Losses Do Have Something to Tell You: Keep Telling!

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Losing is the main thing that happens in contests,” Rosalie Knecht wryly observes In Poets and Writers Magazine. Most people who apply for a job don’t get it, most dates are not great dates, and thousands of fresh losers are minted each year by the Oscars, the Grammys, and the Emmys. It’s important to learn how to lose, she thinks.  In fact, in the social sciences, she knows, there is a whole field of inquiry called resilience studies, which examines the question of how people carry their losses and burdens.  “A loss is just a win that happened to someone else,” the author observes, “It has nothing to tell you,” she reassured writers who fall into despondency when their submissions are rejected or downright ignored by editors and publishers.

Long-term, unrelenting resiliency is the secret of success for content marketers. While remaining alert to the relative success of certain articles, case studies, and blog posts is instructive in creating new content, throwing in the towel before success has had a chance to develop is the single biggest reason for failure in content marketing. Truth is, when I started Say It For You seventeen years ago, I knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, the main key to success was going to be simply staying on task. Now, after years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that  while consistency and frequency are such  rare phenomema, success depends on “keeping on keeping on”. 

Unlike Knecht’s message to writers about “losses having nothing to tell you”, I believe those early “losses” have a lot to tell us about our content marketing efforts – we need to keep on listening, researching, reading around, and “telling our story”!.

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Capturing Conflict in Your Content

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“Every great story depends on conflict to propel it forward, Jane Cleland writes in Writer’s Digest. The conflict can be one of four types:

  • actual or threatened physical attack
  • emotional
  • spiritual (loss of faith or shaken beliefs)
  • mental (a puzzle or intellectual challenge)

However, Cleland cautions, “if someone doesn’t care about a situation, you don’t have a conflict.” That means, she says, “We need to understand what makes people care“.

When it comes to content marketing, “conflict is a problem that the customer is motivated enough to resolve,” Truss Creative adds. In brand marketing, though, it’s not about the business owner’s origin story or their “disruption story”, but about the customer’s story. Writing effective content, therefore, means identifying the customer’s:

  • everyday annoyance
  • burning desire
  • quiet wish
  • tower foe
  • existential threat

In other words, what does your audience notice, value, want to protect, and want to project to others?

Years ago, my friend and admired sales training expert Tim Roberts told me that, while salespeople try to develop good problem solving skills, he challenges them to  first find, then solve. Finding a problem that the prospect hadn’t considered is what makes a salesperson valuable.

In blog posts, we teach at Say It For You, the opening paragraph is there to make clear not only what need, issue, or problem is to be discussed, but also what “slant” the business or practice owner has on the issue. Then, it’s crucial not to end in a “fizzle”,  leaving web visitors trailing off in a disappointed move. The ending has to resolve the central conflict, issue, or problem you’ve raised, leaving readers with a path to action and positive expectations.

Capturing conflict in your content might be the secret to success.

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Op Ed Piece Nails Allusion and Metaphor

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In Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box to care for, and when she opened it, all the world’s evils came out, including curses on humanity. The term “Pandora’s box” has become an allusion to something that seems valuable but turns out to be a curse… 

 In her opinion piece on leadership published  in the Indianapolis Business Journal, Samantha Julka uses the Pandora’s Box metaphor to encourage workforce leaders to go ahead and” open the box” by asking the kinds of difficult questions that are the only path to “hope” of improved performance…

The point of using cultural allusions in content marketing is to cement a bond between the writer and readers based on shared experience and knowledge, I wrote back in 2016. But if readers happen not to be familiar with the underlying tale or reference point, the danger is that the content will be frustrating rather than illuminating. “Know your reader when using allusions in business blogs!” I cautioned, advising marketers to gauge readers’ level of education, to avoid having “Huh?” be the reaction to their chosen metaphor.

Julka handled this very content writing issue superbly, I think. In explaining her thesis that the reason many workplace leaders don’t engage more with workers to learn about challenges and how to address them is that they fear questions might lead to requests they can’t (or don’t want to) fulfill. They fear “opening Pandora’s box” might anger workers rather than engaging them.

But, prior to illustrating her point using the Pandora’s Box metaphor, Julka actually reviews the story, putting all readers (regardless of their level of cultural sophistication) “on the same page”:

Pandora, the first woman on Earth, lets her curiosity lead her to open a mysterious gift she received from the gods. The gift contained all the world’s evils, which escaped when Pandora opened the box. It was impossible to put the contents back in.

 Having reviewed the reference, the author proceeds to state her recommendation to readers – “It’s better to find a way to open the box and deal with the contents constructively” framing questions in a way that benefits all of us”.

At Say It For You, we tell content writers to add picturesque metaphors to help readers remember the information.   I appreciated the way Julka used planning dinner for her own family as a metaphor for framing questions in the workplace. Rather than asking, “What do you want for dinner, boys?”, she now takes a more inclusive approach, asking the more criteria-based and abstract “What do you boys want out of dinner?”.

Julka’s “hope” is that her menu-planning query will allow mixing in some broccoli. As content creators, we’re hoping to mix in some search optimization terms ,along with are engaging content!

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In Content Marketing, You’ve Gotta Do More Than Rubbing Harder

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Earlier this week, we discussed the importance of infusing the unique personality or “esthetic” of the business owner or professional practitioner into their marketing content in order to “make things happen”. Ironically, the instruction label on a household product reminded me how often this good advice is apparently ignored….  

Preparing for the upcoming Passover holiday, I realized that my silver candlesticks had become tarnished and were in need of polishing. At my favorite hardware store, after selecting a packet of “polishing cloths for fine metal”, I began reading the instructions on the back of the package.. The first of seven bullet points of instructions read as follows (so help me!): “Rub tarnished objects gently. For tough jobs, rub harder.”  

”Writing a blog with relevant content proves to your audience that you’re a knowledgeable resource on the subject,” Mailchimp explains. “The content in your blog posts should be helpful and informational as that shows your customers you understand them and want to help them….How-to’s are a very popular type of blog post, explaining to a reader how to do a specific task.”

“When you teach your readers how to do something, it demonstrates three very important qualities about you and your business: You want to help 2.You can help 3.There is more help where that came from”, Linda Dessau writes on LinkedIn. Instructional posts are educational, offering advice and tops onn tackling either common complaints or niche problems, bigstarcopywriting.com observes. In fact, the authors add, instructional blog posts tend to be more successful than others in increasing landing page visits over time.

The thing to avoid, though, in creating content that helps and instructs, is exemplified by the inst4ructions on my silver polish package: talking down to your audience. (As Prince is quoted as saying “When you don’t talk down to your audience, they can grow with you.”)  The secret to success in instructional content marketing is making complex topics digestible without sounding as if your talking down to the reader.

Do I need the manufacturer to advice me that polishing my candlesticks effectively is simply a matter of rubbing harder? In creating how-to content, the one reaction you never want to elicit from readers is the one I had – “Duh!”

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Use Stories to Humanize Your Brand

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“We learn who characters are the same way we get to know people in real life: We are introduced to them, we get a first impression, we see how they act and behave, what they do, how they react and interact, and little by little, we form a composite, ever-deepening picture of who they are.,” Tiffany Yates Martin observes in Writer’s Digest, teaching ways to bring characters to life on the page.

Post COVID, the Made For Knoxville initiative attempted to do that very thing, celebrating and  uplifting Knoxville founders and entrepreneurial leaders by highlighting their individual stories, asking the question “What was your big pivot moment that led to entrepreneurship?”.

To create a brand story that builds authenticity with your target audience, Adobe Express emphasizes, use storytelling for long-lasting impact, conveying the company’s message through compelling narratives rather than relying on “dry facts and features. Through storytelling, the authors assert, you can:

  • connect with customers on an emotional level
  • foster brand loyalty
  • humanize the brand

Our work at Say It For You is based on that precise concept, translating our clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, that’s the reason 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”.

For that very reason, “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective blog 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 the special expertise and insights the providers gained that can now be applied, much to the benefit of customers.

In today’s technology-driven world, humanizing your marketing content is a way of bringing readers “backstage”, keeping the company or professional practice relatable. AI advances notwithstanding, the old saw still applies: People want to do business with people!

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