2011′s underway and I thought I’d start with a post about giving customers what they want.

Take a look at how my local Japanese supermarket went about serving their customers in the final days of 2010.

This is a slightly blurred (sorry!) photo of a double-sided, A3-sized ad that was delivered to our house.

The black headline in the middle refers to the “end of year” and clearly states (in red) the 9am opening time on 30 and 31 December.

Some scarcity and urgency is also introduced because only shoppers present between 9 and 1 will get triple points on their store loyalty cards.

Starting from the top left hand corner, and moving clockwise, all the traditional Japanese favorites are shown, along with their prices.

Sashimi, sushi, fried food (chicken), tempura prawn with ‘long life’ noodles (soba), a selection of beers and sakes and, in the bottom left hand corner, thinly cut slices of meat for ‘shabu-shabu’.

Interestingly, the fact that the meat was domestically produced is quite visible. There was some Aussie and American meat for sale but not a lot.

Taken together, this Ad’s a great example of making it real easy for the customer to know (and see) what they’re buying, how much it will cost, and what benefits there are to being first in the queue.

Attention! Marketing Managers in the Business of Selling Computer Networking Solutions…

1) What types of solutions do you need from freelance technology writers this year?

2) Are these technical copywriting solutions what you’re looking for?

3) How can a freelance writer make your job less stressful – beyond delivering quality writing within agreed deadlines?

I have my own views on what the answers to these three questions might be.

However, I’m very interested to hear my customers tell me what they really, really want.

You can use my contact form or email me: samuraiwriter <at> gmail.com.

‘Replace the <at> with the @ symbol, and remove spaces between the words, samuraiwriter and gmail.

I look forward to hearing from you.

- Mark McClure

PS – My case study special offer is now accepting just two customers for January’s limited slots. The monthly offer finishes once the mentoring course is completed in March 2011.

OK, so the post’s title doesn’t exactly score a bulls-eye but since 2011′s indeed the ‘year of the rabbit’ in these parts, it somehow seems appropriate.

Joe Pulizzi, of junta42.com and content marketing institute fame, has just released a collection of social media and content marketing predictions for 2011 .

As Joe says in his post introducing the collection:

“Well over 150 predictions from more than 100 of the leading marketing thought leaders in the business.”

You can view and also download a free e-book containing all the predictions by clicking on the image in this post.

Alternatively, you can click on this url:
http://www.zmags.com/social-media-predictions-2011

(Note: I found the pdf button in the bottom right hand corner of the zmags screen interface.

Some predictions that jumped out at me:

• Ever shorter white papers (this is something that Jonathan Kantor has been highlighting for a while now.)
• E-books for mobile Internet devices (I think this also applies to traditional marketing content such as case studies and, yes, white papers.)
• Content marketing being freely distributed via social media.

It was a great honor to be included alongside many very experienced and skilled marketers. You can find my prediction on page 18. With hindsight (ha!) I should have written more.

- Mark ‘mystic marketer’ McClure

Are you making it easier for your customers to find you and order?

By way of example from Japan, here’s something I see a lot while riding trains or reading the flyers that appear in my mail box most days.

Look at the Kanji characters inside the Google search box.

This is a Sushi home-delivery chain and the brand’s name – ginsara – plus CM, meaning ‘commercial’, are all you need remember to find them on the web.

For people who are not comfortable with website addresses (and there are many!), this makes it real easy to locate their zany commercials and their website, since they’re at the top of the page for that keyword phrase.

(By the way, these ads don’t infringe on Google’s copyrighted image because all that’s shown is a rectangular box with the keyword phrase and a computer mouse arrow hovering over the Kanji equivalent for the ‘search’ button.)

For the more tech-savvy customers there’s a web site listed for people using computers with a standard screen display and another for those accessing the Internet via a mobile phone, which is very popular in Japan.

I’ll keep an eye out for high tech companies doing similar ads on the train – don’t get any flyers from them in my mail box!

- Mark McClure

PS – Click on the google box above to see a YouTube example of one of their ‘CMs’. It’s obviously culturally-tuned to Japanese humor but I smiled at the tongue-in-cheek bizarreness and have a much stronger impression of the brand (and that’s no small thing, since Japan has gazillions of Sushi delivery shops and chains.)

Or maybe I’ve just been here too long (~_^)

As a freelance technical copywriter I thought I understood how to pre-qualify target prospects by offering a free whitepaper download as the thank you for providing some contact details.

In many cases an optimal approach was to ask for the minimum contact information of name, email address and (possibly) job description.

Anyone doing so then got access to the online whitepaper (sometimes delayed for a few hours, but that’s the subject of a separate post on ‘marketing via scarcity’) and entered a marketing funnel – with the understanding that they could easily opt out at any future time.

However, I’m always learning in this business and was therefore fascinated to come across an online signup form with (from memory) about ten(!) required fields:

Name, Address, Email, Job Title, Phone, Fax, Budget responsibities, projects planned, number of employees, company turnover.

This strikes me as overkill for what was on offer – a free white paper on social media, no less! – and so I abandoned the signup process.

Although I’m left wondering how many others also bailed out in frustration, it’s quite possible that this company have split-tested various online signup forms and discovered what really works for their marketing goals.

How about you?

What’s the optimum number of required fields to maximize downloads of a technology whitepaper?

- Mark McClure