The How-I-Did-It Content Marketing Model

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“Why don’t you introduce your business and tell us what’s so great about it?” The editor of Start Your Own Business 2025 suggests to the founder of London-based ‘Go Car Shine’, posing three specific questions to guide the entrepreneur’s response:

  1. What made your business perfect for crowd funding?
  2. How was the experience?
  3. What advice would you give somebody with a great idea and a need for funding?

Score.org’s Rieva Lesonsky offers entrepreneurs some dos and don’ts about crowdfunding:

Don’ts include overpromising, launching a campaign before forming an actual entity, and forgetting to pay taxes on monies raised. Must-dos, on the other hand, include:

  • storytelling, sharing why you created your product or service
  • knowing your audience
  • setting realistic goals and timetables

Storytelling is an essential element in content marketing. However, as Seth Godin points out in his book All Marketers Tell Stories, not all stories succeed. The ones that do, he reminds us, are never aimed at everyone, only at an audience that already wants to believe. At Say it For You, we realize, knowing our target audience is the key to marketing success. The “Go Car Shine” story becomes the jumping-off point for offering advice to cash-strapped entrepreneurs, along with advice about marketing auto care services.

Whether recalling the start of your own business or professional practice or creating content for a client, it’s important to remember that recalling past failures can often turn out to be an indispensable tactic. Here’s why:

  • True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to connection readers feel with the people behind the business who overcame tremendous odds on the road to success.
  • By sharing tales of their own struggles, owners and practitioners demonstrate they understand the obstacles their readers are facing.
  • As Jamie Gutfreund once suggested in Forbes, “Gen Zs consider taking risks an important part of life and mistakes as badges of honor.”

The How-I-Did-It content marketing model is all about past failures ultimately leading to success.

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Gwawdodyn Hir Content Marketing

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In Writer’s Digest, I was introduced to Robert Lee Brewer, who created a series called Poetic Form Fridays, sharing, each week, an example of a different kind of poem. The Gwawdodyn Hir, for example is a six-line Welsh poetic form characterized by five things:

  • Each poem is a sestet (it has six lines)
  • There are nine syllables in the first four lines
  • There are ten syllables in the final two lines
  • Lines one, two, three, four, and six end rhyme
  • The end of line five rhymes with a syllable in line six

Brewer advises writers to try different formats for their own writing, setting the example by writing his very own Gwawdodyn Hir love poem called Languish:

Move the blood around your beating heart
and provide our love a chance to start
as if you’re the horse and I’m the cart
or lost explorer without a chart
to know the universe or words to say
through these silent days when we’re both apart.

As a marketing content creator, what I found so fascinating about this article and about Brewer’s original poem is that, staying within such almost over-restrictive Gwawdodyn Hir guidelines, the man was able to create a highly original piece of content, expressing a message of his own choosing.

In creating blog posts or articles, working off a “grid” can help writers organize their thoughts while still creating unique content:

“Consider the following steps and tips to write an article,” ExcelTMP suggests.

  • Choose a topic
  • State your point of view on that topic
  • Write the title.
  • Each section of the article should:

Describe what the section is about and why it matters.                                     Give detailed research or examples                                                                        Provide a “takeaway” thought for the audience

HubSpot offers its own grid:

  1. Why the topic matters: Explain the importance of the concept or task.
  2. Who it applies to: Identify the audience, industry, or sector that will benefit from the post.
  3. What to expect: Summarize what the post will cover (e.g., “In this post, we’ll explain why [term] is essential, outline how to [task], and provide practical tips to get started”).To stand out from the crowd, try incorporating your own expertise or examples as it relates to the term.

It’s interesting that, just one year ago, in this Say It For You blog, I quoted another Writer’s Digest author, Mariah Richards, who said, “There are no original stories, but there are always original ways to tell old stories,”

In the field of content marketing,  one concern I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners is that sooner or later, they (and we, their writers) will have depleted the supply of new and different ideas to write about. It’s true that, by its very nature, periodic messaging will involve repetition, with the variety coming from the “e.g.”s and the “i.e.”s, meaning all the details you fill in around the central “leitmotifs”.

Just as Robert Lee Brewer was able to be creative with the restrictive Gwawdodyn Hir guidelines, in our mission as creators of marketing content for our clients, we can create highly original pieces of content to convey our clients’ marketing messages to each of their targeted audiences.

 

 

 

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Comparability Claims in Content Marketing

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In the book Prove It, authors Melanie Deziel and Phil M. Jones teach readers how to use content as a tool to earn audience trust. The authors count five main types of claims owners can make in touting their strengths and comparing themselves to their competitors:

  1. convenience
  2. comparability
  3. commitment
  4. connection
  5. competence

(Prior to detailing precise steps involved in each type of claim, I was happy to note, Phil Jones makes a statement that reinforces a content marketing principle we’ve been emphasizing at Say It For You for the past eighteen years:

“One factor that influences trust more than almost anything else is consistency. How you  show up consistently is how you become trusted to show up.”

Business owners who are able and willing to maintain consistency and frequency in posting content are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most content marketing initiatives being abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. To a significant degree, “showing up” is itself a crucial factor in earning online readers’ trust.

But what happens if you do find gaps between your claims and their provability?  The authors (page 28)) suggest two alternatives:

  1. take steps to adapt and improve your practices and products
  2. adjust your claims to reflect the more reliable and provable truth

In either case, the authors advise using content marketing to “build a body of evidence”. There are three possible approaches:

  • Corroboration – statements by third parties, who might be experts in the field, or actual satisfied users of the product or service
  • Demonstration – stories and case studies
  • Education – informing consumers helps them feel better prepared to make decisions

Truth is, Phil Jones writes, one type of evidence alone won’t “do it” – it’s best to use a combination of the three.

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If You Want Them to Listen, Watch Your Language

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With now 60 countries of the world naming English as their official language, English comes out on top by a large margin, Paul Anthony Jones writes in Mental Floss. (There would be 61, but, while English is the national language of United Kingdom law, government, business, and education, it’s never been made official. In fact, English became official in the U.S. just this year!)

Within the United States itself, people in different regions use not only unique pronunciations, but unique vocabulary. In Texas, a laundromat is called a washeteria; in Ohio you’d refer to a vacuum as a sweeper.  In the Northwest, something expensive is “spendy”, Cassie Wright points out in Lingoda.

When it comes to content marketing, keeping it basic means using understandable, clear language. “In order to write an effective sales page, it’s absolutely critical to speak the language of your target market,” Joey van Kuilenburg writes in Linkedin, paying attention to the terminology they use, including phrases and word choices. At Say It For You, our message to the business owner and practitioner clients who hire us is this:

Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people. Everything about your content should be tailor-made for your ideal customer – the words we use, how technical we get, how sophisticated the approach to a subject, the title of each blog entry – all must focus on what together we learn about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions.

There are certain “Americanisms”, which are sayings we take for granted, but often don’t realize make no sense to foreigners, even to those who speak English.  That’s because foreigners don’t share our cultural memories and understandings.  As content marketers, we can actually turn that “outsider puzzlement” to our advantage, allowing readers to feel they are in our “inner circle” when we share those language “secrets”, I’ve observed over the years working with Say It For You clients from many different industries and professions.

The guiding principle in creating content is that, if you want them to listen, watch your language!

 

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Basing Content on What You Want Buyers to Believe

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“What do you want your buyers to believe?”  That is the question online marketers need to ask themselves when creating content, David Meerman Scott stresses in the 9th edition of his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.  What are your customers really going to be buying from you — is it great customer service? The safe choice? Luxury? Different buyer personas buy different things from your organization.

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer that you create from audience and market research, Flori Needle writes in Hubspot.  (A negative buyer persona, in contrast might include customers too advanced for your product or service or who are engaging with you only to gain knowledge, not to buy.)

Content marketing, however, is not about “forcing” prospects to believe. As Meerman Scott explains, customers tell themselves stories that define them and the way they relate to the products and services they use. Only if the story you tell your prospects and customers matches the story they’re telling themselves will your content be effective in appealing to them.

At Say It For You, we’ve learned over the years, content marketing will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers: a) You (the business owner or professional practitioner) understand online searchers’ concerns and needs and b) you and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

What we’ve discovered, for example, in business blogging is that, whether it’s the owners or practitioners themselves doing the writing or whether they’ve hired us to do the job on their behalf, the language used must give readers the right impression in order to create that “belief connection”

At the same time, it’s important to remember that “the system” (search algorithms) appears to value cumulative content, offering the opportunities for us content marketers to build buyer belief over time.

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