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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

How Engaging is Your Content? — Insights on How Four Austin Companies Take Customer Engagement to Heart

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Customer Engagement is Hot — Are You Wooing Your Leads, Prospects, and Customers with Content that Wow’s Them?

Cupid with an arrow
Are you sending your target audience enough love? If not, it may be time to heat up your relationship with some highly targeted, high-impact Content Marketing.

Love is in the air today. But how much love are you feeling between you and your target audience?

One of the keys to successful marketing is engaging customers with high-quality, high-impact Content Marketing — that delights, engages, and bonds them to your brand.

Here are insights on how four Austin companies are creating stronger bonds with their prospects, leads, and customers through relationship-building Content Marketing.

1. Whole Foods Market — A Whole World of Content Marketing

We all know Whole Foods as the little local natural food store that made it big — really really BIG. But did you know that Whole Foods is also a world-class Content Marketer — engaging its target audience in multiple ways — its blog, an online magazine, social media, and a recently launched TV series?

Here’s a quick rundown of Whole Foods’ many Content Marketing initiatives:

  • The Whole Story blog — chock full of food-related news and recipes.
  • The Whole Journeys Travel Blog — a series of international trips geared toward “active foodies.”
  • An online magazine called “Dark Rye” — which is packed with recipes, travel videos, and food photos, as well as full-length written features about people living life to the fullest.
  • A spin-off of the magazine into a 20-episode TV series launched this year.
  • And a lot of social media, including Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

In fact, Whole Foods is considered an uber-pinner in the Pinterest world, thanks to the inspiration and dedication of the company’s global community manager, Michael Aaron Bepko.

The company creates its boards with the aim of appealing to a broad range of Pinterest users, while tying the brand to a certain type of food culture. Whole Foods’ Pinterest page already has a following of 200,000.

2. HomeAway — Listens to Customers Aspirations, Then Delivers

Today HomeAway is a giant in the vacation rental category. But I knew HomeAway when it was just one guy plugging away out of his home office.

Many years ago, I cold-called the founder to see if he needed a freelance writer. He said that he was working with one writer already (I think she was in Maryland), and didn’t need another one at that time.

Imagine my surprise to watch how this company has grown.

HomeAway’s growth is not by accident. It takes customer engagement to heart.

Here’s an interesting except from a blog post written by the company’s Social Media Manager, Jennifer Stafford, about how the company works to meet its customers’ interests.

“One example of our testing and measurement results can be seen within our ‘Aspirational’ content category. Throughout 2013 we tested various aspirational vacation rentals such as castles, oceanfront mansions, and private islands on Facebook and Pinterest to determine which is most engaging. Testing revealed that private islands are our best performing content type in this category; our most recent post received over 17,000 points of engagement. Based on these results, the decision was made to begin featuring island properties as a separate content category, and a more frequent topic in our editorial calendar.”

3. National Instruments — Mapping the Minds of its Customer Base

This technology company takes Content Marketing and customer engagement seriously — even creating mental models to track customer behavior and buying cycles.

In fact, Content Strategist and Information Architect Lauren Moler gave a talk on the subject at the Content Marketing World 2013 conference. (Note: Lauren is a superstar in the burgeoning Content Marketing world — and is often quoted on the subject.)

According to Lauren, the NI mental model process (based on Indi Young’s book Mental Models) lays out user goals and then maps content to those tasks, identifying gaps and opportunities for reuse. Once you have a tangible model to share, you can distribute it to your organization and get your stakeholders involved in executing your content strategy. Lauren said this process helped NI increase leads and online revenue.

Special note: Lauren is sharing am NI case study at an upcoming Austin Content Meetup on February 25. Hurry if you are interested: I just checked and there are only 10 seats left.

4. Spiceworks — A Place with a Soul Became the Beating Heart of the IT World

When Forbes calls your company “the future of media,” that is a very big deal. (Although Content Marketing Supernova would fit too.)

So imagine Spiceworks’ humble roots as just another technology start-up trying to find customers during the technology bust.

Then Spiceworks did something that changed everything: The company started an online community for IT professionals where they connected IT people and products, and shared tons of content for FREE — along with free software!

The result? A community of over four million IT professionals and 1,800 technology brands in 200 countries. In a word: Wow!

Here’s a short excerpt about its success from the company’s website:

“Part of why Spiceworks became all the IT rage? It’s what “social” was meant to be: real people interacting with each others … but in a community specific to their job. IT pros get answers (even a few laughs!) from fellow IT pros. And get info from vendors on everything from tech specs to pricing. Vendors get 1:1 feedback and build relationships. And it all happens in one handy place. A place with a soul — where IT pros trust the marketers they meet. And marketers approach IT pros like people, not leads. The coolest thing? The free-flow of info in Spiceworks has inspired many small start-ups to use us as a launch pad for new products. Pretty cool, huh?”

These companies are proving that when you woo your customers with highly engaging content, you will likely hear a lot more of those six magic words: “Let’s put a ring on it!”

Note on Content Creation: Do you need more engaging content? I’m available to help you put your words to work — and create content that engages your leads, prospects, and customers at every stage of your relationship.

How Will You Meet Your Content Needs this Year — and Overcome the Three Leading Challenges Facing Content Marketers?

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Five Reasons Why a Freelance Content Marketing Writer Could Be Your Single Best Secret Weapon

Are you one of the 93% B2B marketers using Content Marketing to attract prospects, convert leads, and retain customers — with compelling, buyer-focused, sales-funnel-driven content?

Help me cartoon burst
Are you dealing with one of the top challenges facing Content Marketers today? You don’t have to suffer in silence. A freelance content writer could be your secret weapon in producing all of the high-quality content you need — and I’m just a phone call or email way!

If so, you’re likely facing one or more of the 12 leading challenges cited by Content Marketers in a recent B2B study.

Challenge one is “lack of time.”

The number two challenge is “producing enough content.”

Number three is “producing the kind of content that engages.”

Did you know there is a secret weapon to overcome all of these challenges? Freelance Content Marketing writers.

Over 64% of Content Marketers say they outsource some or all of their content creation.

For example, Coca-Cola has hired over 40 freelance writers to produce content for its industry-leading 2020 Initiative Strategy.

GE says that it relies on a staff of both freelance Content Marketing writers and staff writers to produce content for its innovative Ecomagination.com microsite.

And they are not the only ones. Many companies understand the value of using freelance writers to meet their content needs — especially as Content Marketing becomes the dominant force in marketing and sales.

Are you missing a great opportunity to make sure you’re producing enough high-quality content to engage your prospects, leads, and customers all the way through the buyer’s journey?

Do You Have a Freelance Writer on Speed Dial — or Email or Text?

All of these Content Marketing insights come from the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends-North America survey and report produced by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

The report shares valuable insight into the opportunities and challenges of Content Marketing, including metrics for B2B Content Marketing success and organizational goals for Content Marketing.

But what it doesn’t share is how to overcome the leading challenges.

Five Top Reasons to Hire a Freelance Content Marketing Writer

Freelance writers are the ideal solution when you are facing the leading challenges of Content Marketing.

And here are five reasons why.

1. Freelance writers have time.

If a freelance writer is looking for new clients, it means he or she has time in their schedule to write the Content Marketing you need.

This doesn’t mean we aren’t busy. It just means that we don’t have 9-to-5 jobs dominating our workweeks.

It also means we are adept at time management and juggling many different projects at one time. It’s a gift!

2. Freelance writers do excellent work.

Professional freelance writers are some of the best writers in the business. If we weren’t we wouldn’t be in business.

3. Freelance writers are quick studies.

Some freelance writers write content in only one niche. But the majority of freelancers are industry agnostic. They have written for many industries and types of businesses.

Writing for multiple industries requires the ability to quickly get up-to-speed on new topics. This rapid-ramp-up capability is a skill that versatile freelance writers have honed to a science.

So don’t worry if a freelance writer doesn’t have experience in your particular niche. He or she can ramp up fast.

4. Freelance writers are flexible.

Many companies don’t need a writer to create content from 9-to-5 five days a week. Many only need content every few weeks or months — for ebooks, white papers, customer success stories, and other content.

This is the freelance sweet spot for companies: You only hire us when you need us. The rest of the time we aren’t on your clock pretending to be productive.

Also, sometimes companies need content quickly to meet an unexpected deadline.

I can’t speak for every freelance writer, but I know that I will often work weekends and evenings to meet a client’s deadline.

It’s all part of the benefits package you’ll get from working with a freelancer!

5. Freelance writers are economical.

This doesn’t mean cheap. For that you’d have to look at content mill writers who work for a few bucks per blog post. That’s not what we are talking about here.

We are talking about professional writers who create the highest quality content, who understand all of the moving parts of Content Marketing, and who speak your language.

They may charge what seems to you, at first glance, like a high hourly or project rate.

But when you consider the many advantages of bringing a freelance writer on board, their rate seems downright economical.

For example, you save money in multiple ways when you use freelance writers. You don’t have responsibility for all of the other costs associated with hiring a full-time staff member, like vacation pay, sick days, ongoing training, office space, equipment and supplies, healthcare and other benefits.

So if you are among the 93% of marketers deploying Content Marketing campaigns this year — and don’t want your plans crippled by a lack of quality content — you should consider having your very own freelance content writer on speed dial, email, or text.

Call me post it noteI’ll be ready when you are!