The New Rules of Marketing and PR. David Meerman Scott

design and poor content. If you visit the sites of any of the majors (Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, etc.), you’ll notice they all look the same. The content is all created by corporate headquarters, so individual property pages rarely contain original content about the location of each hotel. The result is that most hotel sites are just big brochures that pull product features like room types and food offerings from a global database.

      The Lodge at Chaa Creek’s website couldn’t be more different. The team behind it includes co-owner Lucy Fleming, who oversees marketing; Australia-based writer and former newspaper editor Mark Langan, who creates most of the written content; and an on-site marketer who focuses on social media and search engine optimization. The team researches what people are searching on—terms like “Belize honeymoon” and “Belize all-inclusive vacation”—and then works to craft content for the Lodge at Chaa Creek’s site, as well as its Belize Travel Blog.⁵ The goal is to offer content that is valuable for those researching a Belize vacation, content that will be ranked highly in the search engines.

Can you see what’s happening here? Somebody goes to Google and wants to learn about bird-watching in Belize. And because the content on the Chaa Creek site and blog includes stories about the birds of Belize, this searcher ends up on the Chaa Creek site or blog. For people searching for information on planning a wedding trip to Belize, Chaa Creek publishes content such as “Ten Reasons Why Belize Makes for Honeymoon Bliss” on the Belize Travel Blog.

      Notice that this kind of information is not about the lodge itself. Instead, the Chaa Creek publishing program focuses on delivering information to people planning a trip to Belize. Then, when they are ready to book a place to stay, they’re likely to consider the Lodge at Chaa Creek, the place where they learned about traveling in the country.

      My favorite examples of this technique are the team’s articles about the Mayan sites located in the vicinity of the Lodge at Chaa Creek, such as the Xunantunich Maya Temples. Anyone using a search engine to find information on “Xunantunich Maya Temples” will see the article on the Chaa Creek site at the top of the search results. Clicking through, they learn that the temples are located near the village of San Jose Succotz and that the lower temple is famous for its stucco frieze (a band of sculpture along the facade). Let me remind you that this is a hotel website. The team even created content about the Tikal Mayan site, located about two hours from Chaa Creek in Guatemala, a whole different country!

      All this content drives people from the search engines to the hotel site. Many of them will then choose to stay at the Lodge at Chaa Creek. Indeed, some 80 percent of new bookings to the lodge come directly from this content marketing effort. This reduces the lodge’s reliance on the old-fashioned techniques of its competitors, which get a large percentage of their bookings from online travel sites (for which they must pay a commission) or advertising in travel magazines (which is very expensive). And it all starts by providing would-be travelers with the information they’re looking for when they begin researching a trip.

      Develop Information Your Buyers Want to Consume

Companies with large budgets can’t wait to spend the big bucks on slick TV advertisements. It’s like commissioning artwork. TV ads make marketing people at larger companies feel good. But broadcast advertisements dating from the time of the TV-industrial complex don’t work so well anymore. When we had three networks and no cable, it was different. In the time-shifted, multichannel, web-centric world of the long tail, YouTube, DVRs, Twitter, and blogs, spending big bucks on TV ads is like commissioning a portrait back in the nineteenth century: It might make you feel good, but does it bring in any money?

      Instead of deploying huge budgets for dumbed-down TV commercials that purport to speak to the masses and therefore appeal to nobody, we need to think about the information that our niche audiences want to know. Why not build content specifically for these niche audiences and tell them an online story that is created especially for them? Once marketers and PR people tune their brains to think about niches, they begin to see opportunities for being more effective at delivering their organization’s message.

      Big Birge Plumbing Company Grows Business in a Competitive Market

      Plumbers and other tradespeople used to generate business through the print telephone directory (when I was growing up we called it the Yellow Pages). I remember my parents both turned to it when they needed, say, a house painter or an electrician.

      We’re in a new world now. People go to search engines and consumer review sites like Yelp to research companies. In this new world, it’s not the expensive half-page Yellow Pages ad that grows business. It’s the best website—especially in a highly competitive market like plumbing.

      When I was in Omaha, Nebraska, for a speaking engagement, I had an opportunity to speak with Lallenia Birge, who with her husband Brad Birge operate Big Birge Plumbing Company.⁶ Lallenia goes by a wonderful title: “A Plumber’s Wife to Big Birge Plumbing Co.”

      “Don’t let your money go down the drain! Call Big Birge Plumbing Company. For all your plumbing needs!” The clever, if punny, writing personalizes Big Birge Plumbing Company, making it stand out from the rest of the market. When the vast majority of plumbers either don’t have a site or just maintain a basic one with straightforward facts and contact info, being different gets you noticed. The Big Birge Plumbing Company site uses fun original photos, has a great design, and showcases the company’s humorous personality.

Here’s how Lallenia introduces herself on the Meet Big Birge page: “Hi! Unlike my husband, I do NOT have years and years of plumbing experience nor have I dug ditches in 100-degree weather. Honestly I’m pretty sure my husband has had to use our drain cleaner at our house more than most of his ‘regular’ customers (pun intended). I did not realize you aren’t supposed to flush wax down the toilet or not place all the food scrapes [sic] off the plate into the garbage disposal! (Whoops!)”

      The fun carries over to the design of their trucks (Lallenia with a “gasp” expression, peering into a toilet filled with money) and to their social media presence, including Facebook.

      In a crowded market—there are more than 400 plumbing companies in the Omaha area—Big Birge Plumbing Company has grown very quickly in less than five years in business.

      “Our very first year, we received Best of Omaha due to our marketing online via social media and the image we display,” Lallenia says. “This is a major award in our city, and we came out of nowhere. We have won it two years in a row now.”

      Big Birge Plumbing Company shows that anyone with a smartphone and a focus on reaching buyers online can grow a business, even in a very competitive market. When I checked recently, Big Birge Plumbing was ranked on the first page of the Google results for “Omaha Plumber.” That’s amazing, considering the company is only a few years old. You can achieve the same result in your market.

      Buyer Personas: The Basics

      Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal buyer personas for their target demographics. (I discuss buyer personas in detail in Chapter 10.) It can be daunting for many of us to consider who, exactly, might be interested in our products and services and is visiting our site and checking out our content. But if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic.

For example, a college website usually has the goal of keeping alumni happy so that they donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. A college might have two buyer personas for alumni: younger alumni (those who graduated within the past 10 or 15 years) and older alumni. Universities also have a goal of recruiting students by driving them into the application process. The effective college site might have a buyer persona for the high school student who is considering college.