Content Lessons From the Stanley Cup

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“Of all the major sports trophies, none can compare to the storied history and quirkiness of the Stanley Cup, Sean Hutchinson explained in a fascinating 2017 Mental Floss magazine article. Although hardly an avid hockey fan, I couldn’t help noting – and sharing with Say It For You readers – quite a number of valuable content writing lessons in Hutcheson’s anecdotes and observations….

A new Stanley Cup isn’t made every year.
Unlike other major league sports trophies, a new Stanley cup isn’t made every year.  Instead, after each championship, the names of the players, coaches, management, and staff of the winning team are added to the cup.

Unlike a personal diary written in a notebook, Artem Minaev explains in firstsiteguide, blog entries are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the newest post on top, pushing previous posts down the list.. Older posts remain on the site, accessible in the “archives”, providing valuable resources available to readers.

The cup is always changing.
Between 1927 and 1947, a new, more streamlined and vertical incarnation of the cup was used. with a cylindrical shape. But, by 1948, the trophy had become too tall to hold or put on display, so the shape was changed to the tiered version used today.

Unlike the more static web page content, blog posts allow new insights and information to be constantly added without losing the cumulative power of older posts. The content can  incorporate the company’s history while showing what is being done to adapt to modern trends.

The cups are not always perfect.
Many champion player and team names are misspelled on the Stanley Cup. The name of the 1980-’81 New York Islanders is misspelled as “Ilanders,” and the 1971-’72 Boston Bruins’ name is misspelled as “Bqstqn Bruins.” Most of the errors are left as they are—it would be too costly to fix the mistakes. However, after 1996 champion Colorado’s Adam Deadmarsh’s name was spelled “Deadmarch”, it was correct after he publicly stated he was heartbroken by the error.

One function of any marketing blog is updating and correcting information, including your own older entries. Mistaken data may have been inadvertently published on your business blog. There may have been updates in a company policy, or in one or more of the products. Or, there might have been a recent development in your industry that makes one or more of your former blog posts “incorrect”. At Say It For You, we recommend going back periodically to former blog posts and insert corrections, perhaps in bold type.  That way, when online searchers find that “old” post, they can see that the company is keeping its readers current. Failed links and misspellings can be fixed as well.

Watch for more Stanley Cup content lessons in Thursday’s Say It For You post!

 

 

 

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The Big 5 for Content Writing

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“A writing conference is a perfect mix of all the ingredients you need to grow as a writer,” Scribd.com asserts. Novelists will start out learning the importance of the Big 5.

  1. Who is your hero?
  2. What do they want?
  3. Why do they want it?
  4. Why can’t they have it?
  5. What happens if they don/t get it? (the stakes)

At Say It For You, we teach content writers to help business and practice owners discover the answers to those very same Big 5 questions about their target audience. To a certain extent, online searchers have found the blog. A certain number of them have stayed long enough to assure themselves that the information you’ve provided is generally a good match for their needs. Now, however, you’re hoping those prospects will choose to become your clients, buyers, patients, or customers.

  1. Who is the target reader? What is their education and sophistication level? Where are they “hanging out”? What organizations do they belong to?
  2. What do they want? Status? Health? Knowledge? Technical advice?
  3. Why, in today’s world, is it important for them to find a solution?
  4. What factors stand in the way of their getting their “it”?
  5. What are the stakes? Why is it crucial for those readers to satisfy those needs?

Some special observations are in order about those “what-happens-if-they-don’t-get-it” stakes. People getting “scared” into action is an important topic in marketing, but at Say It For You, we are not fans of business owners using fear tactics in galvanizing customers into action. Instead, our recommendation to content writers would be to aim towards helping readers envision the potential comfort and relief that that using your advice, products, and services can bring.

On the other hand, it’s important in all marketing to convey a certain sense of urgency, using a “why now?” approach. Knowing the “whys” behind the “whats” – what your target readers want and what factors stand in the way of their getting it – allows you to offer marketing content that provides Big 5 answers!

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Blog Like You Have an Illustrator

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As a professional illustrator, Ebony Glenn offers advice to book authors in a Writer’s Digest piece. Your story, Glenn says, will help the illustrator pair art with text.

Have a compelling theme
To get an illustrator’s wells of creativity overflowing, Glenn says, have a compelling theme. The theme is your story’s North Star. If you have too many poorly defined themes, it will be a challenge for readers to connect with you. Readers need to be able to find the why to your text.

In a sense, focus is the point in blog content writing. At Say It For You, we firmly believe in the Power of One, which means one message per post, with a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business, geared towards one narrowly defined target audience.

Provide resources
Provide your illustrator with resources and notes if your story requires additional research (it’s about a historical figure or takes place in a foreign setting), Glenn tells picture book authors. In blog content, links are part of the resources you’re providing for readers, Amy Lupold Bair says in Blogging for Dummies. At Say It For You, we see collating information from different sources and then organizing that information in a different way provides great value to readers.

Use art to arouse curiosity and evoke emotion
It is the job of the illustrator to engage readers with their imagery, Ebony Glenn admits, enriching the content with intrigue and stimulating curiosity. While words are the most important part of blogging for business, visuals, whether in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, add interest and evoke emotion.

Personally, in blog marketing, I like clip art. While these commercial images are not original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t actually depict a practice’s or a business’ products services, colleagues, or customers, often clip art is more effective than anything else in capturing concepts, helping me as the blog content writer express the main idea I’m articulating in a post.

Read, read, read
Asked for a top piece of advice for aspiring illustrators of all ages, picture book mentor Kim Rogers answers, “Read, read, read some more. It’s the best way to see how books are written, which ones work and which ones don’t.”

Ditto for blog content writers, I’ve been teaching at Say It For You. In order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing. You need to keep up with what others are saying on your topic (What’s in the news? What problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to your industry or profession?) You need a constant flow of ideas.

So, no, you may not have an illustrator, but keep these valuable tips in mind in order to keep producing focused and inspiring marketing content.

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Is Content Marketing For Performance or Brand?

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“Over the past 20 years, performance marketing has become the dominant approach , referring to paying third party channels to generate sales, leads, and click through direct mail, search engines, and social media sites,” a recent Harvard Business Review article states.. But, the authors question, “Is performance marketing crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer awareness of, attitudes towards, and affinity for their companies’ brands?” In fact, the authors relate, at the Cannes Lions Int’l Festival of Creativity, th authors relate, the issue most voted for as important to discuss was managing the tension between brand and performance marketing.

As content marketers at Say It For You, we work with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for the blogs we ghostwrite. In a very real sense, the very process of deciding what to include in a post is one of self-discovery, with the creation of content being part of the process of inventing and reinventing the business brand.

The performance marketing piece of the puzzle, meanwhile, involves the use of keyword phrases. SEO is the practice of optimizing content to clearly define what your webpage is and what information it is providing, explains Elena Terenteva in the SEMrush blog. Some areas that need to be optimized, Terenteva explains, include page titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, and internal links. But should blogs be built around these performance marketing tools? .Using keywords in a natural way in y our post is good for SEO, web influencer Neil Patel says, “but don’t overdo it”. “The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone.  Nowadays, quality content is king,” says Seattle freelance writer Carol Tice.

At Say It For You, we’ve found, our business owner or professional practitioner clients are interested in is spreading the word about what they know, what they know how to do, and what they sell. In that sense, the content writing effort is meant to “perform”. But, in content writing training sessions, I’m continuing to emphasize the verbal, not the viral. That means we’re writing marketing blogs not to attract the attention of gazillions of readers, but to attract prospects of the right kind. Blog posts are essentially about reaffirming the company’s or the practice’s brand.

On the other hand, customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a “brand story”; they want to tell themselves the story,” Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business authors Cooper and Gruntzner advise. The goal in blogging for business is creating loyal customers who have an emotional engagement with your brand.

Is content marketing performance or brand? It’s both.

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The Other Side of Showing What It takes

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In Tuesday’s post, we discussed the importance of “bragging” to make readers aware of “what it takes to do what you do and how much effort you put into acquiring the expertise you’re now going to be able to use for their benefit…”

The other side of “showing what it takes” involves how-tos and useful pieces of advice, explaining what steps will be involved in readers accomplishing a particular goal. One aspect of blogging is putting your own unique slant on best practices within your field, calling attention to rules and safety procedures of which readers need to be aware.

Actually, from a content writer’s point of view, giving instructions is a lot harder than first appears. There is no end to the technical information available to consumers on the internet. Our job, therefore, becomes helping readers understand, absorb, buy into, and use that information.  One way to empower customers to make a decision is to help them understand the differences between various industry terms, as well as the differences between the products and services of one business compared to those offered by another.

The advice Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Small Business Marketing Guide offers starts with giving away information to get clients. “By providing visitors with free and valuable information and services, you entice them to return to your web site often.” Ironically, many business owners are initially afraid to share “too much” information with prospects until after they’ve become clients. At Say It For You, our experience has been that providing useful instruction to prospects instills confidence in the provider and cements the relationship.

Blog content is part of the BRAN analysis process prospective clients use when choosing a provider of any product or service:, and taking readers through that process is a way of “showing them what it takes” to achieve the results they want or the answers they seek.

B = What are the benefits?
R = What are the risks?
A = What are the alternatives?
N = What if I/we do nothing?

“Bragging” makes readers aware of what it took for the business owner to be able to offer such a high level of expertise and experience. Taking prospects through BRAN analysis shows what it will take on their part to achieve the hoped-for outcomes.

Blog content marketing addresses both sides of the “what does it take?” question.

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