Bringing Yourself to the Page

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” For better or worse, in today’s world, everyone is a brand, and you need to develop yours and get comfortable marketing it,” Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald point out in the Harvard Business Review special spring issue. The question to ask yourself is what can you bring to the table of your industry out of your own personal experience. Two examples the authors offer:

  • You studied psychology, and have insights into human behavior.
  • You’re a UX designer who understands how to create more-accessible products.

Whatever your special talent, know-how, or experience, you can bring that to bear as an employee or executive to add value, is the point.

For us as content marketers, in essence “ghost-writing” newsletters, web page content, and blog posts for our business owner and professional practitioner clients, the concept of “bringing self to the page” has a double meaning. Yes, as Whitney Hill advises in a Writer’s Digest piece, “mining” areas of our own lives helps us connect with the right others. But since our purpose is to focus readers’ attention, not on ourselves, but on our content marketing clients, we use our own experience and wisdom to help readers “interview” those owners and practitioners in light of their own needs.

“Some articles have greater impact and reader engagement if written from personal experience, The Writer’s College explains. Writing an article from personal experience can avoid sounding generic, especially if you bring personal experiences to life with vivid sensory details, “showing” rather than just telling. Still it’s important to reflect on the impact and growth that resulted from the experiences you’re describing.

In using content marketing to translate our clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms, I prefer first and second person writing over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message. I compare the interaction between content writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews, where the concept is to focus, not on facts, but on discovering the “person behind the resume”.

In bringing our clients to the page, we know that “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective marketing content for both business owners and professional practitioners. True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice, not to mention showcasing the special empathy those providers have for their clients and customers.

Through messaging, ghost writers, providers, and customers are all “brought to the page”!

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Saying Less, Getting More

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From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out” (on the TV show “Shark Tank”), it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3 Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information, he cautions.

Ironically, what we’ve learned at Say It For You, saying less actually translates into more work and more prior thought in creating content that has a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business or practice. At the same time, each article or post should have three examples or details supporting the main idea.

Short is not easy, USA Today founder Al Neuharth liked to say. “It takes longer to keep things short.”  Yet being short and to the point is the most important thing to keep in mind, he wrote. For content marketers, I offer advice that’s a compromise – make blog posts as long as they need to be to get the point across, but not a single sentence longer. At the same time, our content needs to be personal and conversational rather than terse.

The number “three” in the 3-minute rule is significant in another sense.  Since we tend to process information using patterns, threesomes (think “stop, look, and listen” or “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, or “I came, I saw, I conquered”) not only make titles more memorable, but are a good model for organizing ideas within an article.

Among writing mistakes, K.M. Weiland admits, one of the most common is simply over-explaining. We distrust our ability to explain things well enough the first time around, she says, so we stick in more content just to make sure readers get the point. Don’t, is Weiland’s advice.

Of course, we freelance content writers have to overcome the challenge of the short attention span of online searchers (if we say more, we literally stand to “get less” across!) At the same time, in our efforts to make our marketing content personal, we need to be short AND sweet!

Over the years of creating content for a variety of clients, I’ve arrived at a 3-part standard of sorts for considering ourselves “done” composing a post:

  • We’ve covered one aspect of a topic in some depth.
  • We’ve offered value in terms of advice or information.
  • We’ve offered a visual to complement or symbolize the main point.
  • We’ve verified our research and facts and properly attributed quoted content to its author.

Whether you’re pitching a project on Shark Tank or composing marketing content, saying less can mean getting more!

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Emotion Has Everything To Do With It

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“As a highly data-dependent field, marketing requires us to absorb information about industry trends and buyer preferences. That can seem like a very logical endeavor if all you’re doing is letting the  data dictate your moves,” Rebecca Rick, content strategist at CIDDesign writes, “but that’s simply not enough. There has to be human insight and emotional truth at the heart of the messaging for anyone to care about it.”

Audiences crave authenticity from brands and are quick to notice when it is missing. “In a competitive landscape, ContentMarketing.com agrees, “customers aren’t interested in being sold a product; they are interested in finding solutions to everyday problems. “Modern consumers aren’t loyal to products, but to brands’ stories and experiences, intuitmailchimp.com adds. By tapping into emotions such as joy, nostalgia, and empathy, brands can create authentic experiences.  On the other hand, negative emotions can have a lasting impact, acting as a deterrent to customer engagement.

At Say It For You, we found great inspiration in Jeremy Porter’s “Using Emotion to Persuade”. “Remove the metaphorical barriers between you and your audience,” Porter cautions. In content marketing, one goal needs to be presenting the business or practice as very personal rather than merely transactional, reminding readers that there are humans providing the product or service.  “Don’t put on an act or ‘lecture’ the audience; infuse a sense of humor.” But, can emotional marketing be effective in B2B situations?  To be sure – no company is faceless.  Behind every decision there is always a person involved, and that person has feelings.

During the pandemic, when we were all exhorted to practice “social distancing”, I remember being impressed with a reminder offered by Dr. John Sharp of Harvard to not practice emotional distancing. As a content creator, I understood that emotion trumps fact for people, and that it is compassion and emotional intelligence that must drive marketing initiatives.

“Stories and narratives are particularly effective at evoking emotions because they engage our brains in a unique way, activating not only the language processing areas, but also the sensory cortex and motor cortex,” the Unity Environment University website explains. “Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story,” observes Seth Godin in his book All Marketers Tell Stories.

What we’ve learned at  Say It For You is that blogging is a very personal form of communication, and our clients’ messages need to be translated into human, people-to-people terms.

In content marketing, emotion has everything to do with it!

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How to Use Numbers Without Being a Numbers Nudnik

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With both of this week’s Say It For You blog posts representing my reaction to Ryan Law’s very provocative piece “The Four Forces of Bad Content”, today our focus is on what Law mocks as “deference to data”.  Yes, Law accedes, content marketing should be data-driven, but “the way most writers use evidence…actually undermines their argument.”  Three specific practices he mocks are a) injecting a tired-out statistic into an opening sentence  b) using questionable, outdated data points  and c) dumping quotes from experts with only a thin narrative to link them to the argument.

As a content writer and trainer, I actually believe that numbers, which can be used to “build belief” are often underutilized.  Statistics, I explain to business owners and professional practitioners, are not merely attention-grabbers, but can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem their product or service helps address. If there’s some false impression people seem to have relating to your industry, or to a product or service you provide, I explain, you can bring in statistics to show how things really are. Using data in content marketing relates to the theory of social proof, meaning that, as humans, we are simply more willing to do something if we see that other people are doing it. I agree with Law that, when using statistics in marketing content, it’s important to include the source, providing the answer to readers’ unspoken question: “Why should I accept these statistics as proof?”

A few years ago, I remember reading an Indianapolis Business Journal article titled “In the workplace: Data is a commodity, but insight is gold”. When numbers are tossed around, people generally view it as vital information, she says, but people may not want to read raw data; they want someone to tell them what the data means. When explained effectively, her point was, it can make people think and then move to making decisions.

Pedro Cardoso of Enterprise Apps Today has some very relevant commentary about data. Typically, websites are used to provide data, he says – what products and services the company offers and in what “packages”, who the players are, in what geographical area the company operates. (I believe that, on the better sites, there is also data presented pertaining to the owners and the history of the company). The real value, though, Cardoso points out is in the information behind the data.:

Go ahead and use numbers, we recommend at Say It For You, but avoid being a numbers nudnik!

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Be a SME, Not a Salad

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Both of this week’s Say It For You blog posts represent my reaction to Ryan Law’s very provocative piece “The Four Forces of Bad Content”. The first big negative “tell” of poor quality content, Law asserts, is a “bait-and-switch” approach, in which product Calls to Action are ‘smuggled” into an ostensibly informational article…. 

The Think eBiz Blog agrees with Law’s point about CTAs. “The blog should not be sales oriented… Provide good useful information and establish trust and credibility – sales will follow.” In this Say It For You blog, I keep coming back to the idea that business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. Ironically, the very reason they have made their way to your site in the first place is that what you sell or what you do is a good match for their needs. It is not necessary – in fact, it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with a “salad” of Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

According to About.Com, “a Subject Matter Expert is an individual who understands a business process or area well enough to answer questions from people in other groups who are trying to help.” Actually, the term SME (pronounced “smee”) is not new to me.(When I was a developmental editor for Pearson Education, the course writers would turn to the SMEs for specialized knowledge to put into student textbooks.)  At Say It For You, “SME development” is all about presenting our business owner and professional practitioner clients as experts in their respective fields, a way of translating the bad advertising “noise” to which Ryan Law refers into well-considered courses of action for readers.

The “salad” concept, on the other hand, need not be considered a “force for bad”. “Cutting” or “chunking”, breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information is a very good teaching technique, as e-learning coach Connie Malamed explains. Still, Ryan Law is absolutely correct in that a “salad” garnished with poorly disguised CTA s represents a bait-and-switch approach doomed to fail.

In their fact-finding mission, online readers have arrived at a particular site, looking specifically for information about what that business or that practitioner does and knows about. The tone of the blog content should assume that with complete information, readers will translate that information into action.

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