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Austin Came Full Circle in 2015 — And I Couldn’t Love it More

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Not All of Austin’s Growth is Annoying — The New Development I Loved Best in Austin Last Year

Happy New Years 2015
Austinites had a lot to be thankful in 2014 — especially my favorite new development. Here’s to hoping 2015 brings Austin many other wonderful new developments.

What did you love best about Austin in 2014?

While Austinites tend to complain about the growth in and around the city, there’s also a lot to love in this ever-growing, ever-changing metropolis — with what looks like a dozen cranes crisscrossing the downtown skyline.

So many new restaurants opened (Dai Due, anyone?). So many festivals (one or two a week on average!). So much art, music, theater, sports, food, and more.

I loved so many of our city’s new developments last year.

But one new feature of our fair city in 2014 tops my list — the opening of the new boardwalk around Town Lake (yes, I still call it Town Lake).

The Town Lake Treasure

Since I moved to Austin I’ve loved the hike and bike trail. It’s been my refuge. I used to live in the far southwest part of town, so had to drive to ride or walk the trail. Now I can ride my bike or walk to it.

While, in the past, I would often ride deep into the east side, I usually only cycled as far as the old Holly Street Power Plant (which looked like a Mad Max film set), where I would turn around and ride back.

The few times I circled the lake left me hating the trip, thanks to having to cross 35 and ride along busy Riverside Drive. It just wasn’t fun.

I preferred to just back track on the actual riverside trail. That stretch from 35 to the plant through the lush, green, waterfront of Festival Beach was one of my favorites anyway.

Then on June 7 a miracle happened. The long discussed, long construction project was finally complete. The magical Town Lake boardwalk opened with a party.

I missed the party, but about one week later decided to finally check out the boardwalk on my bike. I rode down to the trail and began my familiar ride heading east.

The first thing I noticed was a lot more people on the trail than in the old days.

I was a little apprehensive after I passed the now-defunct Holly Power Plant, because I hadn’t been to this part of town in a long time.

But the beauty of that side of Town Lake wrapped me in its arms and I continued toward my destination — the boardwalk.

Love at First Sight

After rounding the east end of the lake and passing the lakeside hostel (digs for lucky broke young travelers!), I hit the east-most end of the boardwalk. Then I commenced my 1.1-mile journey down the boardwalk.

It was glorious. All green on one side, blue water on the other, and stellar views of the city.

Austin did itself proud on this project. I couldn’t love it more.

In fact, I loved the boardwalk and full-circle trail around the lake so much that I started riding every single day. When it got too hot by July to ride in the evenings, I started waking up at 6:00 a.m. to ride.

I’m notoriously not a morning person, so this proves just how much I love the ride.

These days, if it’s above 50-degrees, you’ll find me riding the loop around 5:00 p.m. Let me know if you want to join me!

For an awesome view of the boardwalk from a cyclist’s perspective, check out this short video a biker shot with GoPro.

If you haven’t visited the boardwalk yet, here’s some information for planning your adventure.

So, what did you love best about Austin in 2014?

Austin Inbound Marketing Expert Walks Lean Marketers Through Her Marketing Process

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From ‘Shiny Objects’ to the ‘WIIFM Question’ — Amanda McGuckin Hager Shared Inbound Marketing Secrets at Capital Factory

I gasped out loud when Amanda McGuckin Hager clicked on her PowerPoint presentation and displayed her company’s sales funnel on the screen at the Austin Lean Startup Meeting at Capital Factory in June.

sales funnel with target
Expert shared value of inbound marketing at Austin Meetup Is your sales funnel filled with content that is attracting and engaging your target audience? If not, I can help. Contact me about my Freelance Content Marketing Writing services.

It was a thing of beauty.

The funnel included color-coded spheres that descended from larger at the top to smaller at the bottom, each labeled for its stage in the sales process. Along the right-hand side was listed the questions that had to be answered at each stage as prospects moved through the funnel.

It should come as no surprise that Amanda had created such a stellar funnel. “Sales funnels are the foundation of my life,” she said. Her 20-year career has been focused on inbound lead generation, building scalable and repeatable lead gen engines that drive revenue.

“It’s fantastic to look at a multi-million dollar pipeline and be able to say, ‘Yeah, I brought all of those leads into the company.’”

Her first job “working under the hood” of a company’s lead engine was at Solar Winds. “I strategically worked with the hiring manager for one year to get that job, because Solar Winds was viewed as a leader of inbound marketing by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I wanted to know how they created something so special, including what levers were pulled and buttons pushed in its sales funnel, and how all of the moving parts worked together.”

Today she is a Strategic Marketing Executive at PeopleAdmin. She’s worked at nearly a dozen other tech companies in Austin, including Dell and InfoChimps. She also mentors startups at Capital Factory and speaks around the country.

Inbound Marketing Overview — Attract. Engage. Convert. Repeat.

At this presentation, she described her views of and experiences with inbound marketing.

1. Attract.

“The first goal is to attract your target audience with what I call a ‘shiny object.’ In other words, something of value that people want, like white paper, piece of collateral, or how-to document.

For example, at InfoChimps, she created a document called, “How to Do a Big Data Project.” “The idea was that if they can do it themselves, then more power to them. If not, we’re here to do it for them,” she explained. “It was valuable.”

This stage also requires a significant call-to-action. “That’s the gateway that you want everyone to come to you through. It’s how they’ll connect with you first. So you have to put it in everything. In your emails, your press release boiler plates, and every piece of collateral.”

2. Engage.

Once you’ve attracted a prospect with a shiny object, you have to deliver. “If they pick up the shiny object and find it’s just a gum wrapper, they will be pretty disappointed. You really want to deliver on what you promise.”

Also, it must address the WIIFM question — What’s In It For Me? “Your shiny object must fill a real need for your target audience,” said Amanda.

The content must also pass the LCD test — the Lowest Common Denominator in terms of readability. “I typically write for the eight to tenth grade level, sometimes even fifth grade if it’s a really technical piece.

“I often pass content through an English Gradability Scale, because people don’t typically read at higher levels. Even Time magazine is written at the eight to tenth grade level.”

She shared a story about a corporate executive who wrote a press release to announce a new technology. “When I ran it through the gradability scale it was ranked at a 20th grade level, which is post doctorate. This was for reporters, most of whom don’t have post doctorate degrees. So it was sure to fail the audience.

“It’s important to appeal to the exact audience you are going after and make it easy for them to read and understand.”

3. Conversion.

“I’m not an expert on conversion,” noted Amanda, “but there is plenty of great information available on the art and science of it. And it is an art and a science. If it’s your job you should learn as much as you can.”

4. Repeat.

“Once you’ve completed these steps, you do it all again.”

To hear Amanda’s entire talk on inbound marketing, watch the video here.

Do you need a professional Content Marketing Writer to help you attract and engage prospects through your sales funnel?

If so, I’m available to be your on-call Freelance Content Marketing Writer. Let’s set up a time to talk about how I can help you meet your inbound content marketing needs.

Email Me Today — karen (dot) taylor (dot) writer (at) gmail (dot) com.

How Building a Content Strategy with Mental Models Improved Contacts and Revenue for National Instruments’ Academic Program

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Six Steps to Align Your Content Strategy With Human Behavior — and Boost Your Marketing Results

Mind Model
Could creating mental models be the answer to your Content Marketing strategy challenges? National Instruments used them and gained great results.

In 2011, National Instruments was facing a “good, bad, and ugly” Content Marketing situation, according to Lauren Moler, Web Content Producer.

The Good: NI had a new online messaging architecture.

The Bad: None of the content creators were using it.

The Ugly: Customers were not finding the information they needed.

Rather than start from scratch to develop all new content, Moler researched to find a different solution. She landed on the concept of “mental models.”

Her inspiration came from the classic book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young.

Young defines mental models this way:

“Mental models are simply affinity diagrams of behavior made from ethnographic data gathered from audience representatives.”

“The top part of the model is a visual depiction of the behavior of a particular audience, faithfully representing root motivations. The bottom part of the model shows various ways of supporting matching behaviors. Where support and behavior are aligned, you have a solution. Where a behavior is not supported, you have an opportunity to explore further.”

“Using a mental model can advance several tasks for you — both from a tactical and strategic standpoint. It can guide the design of the solution you are working on. It can help you, and your team, make good user and business decisions. And, it can act as a roadmap, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity as the makeup of your team evolves over the next decade.”

Lauren Gives Presentation in Austin — “I’ll Give You a Piece of My Mind! Building a Content Strategy with Mental Models”

Lauren got the greenlight to implement the mental modeling process in one area of NI’s business: it’s Academic Program.

The result was exceptional. Within six months of implementing the solution based on the mental models, the business unit achieved two key results:

  • 70% increase in contacts
  • 51% increase in online revenue

Mental modeling is being rolled out to other business units.

Lauren presented NI’s mental model case study at last year’s Content Marketing World conference — and again on the evening of February 25th at the Austin Content Meetup.

Here’s an overview of the six steps in NI’s mental models process.

Step 1 — Inventory Content

“Our process started with an inventory of our existing content,” explained Lauren. “We had to start somewhere so we began by logging the following content information on an Excel spreadsheet.”

  • Page title
  • URL
  • Content Summary
  • Quality Assessment According to Best Practices
  • Phase in Content Marketing Process

Step 2 — Identify Customer Profiles

“We started quick and dirty with just a list of bullet points,” said Lauren. “We included any bit of information significant enough to better understand our customers.”

Step 3 — Define User Tasks

This involved brainstorming with the team to extract ideas from all of the knowledge holders. Lauren said that involving everyone in the process was key. “At NI, we have a distributed publishing model with a lot of content creators and a consensus culture.”

To encourage participation, charts were posted at key places in the company and people were encouraged to add their insight. “We used an analog approach — post it notes!” she said. “This allowed us to get our hands on the content in a tactile way.”

Step 4 — Group Tasks into Related Tasks

“We looked for patterns within the content and grouped them into information buckets.”

Step 5 — Map Content to Tasks

NI’s mental model is a chart that plots user content needs and NI’s content along the follow six steps in the buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Purchases
  • Initial Success
  • Proficiency
  • Beyond Proficiency
Academic Realign Mental Model_Highlight
National Instruments Mental Model for its Academic unit. The upper half shows what content consumers need at each stage of the buyers’ journey and the bottom half shows what content NI has for each stage. The red boxes show where NI already has useable content.

Step 6 — Create Content Templates

To facilitate content creation in a company with thousands of content creators, Lauren used the results of mental modeling to create site maps and content templates.

Lauren says that in addition to gaining exceptional results, NI also gained several key insights from mental modeling:

  • NI had content gaps
  • NI had been de-prioritizing key marketing tasks in favor of marketing offers
  • NI wasn’t repurposing its content
  • NI had some good content

“The mental model process allowed us to see key areas where we could use our existing content, which content we could repurpose, and where we needed to create new content.”

Although NI deals with massive amounts of content, Lauren encourages companies of all sizes to use mental model to create content strategies.

“Whether you’re a company of one or 1,000, creating mental models is a great exercise to manage your content creation.

“You’ll get a handle on your content and see how it maps to your customers’ information needs. This insight is invaluable.”

Connect with Lauren Moler on Twitter: @merrymoler