The 5 Items You Should Actually Capitalize

I know You might Think the Capitalization in this Sentence is a Little Off, but I can Tell you that I See sentences Just Like this every Single Day.

I believe the cause of most of this unnecessary capitalization stems from the fact that a lot of content creators use capitalization for emphasis when they are writing. But that doesn’t mean those content creators are correct. In fact, I would argue littering a piece with all that erroneous capitalization actually draws emphasis away from its overall message.

Before you capitalize a word, ask yourself why you are capitalizing it. Is the word at the beginning of a sentence? Then go right ahead and capitalize that word.

Is the word a proper noun? If it truly is, then go ahead and capitalize the word or words that make up that proper noun. If you are uncertain if something is a proper noun or not, you can conduct a Google search with the word or words both capitalized and not capitalized, and you’ll most likely quickly find your answer.

Is the word part of a headline or subhead? If so, and it is not one of the words that should not be capitalized in title case, then capitalize that word. A quick search on ‘title capitalization’ should yield some great tools that can help guide you with proper title case. 

And, of course, don’t forget to capitalize the pronoun ‘I’ and the days of the week, months, and holidays.

But if a word is none of these five things – at the beginning of a sentence, a proper noun, part of a headline or subhead, I, or one of the date-related items we capitalize – then it should not be capitalized. It really is that simple.

In addition to capitalizing for emphasis, another common error content creators make is to capitalize concepts like ‘business analysis’ or services like ‘report editing for enterprises’. Many of these same content creators will also capitalize industries like finance, education, and manufacturing, as well as business areas like human resources, sales, or marketing. But, none of these things need to be capitalized.

Before you capitalize any of these terms, consider whether they should really be capitalized, or if they are simply a company term, an industry term, or just a term you wish to call out in your content. Do not capitalize that word, or group of words, unless they fall under one of the five capitalization rules above.

Remember, you have tools like making words bold or italicized to create emphasis – or putting the words inside a sentence separator like this – but do not capitalize these words just to give them emphasis or to call out your company or industry terms.

Content creators should try hard not to break these capitalization rules. But, if you must break the rules and capitalize words that you really shouldn’t, at least capitalize consistently. If you capitalize Marketing as a concept or a department in the first sentence of a paragraph, then you should capitalize it as a concept or department in the fourth sentence of the paragraph, and when used throughout the rest of your article or document.

Content creators should also be mindful that if they capitalize subheads, table content, figure content, or any other items in an article or document, those items should be capitalized consistently. Special care should also be given to using consistent title case as well. Create a list of title case words that should be capitalized and apply it consistently as well. You can do a Google search to find these terms and also customize it for your particular style, company, and industry.

By simply applying capitalization consistently and only in the five necessary instances above, you can declutter your pieces and save your editorial staff hours of unnecessary de-capitalization.

Photo by Tom Eversley via ISO Republic 

Why You Need Industry Pages On Your Website

There are two schools of thought when it comes to whether or not you should have separate website pages for the industries your enterprise serves.

One camp believes if you list out the industries you serve on your website, visitors who do not see their industry will assume you do not do work in their field and move on.

The other camp feels if you do not provide industry-specific pages, you are missing out on an opportunity to provide more in-depth information to potential customers that is geared specifically to them.

I think both sides make a great point, but I tend to feel there is a solution that renders both arguments mute. I propose there is a way to list industries on your site, but still provide an impression that if a visitor’s industry is not listed out specifically, you’re still equipped to handle their business. This can easily be accomplished through a link to an “Other Industries” page at the bottom of your industry list.

Go ahead and create an industry page for up to seven main industries, but then list out some of the work you’ve done in other industries on your “Other Industries” page. If you craft your message properly, in just a few sentences, you can show visitors you are equipped to handle either their specific type of business, or better yet, any new type of business that comes along.

Let me walk you through the process. First, let’s address the industries you should actually list out on your site. Spend some time researching which industries drive the most revenue for your company and which industries you anticipate will drive revenue in the future. Once you have a clear picture of which industries they are, generate a list of the top seven. Then, proceed to develop copy, images and other content that speaks specifically to the people in those industries. If you have done your research properly, this should cover a significantly large portion of your existing and future customer base. This should all be pretty easy to accomplish and most likely something you’ve done numerous times before in some capacity.

Now, let’s create your “Other Industries” page. Don’t simply put up a list of additional industries beyond the seven you’ve already listed, but instead, provide a clear and concise message about your experience in other industries and let your audience know you are confident you can translate your success to their challenges, too. Just remember to keep your messaging customer-focused and speak to learning more about their specific industry’s challenges once you have discussed their specific needs.

If possible, try to get some quotes from customers who are not in your seven main industries that can demonstrate how you helped them overcome some very specific challenges. Be sure to feature those quotes on your “Other Industries” page. If you can obtain some quotes that speak to how quickly you learned customers’ industry-specific challenges, even better. Be sure to develop content based on your individual company’s products, services and experience.

By following these simple content creation steps, you can have a robust industry-focused section of your website that not only highlights the main industries your company serves, but also lets prospects whose enterprises do not fall into those industries know you are more than capable of helping them solve their specific challenges.

Image created using ButtonOptimizer.com

Does Your Marketing Content Focus On Your Customers?

Do you think pro golfers with a spare Sunday relax by hitting the links? Think a professional racecar driver can’t wait to jump in his car and head down the coast? Think a content creator spends some of his spare time reviewing mass quantities of other people’s content and collateral material? Guilty as charged.

But when you love what you do like I do, you tend to find yourself doing it in your spare time. These spare time activities have provided me with great insight into the vast amounts of marketing content out there, and as an avid researcher, I have discovered an epidemic plaguing the marketing content of most American companies, especially smaller businesses that really can’t afford or are not yet ready for a large marketing team. To put it bluntly, American enterprises, so much of your marketing content is not focused on your customers…it’s focused on you!

Now, don’t get me wrong, you have a role to play in your marketing story, and you definitely want to tell your customers about you, but you have to remember that when a customer is searching for a product or service, they are mostly interested in how you can address the challenges they are facing. 

I want you to do me a favor and pull out your most widely used piece of marketing content, then read it while keeping these key questions in mind:

• Is your customer the star of that piece, or are you?
• Does the first sentence of the piece start with your company name?
• Do a lot of the rest of the sentences in the piece also start with your company name?
• Do the main points of the piece talk first about how you do something and what you know, then address how you can solve a customer’s challenge only after you’ve talked about yourself first?
• Does the piece tell your customer which of their challenges you can help them solve and how you will do so, or does it tell them all about your company, your team, what your team knows, and how great it will be for the customer if they choose to work with you?
• Is your content riddled with all of the fancy product, team and department names you’ve so cleverly come up with over the years?

See, if I’m your customer, what I care about is how you can solve my challenges and how quickly, effectively and reasonably priced you can do that. I don’t care what you call your product, teams and departments, how many degrees your executives have, or where they worked before joining your team. I don’t care how many offices you have, that you can trace your company’s roots back to the 1960’s, or how much fun your employees have working there. All I want to see is content that tells me what you can do for me. 

So, if you read your marketing content and find your customer and how you can solve their challenges is not the true meat of the story you are telling, it might be time to re-write that content so it focuses on your customer and their needs, not you and your story. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes as they read your marketing content and ask, “Why should I care?” 

Photo by Karolina via Pexels

The Failed Promise Of Social Media

Social media platforms have not lived up to the promise or the hype when it comes to connecting enterprises with their customers. Remember when we were told social media was going to replace email, and we were going to be able to easily reach our customers through their feed by posting to our own social media pages and feeds? That sure seems laughable now!

I recently read a sponsored content piece in which the author was touting his ability to quickly and easily obtain 20,000 Facebook likes for any enterprise or individual for less than a nickel each. What a great service if they were quality likes from actual potential customers, but even if they were, post something to your Facebook business page and less than 5% of your new 20,000 devout Facebook Likers will see that message.

That is, of course, unless you click on the link from Facebook that allows you to promote your post by paying them some of your advertising budget. But, that is not what social media originally promised us, is it? We were supposed to be able to connect with customers in a wide-open forum of engagement and friendly conversation, but instead, we find ourselves in a pay-to-play, hope-they-see-my-post-somehow world where we are all questioning the benefits of actually maintaining a Facebook company page, especially for smaller businesses. Clearly, the promise of using social media to easily and cheaply connect with customers was never delivered.

So here we are, in 2016, living in a time warp like it’s 2005, or 2001 for that matter, and the only way we can guarantee our message even stands a chance of getting through to our customers is via email or direct message. If you’ve got some extra time and are looking for a new hobby, maintain that Facebook page for fun, but if you want to actually reach your customers, keep turning to your email platform and any type of direct messaging you can find that yields actual customer responses.

It’s time for businesses to get back to the basics of creating engaging email campaigns that provide messaging and content geared towards their customers and the challenges they face. It’s time to connect with customers, colleagues and partners on LinkedIn and use the platform’s great direct messaging feature to stay in touch. It’s time to stop posting to social media and hoping our message gets seen and instead, return to more traditional methods of contact so we can actually get our message in front of the people we’re trying to reach. 

Screen capture by William L. Savastano

ASP vs. SaaS vs. Cloud

We’ve all heard the cliché about how the only constant in technology is change, but during a recent product launch planning session, a small group of us who, if for no other reason than the years under out belts, consider ourselves to have been around the block a few times, were laughing a little bit about the semantics of “The Cloud” and how it resembles two other big buzzwords we’d marketed in the past, ASP and SaaS.

This got me thinking about the similarities and differences between these technologies and while I have, in fact, marketed all three over the years, I had never really taken the time to compare and contrast them. So, just for fun – if you can consider researching software platforms fun – I decided to take a closer look and then put together a little write up on what I discovered.

Click here to read ASP vs. SaaS vs. Cloud.

The Agile Marketing Method

For the past eight years, I have spent my life marketing software. When you market software, you end up learning more than just a little bit about the software development process, its benefits and its challenges. You also learn, like many others before me, that occasionally, the principles of software development can lend themselves to other areas of business, including marketing.

The term “agile marketing” is starting to get a lot more ink these days so I feel it is time for me to release a little something I originally put notes together on across a few evenings a couple years ago and refined over more than a few evenings over the past couple months – a guide on a little something I call “The Agile Marketing Method.”

In this guide, I give marketers insight into how they can apply one software development method – Agile – to their marketing projects. I explain a little bit about the history of software development methodologies that led to the creation of Agile, the principles of Agile, as well as how marketers can use some of Agile’s principles and processes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing efforts.

Read The Agile Marketing Method.

Photo by Woodsilver via Pixabay

Combatting Content Lengthiness: Why I Take My 15-Minute Walks

If you work with me, you’ve probably noticed that I disappear for 15 minutes a couple times a day. Sometimes I am just taking a break and stretching my legs, but most of the time, I am out giving one of my content pieces a length test.

We all know that content is king when it comes to marketing these days, but I also feel that much too often, I find myself nodding off due to the length of some of the pieces that find their way to my inbox.

It is my belief that 15 minutes is long enough for us content marketers to clearly and concisely get our point across, no matter what our message might be. If it takes our audience longer than 15 minutes to read and understand a piece of content, it is either too long, covers too many topics, or is just too plain wordy.

Hence, you can find me a couple times a day, out on a 15-minute walk with a piece content in my hand, ensuring that my reading doesn’t outlast my walking.

My goal is to make sure that I can read the piece completely and thoroughly and understand each word in the time it takes to walk my 15-minute-long route. But if by chance, I am back from my walk and find myself still reading, it is a clear signal that I either need to do some serious editing or break the piece down into smaller chunks.

Not that you need instructions on how to walk, but if you’re thinking of following in my footsteps to give your own content pieces a length test, here’s what I did:

First, I timed myself on a walk near the office that not only provides quiet, but is also safe enough to traverse while really only partly paying attention to the actual act of walking.

I found a mostly level route with some cover for those too-sunny or too-rainy days, though I will readily admit you will see me out there with an umbrella on rainy days because as they say in the marketing biz, the content must go on.

I also made sure my route did not cross any stoplights or intersections that cause me to stop and wait because that would throw off my time and impact my results.

Once I had my route planned and timed, confirming it was 15 minutes from start to finish, I printed out my piece of content, grabbed my pen and went on my first length-test walk. I have repeated as necessary for many months now.

If you are thinking of giving my length-test method a try, please do. You can choose to review your piece electronically, pick a route with no cover at all, or modify my guide as you wish, as long as you ensure that your route is exactly 15 minutes and that you are done reading your piece by the time your walk is done.

Just think, if every content creator out there adheres to this inexpensive, easy-to-set-up, easily repeatable length test, all of the content in our inboxes will be so much better! 

Photo by Jordan McQueen via Pexels