Staying in Sync Without Stirring up Sting

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“Content must solve problems, answer questions, or entertain. You are not selling with content, you are building relationships,” the Core dna team advises. “Think about what your audience needs to figure out or decide, then build a tool around it.”

Yet, with such a culturally divided society, “advertisers may be asking themselves how they should show up in a society that’s culturally divided,” the current.com says.  While it’s important to stay relevant, recognizing community, national, and even worldwide events and trends that are at the forefront of readers’ minds, the question is how to create content that “connects with reality” without being “political”.

While marketers might choose to offer a respite from politics by promoting feel-good stories and product updates, as Okeeffe PR suggests, one of the most common – and most effective – ways to get consistent hits on your blog is to tie your content to current events,” Ray Access points out. In fact, the practical SEO-related suggestion Access offers to us content writers is to get in the habit of scanning headlines of a daily news site so as to use “newsworthy keywords” in our own content.

Aside from SEO tactics, at Say it For You, what we’ve learned over the years is that a huge part of engaging readers is reflecting and even directly alluding to current happenings and concerns in the community. People tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who “give back” and who actively participate in home town events and activities.

Consumers do want to buy from brands whose values match their own, Clare McKinley admits in basis.com, but this alignment does not have to be political, she points out. Values such as diversity, ambition, or work-life balance serve as a connecting factor. Hyper-personalization is the key in the long run, McKinley concludes. The population of eligible voters  in content marketing (think “eligible buyers“), is made up of many smaller groups, each of which creates specific opportunities for messaging”.

Of course, no piece of content, no campaign, can be all things to all people. Each post or article must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who are most likely to want to do business with you. And, as our world appears to be come ever more “political” and polarized, we content writers must work on “staying in sync” without “stirring up sting”!

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Can Marketing to Anyone Help Sell to “Someone”?

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In this Say It For You blog, I love to share with readers marketing insights gleaned from  my own “reading around”. On Tuesday of this week, I shared thoughts from Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, highlighting ways insights gained from customer complaints can be turned into positives through content marketing. Today’ I want to share some ideas I found in Leil Lowndes’ How to Talk With Anyone…

In her “self-help” book, Leil Lowndes offers tips and suggestions for building strong relationships with others, discussing the importance of body language and teaching how to use “mirroring” (imitating  another person’s mannerisms to make them more comfortable relating to you). As a content marketer, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by one of the 92 tips the author lists for keeping a conversation from coming to a hard stop…

Brief, “naked” introductory questions often lack conversational “bait” to encourage further dialogue, Lwondes points out. For example, when asked “Where are you from?”, if you respond with “Washington, D.C.”, there’s no easy way for the other person to continue the conversation.  Instead, use an expanded statement to offer a specific, interesting detail, making it easier for them to ask a follow-up question and keep the conversation going. At an encounter at an art show, Lwondes would follow “Washington, D.C.” with “which, by the way, was designed by the same city planner who designed Paris.” At an all-woman gathering, she might have added “I left D.C. because there were seven of us females to every man there”…

In content marketing, we’ve learned over the years at Say It For You, while you’re offering facts, opinions, and observations, it’s important to keep the “door open”, so readers can relate their own experiences to the topic and encourage them to “continue the conversation”.

Most business owners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services, which means that not every piece of content is going to be helpful to everyone. Fortunately, content is made of very “stretchable fabric” Today’s blog post can slant in one direction; tomorrow’s can take the same theme or “leitmotif” and deal with it in a different way, offering some valuable information or advice relating to just one aspect of your business.

Yes, you’re from Washington D.C. But how does that relate to where your reader is “coming from”?

 

 

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Hater-Hugging Content Marketing

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When customers complain, the last thing you feel like doing is giving them a hug. But that’s precisely what Jay Baer recommends in his book Hug Your Haters. In fact, Baer teaches, openly embracing and dealing with complaints can turn bad news into very good news for your business, because complaints can help you:

  • create advocacy
  • gather insights
  • differentiate you from your competitors

When Baer talks about dealing with complaints, he means all complaints, all clues that a customer’s experience with a business or practice hasn’t been up to expectations. That means paying attention to in-person and phone conversations. Most “haters”, though, complain “offstage”, rather than directly confronting an owner or customer service rep via phone or in persona, they use e-mail , texts, and post negative reviews, Baer explains in a podcast hosted by Kerry O’Shea Gorgone.

 

An Inc. Magazine review of the book emphasized a startling observation by Baer – Complainers fall into two camps – those seeking help and those merely seeking attention. The first category of complainers actually want and expect a response;  while the complainers don’t expect a response, when they do receive one, they are twice as likely to recommend that company in the future.

Too many business owners shy away from regular posting of articles and blogs for fear of receiving negative comments, we’ve found at Say It For You. Of course, if you don’t create and publish content frequently, you may not receive as many negative reactions, but neither will you attract the attention of search engines or of readers! In fact, “getting in front” of complaints by demonstrating in your content how you remedied a negative customer situation is probably the most positive kind of publicity you can ask for!  Don’t be afraid of showing your err-is-human side.  Your blog, I emphasize, gives you a chance to turn a “failure” into a success story.

 However, unlike working to amass “piles” of compliments in the form of reviews and survey responses, look for opportunities to create content telling “the whole story” – what the issue, problem, or complaint was, how you worked to solve it, and why the solution worked better than what the customer had ever experienced before.

 

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Titles — Seldom What They Seem

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One lesson we content marketers learn pretty quickly is that the rose may not smell as sweet “by any other name”.  In other words, titles are super-important. Periodically, I browse the shelves at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble to find examples of how a single topic can be approached in a plethora of ways. Yesterday, I sauntered down the Healthy Living aisle, only to notice how, to a much greater extent than I’d noted a year earlier, that the majority of titles did NOT make clear what kind of content I might expect to find inside the cover! 

  • The Good Vices (Ofgang & Ofgang)
  • High Octane Brain (Braun)
  • Floating in the Deep End (Davis)
  • Thinking Fast & Slow (Kahneman)
  • Generation M (Shepherd)
  • The 36-hour Day (Rabins)
  • Outlive (Attila)
  • The Vagina Business (Gerner)

When it comes to content marketing, all the titles show above could be classified as “Huhs?”, meaning that each needs a subtitle to make clear what the book is actually about. (The covers of the books named above did not offer even that type of clue.) There was one that had a “Huh? Oh! combination:

  • How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest (van de Laar). 

True, in choosing titles for blog posts and articles, it’s a mistake to ignore the kind of “intrigue” demonstrated above, and the power of a title to engage interest. Yet, because the keywords and phrases in the title help search engines make the match between online searchers’ needs and what your business or professional practice has to offer, the content in the body of the post had better “match” the headline “promise”.

So, did I see any titles on that Barnes & Noble Healthy Living shelf that gave more of a clue to what I’d discover inside the covers? A couple…

  • Eat Your Age: Feel Younger, Be Happier, Live Longer (Smith)
  • The Hormone Shift (Bahtia)

In devising content titles, we’ve learned at Say it For You, it can be useful to incorporate an element of surprise. Going back to the Barnes & Noble titles:

  • “good” and “vices” don’t belong together in the Ofgang title
  • “fast” and “slow” don’t belong together in the Kahneman book
  • “36-hour” and “day” startle in the Rabins title
  • “generation M” – we’ve heard of Gen X, Y, and Z, but M?

The quality and information contained in your writing doesn’t matter if no one ever reads it,” as Roy Youngman of the Business Relationship Management Institute bluntly states. “The Title of anything helps the reader decide whether or not the subject warrants their precious time to read further.”

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Content That Gets Gestalt

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In a post last week, I’d explored factors that make content more memorable, citing a study done at Cornell University suggesting that, while lines in a movie might become popular because of an unusually effective delivery by an actor, there are specific qualities that make quotes “stick in our minds”:  Memorable lines, for example, tend to be short, using simple syntax but distinctive words. 

This week, an Indy’s Child article about autistic kids caught my attention, because in essence it was describing an approach to language and learning that is quite the opposite of using “distinctive” individual words and phrases to get our point across…

 “Most people assume language develops in a linear, word-by-word fashion,” Jessica Willitz explains.  That’s not the case for the majority of autistic children, researchers found. 84% of autistic individuals are GLPs, gestalt language processors, learning in chunks and scripts – phrases they’ve heard from songs, shows, and the people around them. (The term “gestalt” is derived from a German word that means “whole” or “put together”. Gestalt therapy was developed in the 1940s as an alternative to traditional, verbally-focused psychoanalysis.)

A “gestalt” approach can be applied in creating marketing content, a WordPress article suggests. “The perception of stimuli as groups or chunks of information, rather than as discrete bits, facilitates memory and recall.”  When creating written content, we’ve found at Say It For You, consistent use of bolding and font size for key terms helps readers subconsciously group those together, as does white space surrounding a set of related statements. The object – making our copy more readable – and more memorable.

Going back to the tendency of autistic children to repeat “scripts” from songs and shows,  in content marketing, we’ve seen that threesomes can make content more  memorable (“the good, the bad, and the ugly”, “stop, look, and listen”). In articles and blog posts, while there can be a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business or practice,  one call for a single action, that focus can be supported by three points.

In creating marketing content, get gestalt!

 

 

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