Canright Communications

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Fintech

Communications Conversations: August 01 – August 05

Text Case Study typed on retro typewriter

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

Case studies are influential, yet often underestimated, marketing tools that help a company create credibility with potential customers.

Used on a website, as an email, or as a leave-behind for salespeople, a well-written case study illustrates how you resolved a specific problem or met a need. By letting a customer speak about the results they receive as a result of your product and solution, you gain credibility as you educate potential customers on how your product or service works.

You build even more credibility when your case study gets published in an industry publication, as has happened with previous Canright clients. For example, one of our case studies that examined how one of our clients grew its business without increasing staff was published in AFP Exchange, the journal of the Association of Financial Professionals, the treasury industry’s primary professional group.

The Canright Process 

The Canright process of crafting a compelling case study involves a handful of important steps, including a questionnaire and outline. A comprehensive Case Study Research questionnaire and outline gives a framework for researching product and service case studies that interest and educate. Most case studies do not need this much detail, but the more you have the better you can show how your product or solution helps clients achieve their business goals. 

During the questionnaire and interview phase, we spend time meeting with clients to understand their vision for the case study. We like gathering background information about the client and information related to project challenges, solutions, costs, benefits, and results.

From there, we begin plugging that information into an outline and flushing out the content until we have a completed, refined piece.

Client Case Study Spotlight

Canright writes frequent case studies for the North Central Terrazzo Association (NCTA). Often times these case studies spotlight the completion of large-scale projects or trending news in the terrazzo industry. One of our recent NCTA case studies covered a terrazzo project at the Clinton Airport in Arkansas. Titled “Over an Arkansas Sky Captivates Visitors to the Clinton Airport,” the process of writing the case study included a brief questionnaire, interview, and outline before its completion.

For more information on how Canright writes case studies, read our “Outline and Questions for Case Study Research.”

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

Chainlink & Decentralized Finance

Chainlink launched in 2019 as the first to market a decentralized oracle network. Since then, it has become the de-facto standard in how DeFi & smart contracts interact with the real world. By building a framework for decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink empowers hybrid smart contracts for expansive use by providing a secure foundation for connecting oracle data with real-world, off-chain computation. Contracts rely on external information for fulfilling term agreements. Online, Chainlink can automate that process and remove third-party arbitrators by utilizing blockchain oracles. 

By employing a data feed, oracles enable the validation of ongoing terms for related parties while contract stipulations are still being met. This allows all parties to know in real-time where the contract stands without any interruptions/interferences.

Chainlink oracles gather and collect external, real-world data and interact with blockchains to comb through relevant information to feed smart contracts for predictive modeling. In this way, Chainlink compiles and validates data for advanced smart contracts in an automated and efficient way. To showcase its development, Chainlink has been experimenting with real-world use cases, such as bonds. Bonds are fixed-income instruments that represent a loan made by an investor to a borrower (typically corporate or governmental). Chainlink can replicate bond transactions as automated smart contracts by providing the external data required for loan settlement, such as interest rates, debt ratings, and fiat payments.

Communications Conversations: July 04 – June 08

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

Ad agencies have long relied on creative briefs to provide assignment basics. Often structured in the form of a questionnaire, briefs give communications teams a common understanding of the requirements and key considerations that drive campaign deliverables. In our experience, the best briefs, whether for advertising campaigns or technical content, extract insights from project or campaign research, adding new layers of meaning.
 
Why

  • Provide new insights and priorities, and bring teams together.

Use Cases

  • Create alignment between product, development, and communications teams.
  • Develop product documentation for external and internal audiences.
  • Present new products or services to the market.

Method

  • Complete a content brief questionnaire for assignments. You can find creative brief templates online or download the Canright Content Brief. 
  • Include statements of organizational purpose, mission, and goals. Use what comes with the understanding that the project’s context may help refine them. 
  • Answer all of the traditional project questions while keeping an organizational context in mind. This may help refine your initial project purpose and goals. 
  • Research the product and service’s competitive market to further refine your content and communications project.  
  • Add any insights that the organizational, project and market contexts spark in the final write-up and share it with the product, creative, and executive teams. 
  • Gather and analyze responses and reactions. These may point to needs for product and service refinement, additional competitive analysis, or new communications directions.

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

Communications Conversations: June 13 – June 17

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

This week we focus on how to deliver information and content to stakeholders in a clear, concise format. The following methods detail how we transform the raw material of interviews and discussions into concise, easy-to-understand documents.

Knowledge Briefs

This week Jess describes how to give stakeholders the information they need in a simple, clear format.

Why

  • Breaking down concepts for the layperson helps business professionals understand the importance of technical work.

Use Cases

  • Pitch decks, explainers, and other internal communications

Method

  • Conduct research to get a clear technical understanding of the subject matter. Using a journalistic framework (who, what, where, when, why, how), break it down into pieces that make concepts simple to understand no matter the expertise of the reader. Aiming for broad readability without talking down, these briefs help boil down technical speak for non-technical audiences.

Creating a Digital Knowledge Base 

Ryan shows how our digital content creation strategy helps stakeholders benefit from a business and organizational standpoint.

Why

  • Give the team content in a digital format that is searchable, filterable, and acts as a knowledge base. Improving productivity and reducing training time.

Use Cases

  • Write new help content and revamp legacy content to fit an organization’s digital transformation. Making information more accessible to the end-user.

Method

  • Determine the audience which can include internal, existing customers, and new customers.
  • Plan for new content to be written into the digital knowledge base.
  • Add resource pages based off of the aspects the audience wants to learn in relation to products and organization. 
  • Create visuals in the content to clarify the message.
  • Make sure the site is easy to navigate.
  • Customize content based on the topic to help the end-user better grasp the concepts.

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

API Marketing Strategy and Tactics

APIs can provide a competitive advantage. They enable businesses to provide new solutions by making it easy for developers a way to incorporate your software’s capabilities into theirs.

As the marketplace for API publishers continues to expand, with vast libraries of tools available to would-be developers from all over the world, developing a comprehensive marketing strategy is core to standing out.

While having the best API offering possible and striving for product excellence is important, it isn’t enough to win in the marketplace. Discoverability is key, along with a clear plan to build associations and differentiations with your competition every step of the way. 

List in API Directories

The most straightforward way to make sure that your product is visible to customers is to make sure it’s on store shelves.  Online API directories are a ubiquitous part of the marketplace for developers, and usually include search functionality that helps people narrow down the best API for their needs.

Listing capabilities vary by directory, but all of them include keyword functionality – it’s important that you provide as much information about your API as possible in the space provided to maximize results.

Some of the most popular directories include:

Tailor Content to Client Business Needs

No matter what your product is, your clients are looking for a business with a clear expertise, and clear ideas for just how best to use what you’ve built.

Knowledge articles and blogs offer a natural entry point for customers to discover your product through search engines, providing answers that naturally point the way towards your API as the best solution for their business problems.

You can also tailor your content to the niche audience that best fits your product through participation in Q&A sites like Stack Exchange, Quora, and Stack Overflow.

Whatever your strategy, it’s important to remember that tailored content is marketing, but it’s not an advertising pitch – references to the product should be restrained, only brought up where appropriate, with the general focus centered on providing information. Nothing undermines your credibility as an expert like coming across too much like a commercial.

Above all, engagement is key in this space; making voices available to answer questions that arise is the most solid way to engage the developer community and build trust with your customers.

Focus on the Audience

Business. You’re proud of the work you’ve done, and it’s tempting to fill your product marketing with technical information about how you built your API and how it works – but this kind of data can come across like a foreign language to the business people who make the purchasing decisions around your product.

As a primary strategy, that complexity should be made compelling to a lay audience – broken down into simpler terms with a clear focus on the capabilities and solutions your API can bring to a business, not the jargon.  It’s a simple concept, but easy to lose sight of:  focus on what your API does, not how it works.

Know your API’s unique selling position: what makes it distinct from the competition,  and addressing potential objections before your customers can even mention them.

Developers. Software developers are unlikely to be the audience that makes the purchasing decision for a particular API – but they are the ones who are going to be using it. Focusing some of your marketing content for them, with the kind of technical information they need, is vital to give them reasons to advocate for your solution above others.

Provide Documentation

Your API needs to be as simple for developers to utilize as possible if it’s going to stand out in the marketplace. Comprehensive documentation, traditionally through collaborative spaces like Confluence or various wiki software, is key to driving adoption.

Publishing and promoting new API documentation can even be a great way to push awareness of a new offering in the space.

Standards should be focused on following OpenAPI specifications – documentation that’s both human- and machine-readable. From there, it’s just a matter of covering the relevant territory; from authentication, to error handling, and any other situations that developers using your product are likely to run into.

To see how Canright has helped clients with API marketing materials, see Getting Started with the Envestnet | Yodlee Platform API – for Non-Coders. For a basic introduction to APIs, what they do and how they work, see Bridging the Gap.