Describing Simply in Content Marketing

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“If you understand something but can describe it only in complex or jargony language, you’ll reach just the subset of people with expertise in the topic,” Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss write in Harvard Business Review. Instead, they advise corporate leaders, “When your organization needs to make a big change, stories will help you convey why it needs to transform but also what the future will look like in specific, vivid terms.”

The authors go on to detail four steps involved in moving the constituents to take positive action. Each of these, I find, is applicable to content marketing through blogs.

1. Acknowledge the good parts of your history.
As I teach at Say It For You, history has an important place in blogs. “History-of-our-company” background stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings admiration for business owners or practitioners.

2. Reckon with the not-so-good parts of your history.
Publishing content about past failures can actually prove to be a success, with the stories eliciting feelings of empathy and admiration by readers for entrepreneurs who recognize their own missteps.

3. Provide a clear and compelling mandate going forward.
At Say It For You, we know that, when searchers arrive at your blog, they already have an interest in (and probably some core knowledge about) your subject. Blog marketing reality is that, in order to move searchers to the next step, you need to “prove your case” with statistics showing you know a lot about the problem you’re proposing to solve, and that your and your staff have the experience, training, and degrees needed to solve that problem.

4. Get into the “weeds” of your plan with specific recommendations.
Smart buyers want clear, specific recommendations that tie back to solving those problems.. Since, other than the clues offered through the words searchers have chosen to type into the search bar, their individual needs are as yet unknown to you, include anecdotes as examples of common issues that have been solved using your products and expertise.

Blog marketing is all about describing – the past, the problem, the solutions – simply!

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Blog Posts are Ideas-in-Brief

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“To help busy readers quickly absorb and apply the concepts, the feature-length articles in these collections also include short ‘Idea in Brief’ summaries,” the editors of Harvard Business Review’s Special Issue explain, referring to the “text box” found in each long article..

What are text boxes?
As the Style Manual teaches. in technical or long-form content, text boxes, which sit on the page close to the text they support, are short articles that support the main body of the text. The content in the text box might contain a summary of the topic, examples, or an expansion of ideas in the main text. People tend to scan text boxes before they read the body of the text.

Blog posts as text boxes:

A blog post can summarize the topic:
Lawyerist.com teaches lawyers how to create powerful introductions when arguing a case in court, advising that an opening line must put the motion in the larger context, besides giving the judge a reason to keep reading.

A blog post can give examples illustrating the main message of a business or practice:
The “mapping method” of taking notes on paper can be adapted for blog series, where the content writer explores different aspects of the same topic in a group of three to four individual posts.

A blog post can expand on the ideas within the topic:
Blog content lets you go deeper than your website permits, creating a big, expanding brochure of practical, persona-optimized web content targeted to your market niche. Milie Oscar explains.

Text boxes and “callouts” are not just gimmicks – the main message in an article and the information in the text box must be directly related to one another. In the same way, whichever content an online searcher might encounter first, whether it happens to be the business website itself or an individual blog post, the core two purposes is the same – imparting understanding and forging connections.. “Before you include a text box or callout in your content, consider how it will help people understand or use the information,” Style Manual cautions.

Blog posts are nothing more than “Ideas-in-Brief”.

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Clear Explanations Beat Vague Cultural Allusions

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“Even if you’re not a man of words, you probably agree that plumbing slogans can make a huge difference in advertising your business and attracting customers,” Or Rozenberg writes in Workiz.com. Among the examples Rozenberg offers are “Let us do your dirty work”, “Don’t let your money go down the drain”, and “Got a leak? We’ll take a peek!”. Good plumbing slogans, he says, are memorable, with the “kind of rhythm that gets stuck in your head”.

So far, so great, I thought – good content marketing advice. I appreciated “making the flow go” and caught the reference to “all systems go” in “all cisterns go.” But, when I got to “Because a good flush beats a full house”, I got lost. (Call me old fashioned, but the only card games I know are euchre and gin rummy, and I just didn’t understand the play on words.)

Interesting – almost seven years ago, in this Say It For You blog, I cautioned: “Know your reader when using allusions in business blogs.” It’s not that allusions themselves aren’t useful. In fact, they can:

  • get readers thinking about your subject in a new way
  • get a point across without going into a lengthy explanation
  • cement a bond between writer and readers based on shared experiences and
    knowledge

However, if a reader doesn’t know the underlying story, literary tale, or other reference point (just as I don’t know poker), the result is frustration, not illumination. It’s as if the writer expects the reader to possess certain knowledge and grasp its importance and – well some just don’t. I get it – you want to liven up your blog content. But be reasonably certain that the reference is obvious and that your target readers are likely to be familiar with the concept you’re trying to convey (among other things, we as content writers need to gauge our readers’ level of education).

Whether or not you’re in the plumbing business, be careful when using allusions. After all, the last thing you want is for your online visitors’ interest and trust in you “go down the drain”!

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Allow Me to Introduce New Terminology

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Before browsing through a magazine handout at the grocery store called alive.com, I’d never heard the term “immunity debt”, and curiosity led me through an entire article by Dr. Gillian Flower. The thesis – our immune systems need exposure to viruses to protect us from infection, and lower exposure to others through the pandemic may have decreased our resistance, creating an “immunity debt”.

Apparently, not everyone agrees. “Immunity debt is a misguided and dangerous concept,” Anjana Ahuja writes in Financial Times. “There is no evidence that an individual is worse off for having avoided earlier infection.”

While I am certainly not qualified to weigh in on this medical discussion, as a content writer I was impressed by the fact that by simply introducing me to a new term, the author had the power to engage my curiosity about the subject.

In blog marketing, once you’ve established common ground, reinforcing to readers that they’ve come to the right place, it’s important to add lesser-known bits of information on your subject, which might take the form of arming readers with new terminology, serving several purposes:

  • positioning the business owner or professional practitioner as an expert in the field
  • adding value to the “visit” for the reader
  • increasing readers’ sense of being part of an “in-the-know” group

As content writers, part of our challenge is to educate both prospects and clients on the issues relating to their decisions to choose between one business’ products and services and those of its competitors.  Introducing a curiosity-stimulating new term is one possible way to do just that. At Say it For You, we believe in empowering readers by teaching them the correct use of the terms that apply in the blog sponsor’s field of interest and expertise. Any hint of controversy only adds to the mystique of the terminology.

Most important, buyers feel empowered to make a decision when they feel “in on” the “lingo”.

 

 

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Content Writing With a Twist is Tricky Business

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“Twists fail a lot because they are delicate things,” Jeff Somers opines in Writer’s Digest. You have to give your reader enough information to make the twist feel like something they somehow missed, he tells novelists.

Blogs are a great way to share new information with people in an easily digestible format. You can use blogs to teach new information in several ways, including guest posts by experts, listicles, and feature stories or interviews of people who have learned something new, Kesah Po writes in Quora. At Say It For You, we particularly appreciated Po’s suggestion that content writers feature stories of people who have learned something new.

Every book can benefit from adding a plot twist or two, to add tension, intrigue, and keep readers talking, N.J. Simmonds says in Jericho Writers. Plot twists seem to come out of nowhere, SImmonds adds, changing the direction of the story, after the author has “misled readers on purpose”.

But, just as Jeff Somers cautions novelists, in blog marketing, twists can also be tricky business. Not only does effective business blogging need to be centered around a limited number of keyword phrases and key themes, the core message needs to fulfill the implied promise given the searcher who has arrived at the site based on a need for specific information on a given topic.

That is not to say that, through blog posts, marketers can’t introduce readers to a solution they hadn’t known was an option for them. (Some of the most successful businesses represent new twists on old ideas and products.) However, since successful blogging begins with a clear understanding of your niche and target audience and adding value for them within their general range of needs and expectations, providing “twists” in the form of information they may have somehow missed, can be tricky. What’s more, what with internet marketing an ever-evolving field, content writers need to stay updated on the latest technologies and changes in search engine algorithms.

Deciding how and when to reveal information to readers is part of the challenge novelists face, Jeff Somers explains. As blog content writers, we share the challenge of delivering information to online searchers, doing that with a “twist”!

 

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