyers navigate tough budget waters and achieve goals despite the challenged economy.

The following are our predictions of how economic pressures will define 2012, and four tangible ways you can overcome some of the challenges with content marketing:

Challenge #1: Budget uncertainty grows

There are some key findings that, according to a survey of B2B purchase decision makers from Demand Creation Specialists (DCS), are important for you to understand:

• Only one in every four dollars for new project budgets are set in stone at the beginning of the year, leaving much of the budget up for grabs for the right business projects.
• The discretionary budget allocations this year will be a substantially higher percentage of new project spending than in years past, indicating that buyers are in a wait-and-see mode about the economy and are planning to allocate as little as possible up-front. Over 50 percent of the new project budget will be allocated for projects that are identified, prioritized, and justified based on needs, either leveraging unallocated budgets or taking budget from projects that have less value or a lower priority.

Advice: Be provocative. Because much of new project budgets will remain up for grabs in the new year, there is a unique opportunity for sales and marketing to consultatively and proactively convince a buyer that:

• A need for your solution exists, and it should be a priority
• If the need is solved, it could return tangible and significant financial and competitive rewards
• The proposed solution is viable and can deliver significant ROI and fast payback.

Marketers need to proactively convince buyers that maintaining the status quo is not an effective option, and that there is a cost for doing nothing. With more of the budget being allocated on an ongoing basis in 2012, a provocative sales and marketing approach can help the customer identify significant opportunities while resulting in more sales opportunities and incremental revenue throughout the year. This can be accomplished in two ways.

Provide content that helps buyers prioritize needs that the solution addresses. In some instances, the buyer might not even be aware of the issue and severity, while in others, they know of the pain point, but don’t realize what a priority solving it should be. Content can be developed to illuminate the opportunities and raise the priority of assisting buyers in understanding and prioritizing opportunities especially in the following areas:

1. Provocative research can be used to show buyers the facts and figures behind a particular opportunity, which helps prove that the issue exists, that it is costly and important to fix, and that solving it can yield substantial and tangible business benefits. This can be best delivered via white papers, infographics, and eBooks.
2. Diagnostic assessments can be applied to survey buyers about their current situations, scoring them against best practices and their peers to illuminate specific trouble spots, raise urgency via benchmark comparisons, and prioritize specific solutions to resolve the most significant of any identified issues;
3. Case studies can help demonstrate how similar companies identified the issues they are experiencing and successfully addressed the issues to yield bottom-line impacts.

Provide content and tools to help buyers quantify the value of your solution and justify the investment, especially proving higher return on investment (ROI) and quick payback compared to other projects. Content that helps buyers quantify solution value could include interactive benefit estimators and ROI calculators, ROI white papers, and justification-focused case studies.

Challenge #2: Discount demands increase

Price dominates the decision-making process for the vast majority of B2B buyers — some 64 percent,  according to a TricomB2B/ University of Dayton survey: The Considered Purchase Decision. This means that discount providers will have an inherent advantage. The majority of B2B providers is not discount-focused and will have to adjust sales and marketing strategies to defend higher purchase prices.

Advice: Elevate the discussion beyond price. In a price-focused environment, discounts will gain attention and can often be enticing to frugal buyers; however, most of us need to move beyond the “discount dance”.

The good news is that certain buyer groups, such as senior executives, are more likely to consider:

• How much it costs to own the asset or service over multiple years vs. just initial purchase price
• The incremental value certain solutions might deliver over lower-cost alternatives.

To end the discount dance, content marketers need to create content that helps buyers:

• Quantify and prove lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over the useful life of the asset/ service
• Quantify the incremental business benefits their solution delivers (compared with the competition) by looking at the total value of ownership and ROI, not just cost differences.

This content can be delivered via TCO comparison calculators, TCO-focused white papers, eBooks, infographics, webinars, and case studies to compare and contrast competitive alternatives/ solutions on a TCO/ value basis.

You can also arm your sales force with TCO/ value-focused tools and content to effectively connect and engage upwards within accounts, enabling them to proactively develop comparison reports and present competitive alternatives/ solutions on a TCO/ value basis. To move discussions beyond price, analysis workshops are extremely effective, using TCO comparison tools with the customer to compare and contrast different competitive solution options head-to-head to understand the lifecycle cost differences, incremental values of different options, and advantages of each alternative.

Challenge #3: More skepticism

Buyers are taking more time to make each decision (48 percent) and are using a wider variety of sources to help them make a decision (36 percent) compared to just 12 months ago, according to DCS’s buyer surveys.

While vendor content is one of the key sources of content being used in the decision making process, buyers are three times more likely to trust content from peers and industry analysts

Advice: It’s a matter of trust. Several different collaborative content strategies are needed to help connect and engage today’s more empowered buyer, including:

• Leveraging content developed/ contributed by industry pundits and research analysts — such as research white papers, infographics, eBooks, webcasts, videos, diagnostic assessments, benefit estimators, ROI calculators, and TCO comparison tools. This is especially effective when using a third party to validate opportunity, savings, cost, and value claims
• Developing and delivering peer case studies (especially those that use video and audio testimonials) to help buyers understand how others have solved priority opportunities using proposed solutions — particularly ways in which other customers have achieved savings, drove business benefits, or realized other values
• Adding social sharing capabilities to all marketing collateral, making it easy for buyers to share, comment, discuss, and even contribute to the content
• Establishing and cultivating advocate communities and user groups to help buyers get peer and influencer advice on how the proposed solution can solve their problems and help them realize favorable outcomes
• Providing “freemium” offers, demos, and live trials. Today’s buyers are used to being able to try before they buy in their personal purchases and now expect similar test drives on their B2B solution purchases.

Challenge #4: More overload

Forced to do more with less, buyers are consumed with keeping the lights on, which give them less time to research new opportunities and solutions. At the same time, according to research by the Vanella Group, buyers are more overloaded than ever, receiving upwards of 15 sales calls per day and 200 marketing related emails from solution providers each week. With buyers adding social media participation to the mix, the overload will only get worse, making it harder for buyers to keep up, and more difficult for marketers to get heard above the noise.

Buyers need relevant content more than ever to help more quickly research opportunities, select and justify solutions, and assure they are getting best value possible; however, they are lost in an ocean of available resources, and inundated with irrelevant content and offers.

Advice: Service the “short attention span theater” set. Buyers’ time is precious, and it is a currency. For the buyer’s time, are you providing a value added connection and engagement? Here are some content marketing techniques to help support this goal and address buyer overload and short attention spans:

• Use nurturing techniques to understand the buyer’s role and stage in the decision making process, and providing relevant emails and content at the right time to help facilitate the purchase decision
• Keep content as short as possible
• Leverage content designed to deliver more information more quickly, such as eBooks
• Make content like white papers more personalized via intelligent interactivity — using the buyer’s profile to customize the content, making it relevant to their role in the decision making process, stage in the process, pain points, industry, size, and location
• Enable sales with content that help them add value and be more collaborative with customers by giving them information that they can’t find for themselves online, such as intelligent diagnostic, roadmap/ sizing, and justification tools.

The bottom line

The much-sought economic relief in 2011 never arrived, setting the stage for a budget constrained, frugal 2012. Frugalnomics is in full effect with buyers more uncertain about their budgets, more price-focused, skeptical of vendor claims, and seriously overloaded.

Successful sales and marketing groups recognize the continued buyer’s woes.  Implementing new and improved content marketing strategies to help facilitate buyer decision-making and help buyers overcome these challenges.  These savvy organizations will purposely address the frugal buyer of 2012 by leveraging content to be more provocative, reducing discounting, overcoming skepticism and breaking through the noise to achieve better connections, engagements and sales performance despite the challenges.

Impossible, right?

Now imagine describing not only what an infographic is but also what makes a good one. Because it’s uniquely difficult to do this in the abstract, examples are key. So let’s channel our inner Jack Klugman (Quincy, anyone?) and perform an autopsy on a recent infographic, dissecting it to see what worked, what could have been improved, and what features might have made it truly epic.

For this exercise, let’s examine “The 50 Richest People on Earth,” a popular infographic published by CreditLoan this past summer.

The topic

Killer. Its parameters are clear (50 people); it’s enticing (they are worth how much?); and it’s relevant to the publisher’s business of wealth and credit management. Moreover, it’s not a one-off piece of content. A few months earlier, the brand published another provocative infographic titled, “Is Walking Away From Your Mortgage OK?” The lesson here is that serializing content can contribute to scale and continuity.

The visual

The image itself it refreshingly simple. Too many infographics seem to be complex for the sake of complexity. Not this one. The 50 Richest People on Earth overlays the names and net worth on top of a world map. Doesn’t get more straightforward than that.

But then the designer pulled up a bit short. The infographic does little to go beyond the source data (an article in Forbes). In many ways, it doesn’t contain anything that the original article lacks. It doesn’t add to, challenge, remix or offer commentary on the content in Forbes’ list. It simply overlays the names onto a map. Great infographics are faithful to the data while providing a relevant perspective. This visual is, in many ways, too faithful to the data and too literal a translation for the medium.

The design also misses the opportunity to engage readers with more compelling visuals. Data in the infographic is visualized in three different ways:

• A circle surrounds each ranking and the line weight corresponds to placement. The higher the rank the thicker the line. Initially, this seemed superfluous but then I realized the utility: It makes it easier to find the top earners with a quick eye scan. Since this is reasonably useful, it’s a nice touch.
• Up/down arrows depict whether the individual’s wealth is static, rising, or falling. This is a quality element that adds a dynamic layer to the information.
• A bar shows how close each mogul is to a $100 billion net worth. This visual element is useless. For one, the wealthiest person on the map (Bill Gates) is “only” worth $40 billion, so why should the bar extend all the way to $100 billion? That’s $60 billion in “dead space.” Further, 43 of the 50 names are clustered between $9 billion and $20 billion, making fine gradations in the bar difficult to detect at a glance. Lastly, the mogul’s precise net worth is listed alongside the bar, making each of these items redundant in the context of the other one.

What could CreditLoan have done differently to make the quality of the visualization consistent with the quality and relevance of the topic? Here are some ideas:

• Iconography: Rather than writing the name of each billionaire’s industry, the creator could have used iconography to have some fun with sector identification. (A syringe, for example, could represent “Pharmaceuticals”.)
• Illustration: Since the true stars of the infographic are the leaders themselves, CreditLoan could have created a caricature of each person. (Imagine if one of the featured billionaires happened to love his illustration? What would that endorsement have done to the spread of the visual?)
• Context: Data is far more interesting in context than it is as an absolute. Since each magnate is already mapped to a particular geography, why not compare the individual’s worth relative to the median income for families in his or her home country? That addition would have contextualized the data for the audience, providing the type of nuance that is essential for remarkable content
• Interactivity: Each capsule could have linked to the corresponding billionaire’s Wikipedia entry. This step is neither labor- nor cost-intensive, yet it would have gone a long way toward engaging the viewer more deeply.

Data

CreditLoan deserves, well, credit, for selecting a reliable data source: Forbes. Nobody in publishing does lists better than Forbes. That said, I cross-referenced this ranking against Forbes’ own “Richest People on the Planet” list and was surprised to find that the order and net worth numbers varied greatly. The lifeblood of an infographic is data reliability, and this particular visual leaves me questioning its accuracy. Linking the citation to the source article would be a swift and easy fix so no one would question where they are getting their data (and it would protect them should their data be challenged).

Taking this a step further, even though the creator selected a trustworthy source, infographics tend to benefit from multiple data sets.  As information designer Edward Tufte wrote in Beautiful Evidence, “Too often diagrams rely solely on one type of data or stay at one level of analysis.”

It also would have helped to have included a brief paragraph that characterizes their definition of “richest” (Total net worth? Liquid assets?).

As a side note, it’s worth noting that comments are closed in the blog post that hosts the file. Allowing comments is essential because it permits viewers to ask questions (such as the source of the data) and to suggest areas for improvement (so they might be able to reimagine how they depict the information for the next year’s version).

What do you think of the infographic? What, if anything, would you prescribe to improve it?

One answer: It’s not only what you deliver (content) but also  how you deliver it (creative). Even when you have solid product messaging and a good story line, how you deliver your content can make the difference between standing out among the message flood or getting lost in it.

The problem is that creative often happens after a team has completed the marketing strategy and product messaging, which leaves little time for creative development. So how do we keep focused on creative throughout the whole process of product development and launching?

Content and creative are part of the marketing strategy

Think of it this way: Compelling content is king, and creative development is queen, and the royal couple requires cultivation and time.

To make sure your team has enough time, explore content and creative development early in the strategy development phase.  While you need to begin with messaging, you don’t need to wait until it’s finalized to begin the creative process.

While I must adjust my approach as the Global Integrated Campaign manager at Intel based on the specifics of a campaign, here are the general steps I follow:

1. Write a preliminary one-page brief about halfway through the strategy development process. The brief should cover sales and marketing objectives, audience, product value prop and communications strategy.

2. Identify one key take-away about your product to seed the creative process. Ask yourself, “If you have 10 words to say about your product, what would they be?”

3. Brief the creative team and content creators, assuring they understand the messaging.

4. Jointly develop content and creative strategy between the creative and content creators.

5. Develop 3-5 creative recommendations.

6. Ensure content strategy and creative recommendations still align with the spirit of the final marketing strategy.

7. If budget allows, conduct focus groups or other research to confirm the effectiveness of creative and accompanying content.  If not, select the creative and content recommendation with the target audience in mind.

8. Incorporate content strategy and creative recommendations as part of overall marketing strategy.

It’s very challenging to incorporate content and creative in the early process of  marketing strategy development.  With so many moving pieces, sometimes the final marketing strategy changes so much from my preliminary briefing that I scrap the original creative and start over from scratch.  I learn to be nimble and flexible, and I modify the creative and content as the strategy develops.  But I believe that’s a risk well worth taking.

With the power couple of King Content and Queen Creative, you double your chances of developing content that will stand out like a brilliant crown jewel.

Do you have any suggestions for incorporating creative into your content marketing? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Let’s say you’re repurposing your existing articles into an e-book. And let’s also say you’re thinking of having a custom graphic design. Some obvious questions pop up:

• Will a graphic designer guide you through the unfamiliar world of design?
• At what point in the content development process should you talk to the designer?
• How can you tell if you and your designer are a good match before you work together?

To answer these questions and more, I sat down with graphic designer Eduardo Barrios of Barrios Advertising.

Our conversation explored several areas that will increase your awareness about how to work with a graphic designer for the first time. Join me in this enlightening conversation.

Create a framework for us, Eduardo: What is the first thing writers and content marketers need to know about graphic designers?

Well, first of all, we’re both creative partners. There’s not really a separation—we just do different things. In other words, when you’re communicating with content, you have a huge palette from which to draw, but it’s the copywriter’s main objective to be as efficient as possible with the language to get the idea across. Well, it’s the same thing with a graphic designer.

A graphic designer would want to know from their copy partner:

• What is the main objective that you’re trying to get across?
• What is the main point of the article or the content piece, and how do you—the copywriter—envision the kinds of graphics you’d like to see?

So it’s a working relationship. It’s about starting out with concepts, and then it’s a matter of getting to a point where the communication is delivered efficiently and effectively.

When does the emotional “feel” or “flavor” of the content come into play?

First, look at the message. What kind of flavor does it have? Does it have a humorous touch to it? Is it more introspective and serious? There are those kinds of sub-levels of concept and execution that you can discuss with a designer. You could even get down into the nitty-gritty of color and typography because each color has its own mood. And the typography—there’s so many different fonts out there. A designer will help you limit your universe because there are some classic font faces and some font faces now that can be used on digital format that are easier to read. So there are some practicalities in this also.

When is the best time to talk to a graphic designer?

Well, if you have your content firmed up or you’ve been working on a committee, it’s not likely you’re going to change the concepts. There are certain mandates you’re working with, so it’s best to wait to bring in a designer until those decisions are settled and you have a clear direction. If you think that the designer may solve the internal problem by guessing what you want, that probably won’t work too well.

However, if you have a clear direction—your team is in agreement on what the copy or content should say and do—then it’s probably the right time to bring in a designer. Start by summarizing what your content is about and laying down your expectations. A large part of what the designer will want to know is who the audience is. That will inform the type of design that the designer presents to you, and there could be a couple of different options that the designer might explore depending on what tone you discuss.

But if you’re a sole proprietor or writer, you may want to bring them in for a brainstorming session prior to creating the content if you’re having trouble getting your fix on what you should be talking about.

What are two common myths many people have about graphic designers?

1) A big myth is that graphic designers don’t read; they just design pretty pictures, which is not the case. Graphic designers are very interested in content. It’s not just pretty pictures or fine art for its own sake. This is commercial art, and so it’s about selling ideas and making money.

2) The second myth is that graphic designers are not interested in business. In other words, graphic design is not about winning awards—it’s about helping you sell your product. So designers want to know about your product, your content, and what you’re selling. They’ll probably ask questions about what other content you have published, what your brand is, and what your readers are looking for. The answers will enable  graphic designers to produce effective, branded, and relevant designs for you.

What if someone doesn’t have a clue what the design should look like?

Trust your designer. Hang out with him and just say, “I don’t know anything about color.” The good graphic designers will stay with you and help educate you.

For example, there’s a great color resource—Pantone.com. The Pantone system is a color-matching system used worldwide.  You can go on this website  and find all kinds of interesting information about color and the science of color. I’ll often direct my clients to the Pantone color website  and invite them to ask questions. But I will generally teach them about the warmth of a color, the coolness of a color, and how that translates into communication for their readers, and how it connects with the concept that they’re trying to get across to readers. It’s the same for typography or even design principles, for that matter.

Sometimes, I’ll just get out a pad of paper and my trusty number two pencil and will just sketch and say, “See, here’s a composition that’s balanced, and here’s one that isn’t.”

And then there are things like white space. Generally, I think people are tempted to say and show more than is necessary. What happens is the message becomes muddy and difficult to comprehend; there’s so much to take in at one time. So we just educate in a gentle way about what can be done and what shouldn’t be done for a design to be efficient and clear.

How can someone start learning the basics of design on their own?

If you don’t know what the design should look like, start by observing the things you see around you that you like. You could find inspiration to show a designer; but, just like copywriters, designers won’t plagiarize.

And inspiration comes in all forms. You could find something on the Internet, you could read a book or see a book jacket cover, a printed piece, go to Barnes and Noble, or you could be at a baseball game, and the way a little kid swings the bat creates an image in your mind. Just write it down and be aware that inspiration is everywhere.

You can bring these ideas to your designer who will immediately understand what you’re sayingand showing. He’ll see patterns and understand the tone you’re trying to set. You also want to discuss designs you don’t like; sometimes it’s helpful to discuss this first.

Why would someone spend money on a custom-designed e-book cover, for instance, when there are so many inexpensive ways to create a cover?

It’s a great question. Your content isn’t generic, and it would be a disservice to your project to get something free online instead of really customizing your graphic design to match your content. You want it to be packaged in a unique and customized way.

At the end of the day, you’ll feel good about knowing that the graphic design is completely yours. You won’t be seeing the design used by some other content provider who downloaded a stock design from the Internet.

Let’s say a project is already finished. Is it too late to work with a graphic designer?

It’s never too late to call in a designer, but here’s my caution. Some people will wrap up their writing and have strong feelings about what they want for design, but they may not communicate that specifically or explicitly. So a designer may go off developing ideas that don’t track with your vision, which will create undue stress and misunderstanding. Designers are good, but they are not mind readers.

So if you’ve written something and you have a very clear vision of what you want, let the designer know that this is what you would like. If you don’t know, express that too. After all, too much design development time may yield design charges that neither you nor the designer expected. Be very clear about how you initiate the project with a designer.

Thank you, Eduardo, for sharing your time and insights about the world of graphic design. Your insights will definitely help people who have never worked with a graphic designer before.

Summary

• Graphic designers are creative partners in your communications process.
• If you don’t know much about design, your designer will help educate you about your choices.
• Content is just as important as design.
• Graphic designers understand business; they want to help you sell your product or service.
• Customizing the graphic design to match your content ensures your brand will be unique and stand out.

Over to You
What other tips can you share with those who have never worked with a graphic designer?

What questions do you have about working with graphic designers for the first time? (Hopefully our readers can pitch in with their answers!)

• Producing engaging content (36%)
• Producing enough content (21%)
• Having sufficient budget to create content (20%).

There is a simple way to address all three challenges at once: Planned obsolescence.

The concept of planned obsolescence – purposefully designing a product with end-of-life in mind – permeates product engineering across all sectors. Simply put, ensuring a product eventually fails or goes out of style is a sure-fire way to induce people to buy more products.

My question to marketers is this: Do you build obsolescence into your content? If not, you should. We did, and here’s how it worked.

Last June, Eloqua and JESS3 collaborated to produce the industry’s first content marketing infographic, called The Content Grid, which was billed as “a model for content marketing.”

We knew the graphic was interesting visually, and we also knew it could be used by marketers. But deep down we felt that something was “off,” but we couldn’t quite put our finger on what was wrong. We could have sat in the drawing room until it was “perfect” (translation: indefinitely), but we didn’t. Instead we published the content as-is and deliberately planned to revisit it one year later.

During that time, we solicited feedback (in blog comments, on Twitter, from colleagues, even from the audience at speaking engagements) and preserved all comments in a spreadsheet. By provoking widespread feedback (positive and negative), we were deliberately rendering obsolete the infographic we had worked so hard to develop.

As we prepared to design The Content Grid v2, we began by reviewing all of the feedback we received, paying particular attention to criticism. While most observers found the visual compelling and useful, some called it confusing and even “scary.” Others felt certain types of content were under-represented.  A couple of folks wanted metrics. One very sage observer asked why the buyer’s perspective missing. Bingo!

This input guided our vision for v2. The JESS3 strategists and I hammered out the vision and framework, and then their superstar designers executed it. (For more information on the making of the Content Grid v2, check out the Forbes blog post by JESS3 co-founder and CEO Jesse Thomas.)

As of this writing, the new infographic has been live for 24 hours. In that short time, dozens of bloggers have written about the new Grid; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tweets have been posted; but most important of all, nearly all of the critics of the original version have applauded v2.

How did this technique help us overcome the top three challenges vexing content marketers?

1. By planning obsolescence from the start, we were able to create much more engaging content for Eloqua. We were able to engage our audience when we published v1, and then re-engage them in a meaningful way when the follow-up hit the Web.
2. We created more content by turning a single concept into two popular infographics.
3. We reduced our budget because we didn’t have to invest as much time or resources in coming up with a new idea for an infographic. We simply reimagined the original. And, in many cases, the ability to derive maximum value from a single concept is what content marketing success ultimately comes down to.

Takeaway: Don’t wait to publish content until you think it’s perfect. Rather, put your best foot forward, solicit feedback and update your content based on what you have learned. By taking this approach, you’re engaging your audience, continually producing content and saving budget as you’re not doing everything from scratch.

Want to learn more about Eloqua’s content marketing strategy? You can read about how they created their killer content marketing program in only a few months with this detailed case study.

The bento box is a great visual metaphor for the role of information design in content marketing. Information design is the art of presenting content on the page (or screen) in a way that makes it easier for your readers to understand and remember your message. Just like the bento box, a well-organized article or report should include highly visual modular elements that separate sections of your work and embellish key points.

The lesson hit home for me personally when Chief Content Officer (CCO) magazine launched in January. A few bloggers pointed out (thank you) that our articles were too long and linear. Readers wanted to be entertained both in word as well as story format.  The CCO team gathered and gave me marching orders:

• Take each feature article and break it into pieces
• Add sidebars and pull-quotes
• Add skimming elements
• Make it more visual and less daunting to read.

Some people refer to this strategy as creating modular content. (‘Modular’ makes me think of boxy-modern, orange furniture. I would rather visualize pieces of sushi snuggled together.) In CCO magazine next month, we are adopting the bento box model of content marketing. Rather than having one 1,200-word feature article, we are running articles half as long, supplemented with short-form sidebars and callouts.

Why is modular content so important?

We are an impatient bunch
Particularly in the context of business content, we are reckless skimmers, racing through web pages and PDFs to find useful nuggets of information.

Content marketers are often writers by profession, and so we are understandably focused on delivering smartly-written, high-value content, forgetting to consider visual presentation. Visual tools like section headers, callouts, sidebars and infographics help your impatient readers decide whether they want to read more and help them arrive at the sections they are most interested in browsing.

Some of us remember information visually rather than in word
That’s why infographics play such a crucial role in relaying complex information. I consider McKinsey to be an infographic powerhouse. Other companies manage to create infographics that are more beautiful or intellectually challenging, but the designers at McKinsey are experts in simple, educational graphics.

Sidebars add depth without weighting down the main article
Perhaps you have a case study or an expert interview you would like to include, but you worry that your article is already too long. Sidebars allow you to add depth and nuance while keeping your main article tight and focused.

Make it Modular

Here’s a quick information design checklist to walk through during your next content marketing assignment (sidebar, baby!):

• Consider a quick-hitting summary presented up front that allows readers to decide whether they should read on (could be included as a secondary title, a short executive summary, or a sidebar). PricewaterhouseCooper’s 10 Minutes series does this well.
• Make it modular with sidebars. Are there sections of your article that could stand alone as a sidebar? Sidebars shorten your main article, pull out key information visually and allow you to expand on more complex ideas.
• Use section titles that allow your readers to skip sections or locate key sections, and use callouts to highlight key concepts or quotes.
• Use bold print (judiciously) to highlight key phrases or sentences. This is a tactic CMI uses in its daily blog.
• If your article contains complex information (could be quantitative, a multi-step process, a series of decisions, a cost-benefit analysis) consider an infographic to simplify the information.
• If your article is educational in nature, consider a half-page self-assessment that allows readers to test their knowledge or test their company’s level of sophistication on that topic. This is a great reinforcement tool.
• Make it easy to share with a checklist or synopsis. Pull it all together with a beautiful PDF checklist (don’t forget to brand it).  See Ahava Leibtag’s content checklist as a great model.

Our July issue of CCO magazine will truly be the first issue that embraces this new modular mantra. Also, keep a lookout for our new columnist, Bob Johnson from IDG Connect, who will be writing about dynamic design and content optimization for CCO magazine.

But, as writers and editors, we know if readers invest the time, they will walk away smarter, wiser and in some cases their lives will forever be transformed.

So, how do we make that happen? As other bloggers have discussed, the design of your content is critical. Whether you work with a designer or just want to incorporate some of their tricks into your copy, follow the tips below to create picture-perfect prose.

When to think about design

When you gather information to write an article, always think about the design elements that can enhance your article to bring the page to life and provide pertinent subsets of information—and great eye-catching entry points for each page.

If you have the luxury of working with a designer, your goal from the get-go is to make sure you provide him or her with as much information as you can from primary and extended sources.  With a designer, or on your own, think about using multiple text and visual elements to construct an appealing layout that will immediately attract and engage readers.

Types of graphic and visual design

Because most readers skim, they prefer attention-grabbing displays of statistics and other data, and these become entry points to the text. Think about what information will add value and enhance the layout such as:

• Sidebars
• Pull quotes
• Charts
• Graphs
• Short data points

Also consider visual elements such as:

• Photographs
• Art
• Illustrations
• Spot art
• Logos

Where to find graphic and visual elements

Direct from the source
Ask your sources for data from their own research or leads about research from other sources you can tap to construct charts or graphs.  For visual elements such as photographs, don’t just ask the person you interview for a head shot. Instead, ask for an interesting photo of himself, perhaps outdoors or in a setting that has an interesting backdrop.

Web sites
Always go to the web site of the person, company, organization, etc., that is the subject(s) of your story. There almost always is some valuable art or content elements you can glean for your article. Often, there will be a press release library, executive bios, white papers, case studies, profiles, data, photographs and other gems that you can mine to enhance editorial and design.

Secondary sources
Consider secondary sources that can supply you with additional sidebars and charts:

• Data from government or state agencies
• Industry analysts, think tanks and professional associations
• Authors and experts on the topic – often helpful for sidebar Q&As or brief interviews that complement the main story

New collaborations
The best way to create great visual elements is to collaborate. Send a draft to the art director so she can start to noodle about the key points of the article, and think about possible design treatments, art and illustrations that can marry well with the focus of the article.

Tip: Let the design team know in advance what possible sidebars, charts and other text elements you may be thinking about for the piece. This helps the layout process work better.

What other tips do you have to incorporate good design in your content? Share them below!