The Importance of Specificity in Content Marketing

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“Many writers rely on generalities rather than absolutes as they craft an article; this is both a cheat and disrespectful to the reader, who is left without the kinds of supporting details that can turn a good article into a great one,” Don Vaughan advises in a recent issue of Writer’s Digest.”There’s a meaningful difference between ‘a couple of centuries’ and ‘215 years’.”

Asked where writers might go to find those supporting details (other than a simple Google search), Vaughan suggests checking:

  • government agencies
  • military agencies
  • universities
  • data resources, both U.S. and overseas,

but also just talking to as many people as you can, expressing curiosity about their knowledge and opinions on the topic.

“Specificity can be your weapon of mass effectiveness,” Jason Cohen once wrote in “A Smart Bear”. Whether for marketing copy, blogging, a sales pitch, be specific. “Generic words are a sure sign of lazy writing.”

In content marketing, we’ve learned at Say it For You, the more specific you are in describing the shortcuts and solutions, the more engaging that content will be. Web searchers are on a fact-finding mission, looking for information that relates to what you do, what you sell, and what you know about.  The more specific the key words and phrases in the title and in the body of the blog post, the greater the chance search engines will direct those searchers to your blog. Then, the more specific the examples you provide and the terminology you use, the more impact you’re likely to have on readers of your content.

As “ghost writers’ for our clients, (our Say It For You contract guarantees that we will not write content for their competitors), we often find ourselves creating content on topics in which we have no prior experience or training. Don Vaughn’s advice about finding supporting details from agencies, universities, and specialty magazines is very apropos. “You don’t have to be a subject matter expert to write on specialty topics,” he says – “all you need is an innovative idea specific to the topic”  – and the willingness to delve into:

  • aspects of the topic’s history
  • profiles of prominent people who’ve benefitted from the product or service
  • news about developments in the industry
  • different opinions on the topic
  • human interest stories.

In content marketing, specificity can turn out to be a weapon of  creative effectiveness.

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Content Market to Reach the Ones, Not the Everyones

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Paul was trying to be everywhere, serve everyone, and sell everything. Still, his business had zero revenue for three months in a row. Then, using coach Justin Welsh’s “Rule of One”, Paul was able to effect a 90-day transformation, gaining five clients and a waitlist of three more.

The secret was in the focus, Welsh explains.

  • Paul’s content got better because he focused on one specific topic, posting content on one platform only.
  • His expertise deepened because he chose one offer that solved a specific, expensive problem.
  • He chose one customer type to target; he wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone.

Beginning back in 2008, I’ve returned again and again, in this Say it For You blog, to the theme of target marketing:

Blogs and Podiums – Choose Yours Wisely – Pick one primary area of focus – don’t try to do everything in one post.
Befitting Bloggery – Everything in your content should be tailor-made for one type of customer.
In With Blogging; a Small Business Can Have a Long Tail – high quality content can have a huge effect in a small market.
Smaller targets, Better Hits – Smaller, shorter, and centered around just one idea can turn mini-power into maxi-power.

“Trying to be everything to everyone is one of the gravest mistakes any business can make, the BigCommerce Team advises. Not only will targeting allow you to allocate your advertising dollars and marketing efforts better; “failure to understand the desires, core values, and preferences of your target audience can backfire tremendously”.

I like to call the process of creating content for professional practitioners and business owners “SME-DEV”, (Subject Matter Expert development). Yes, content needs to be focused “outward”, always keeping the needs of that carefully researched target audience in mind. At the same time, we must produce content that focuses on the people behind the business or practice, presenting them as Subject Matter Experts Who Both Know and Care.

Content marketing focuses on the ones, not the “everyones”.

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Solve for the Monkey in Your Content

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“We waste our time chasing the wrong projects,” writes Jason Feifer in Entrepreneur Magazine. “There’s no point in building pedestals if you can’t solve for the monkey,” he explains, referring to a problem-solving framework created by Alphabet (Google’s parent company) – Can you teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal? Unless the essential, pivotal problem is solvable — Can monkeys actually learn to recite Shakespeare? — there’s no use focusing on other aspects of the challenge.

To find your “monkey”, Feifer advises, ask yourself – “If I solved this problem and it was a great success, what major change would have gotten me there?” Stop spending time on fruitless steps, he says. Go get that monkey!

“When we talk with companies about the biggest challenges they face in growing revenues, we hear a consistent complaint,” Thomas Sittenburgh and Michael Ahearne write in Harvard Business Review.  “Companies that have invested millions to dream up new-to-the-world innovations need to become more adept at selling them to customers.”

Should you focus on the problem or the solution?  Focusing on the client means you sell the problem, not the solution, Emma Rose explains in Idea Rocket. Others insist that customers know their own pain points, and what they need is to understand is why your product is special in terms of solving that problem. In a “mature” market, it’s important to focus on the specifics of your solution (what you do better than anyone else and why you are unique).

Applying those viewpoints to our clients’ content marketing challenges, at Say It For You we’ve found that defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience providing solutions to that very problem can help drive the marketing process forward. Searchers are unlikely to follow you into a “deep subject dive” unless they perceive that you’ve “solved for their monkey” and know how to ‘tame-and-teach” the creature!

 

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How Do We Know What We Know and Let Them Know It?

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How do we learn to string words together into statements? How do we know to say “I don’t have much money”, but that the opposite is not “I have much money”? How do we know that “a picture of Paul” and “a picture of Paul’s” mean totally different things? In his piece in the March issue of the Mensa Bulletin, Richard Lederer ponders these language mysteries. Think about it, he urges. Why do we say “the bicycle is next to the building”, but never “the building is next to the bicycle”?

“In marketing, language is a key tool for influencing, persuading, and manipulating an audience,” writes Sambuno. Through language, marketers create messages that are tailored to the specific target audience in order to elicit a desired response.

  • a car company might use language that appeals to the emotion of safety and security when targeting parents who are car shopping for their families.
  • a fashion company might use language that appeals to the desire for self-expression when targeting young adults.

Marketers can craft a powerful emotional bond with the audience through carefully selected language. We may not know precisely why “I have much money” sounds funny, but grammar matters in content marketing. “When you publish content with grammar mistakes, you risk affecting your reputation, search engine rankings, and even conversion rates,” SEO.com explains. “While some grammar errors won’t affect communication, others will force people to re-read your content or guess what you’re trying to say.”

On the other hand…. (I enjoyed reading this dissenting commentary on the subject of perfect grammar): “Nobody cares how well-written it is, unless it solves a real problem, or who wrote the article, as long as it makes sense.”

While, at Say It For You, I reassure content writers that, if their marketing blog posts are filled with valuable, relevant, and engaging material, the fact they wrote  “a lot” when they should have said “many” or substituted “your” for “you’re” isn’t going to be a content marketing deal breaker.

We’re out to focus readers’ attention on the bicycle or the building, not on which is next to which!

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Using Failure as a Foundation

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“This is one tip I’ll offer to any struggling writer out there,” says Heather Fawcett in Writer’s Digest: “If you have an old idea in a notebook or saved to a flash drive, try recycling it into a new form”.

“It’s time you reinvented the word failure and saw it as feedback,” Suzie Flynn, BSc agrees… When you fail you have the opportunity to look at things from a new perspective, to experiment and even playfully have fun with new ways of doing things.

It was back in the early days of Say It For You that my then networking colleague Robby Slaughter had published the book Failure: the Secret to Success.  Based on the thesis of that delightful book, I explained to my readers two ways in which failure could be an important ingredient in blogging for business:

  • Your posts can demonstrate that you understand the problems the searcher is facing, and are devoted to the process of finding – and sharing – unique solutions.
  • Failure can become a standard by which to understand how a successful outcome will look and feel.

Some ten years later, I gained another perspective on failure when then Nuvo editor Laura McPhee devoted an entire section of the paper to highlighting “alumni”, people who worked there but who had departed for “better things”. As a content writer, I understood that the best way to make a company or professional practice relatable is to introduce readers to the people behind the brand, even if those people are no longer involved in making the products or delivering the services. And, of course, some of those stories and memories are going to revolve around failures – things that, at the time, had gone very wrong.

For me, Heather Fawcett’s piece in Writer’s Digest added a whole other dimension to the concept of using “failure” as a foundational element in content marketing: “recycling” ideas and presenting them in a new way more relevant to what’s happening “in the now”… One great content marketing sustainability tip is to keep an idea file, online or in a little notebook or folder with articles you cut out of newspapers or magazines, notes on ideas gleaned from a seminar, from listening to the radio, reading a blog or a book.. Your folder of “ingredients” , I tell newbie content marketers, will make your job a whole lot easier!

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