Post How the Pros Do It

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You wouldn’t imagine consulting Golf Digest for tips on content marketing, but ideas are everywhere, as I constantly assure readers of this blog. This week, both our Say It For You posts relate to articles in the March/April issue of Golf Digest. In this second piece,  Mark Blackburn writes about what the game’s best players are looking for when they see a green for the first time….

“A PGA Tour course is like a riddle: It has an optimal way for a given player to make his way around — and it ends with diagnosing the challenges of each green complex,” Blackburn explains, listing things important to notice about a course’s topography:

  • where pins have been during previous events
  • amount of landing area and available run-out
  • grass thickness
  • contours – “banks” and “bowls”

Mark Blackburn is careful to explain why these details could prove important to the reader – “Your scouting report will influence club selection and aim…  Good golf is a compounding of positive, sensible micro-decisions… Just being a tiny bit better in where you leave your approach shots, and a touch closer to the hole with your wedge game, is how you save a stroke here or there.”

In fact, I believe, this article is a near-perfect model of what I call “advice column” content, because the tips Blackburn offers readers are not only highly specific, but practical and do-able. With  no direct tie to any product or services “pitches”, the author is firmly establishing himself as a SME (Subject Matter Expert).

At Say It For You, we sometimes encounter resistance from business or practice owners when it comes to posting content. Owners of personal service businesses, in particular, voice fears of giving away valuable information “for free”. (What happens in the real world, we’ve seen over the years, is that readers don’t want to do it all themselves and turn to the source of the advice they’ve been offered.)

This concept of “soft marketing” is one I keep coming back to: business writing needs to be conversational and informational, not sales-y. Readers understand you’re writing for business purposes. The very reason they have made their way to your site in the first place is that what you sell or what you do is a good match for their needs. It is not necessary – in fact, often it will defeat your purpose as a content marketer – to punctuate the text with Calls to Action – either overt or disguised.

Posting “how the pros do it” (whatever your “it” is), turns out to be a great way to establish trust.

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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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Don’t Be Like Flynn or Like a Sore Thumb

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No one likes being around someone who “drinks like a fish” and “sweats like a pig”, Richard Lederer observes in a humor piece reprinted in my Mensa Bulletin. “Avoid cliché’s like the plague,” is Lederer’s tongue-in-cheek advice to content writers. One of the ironies of language is that vivid comparisons become clichés precisely because they express an idea so well, the author admits.  Later, though, these “like” phrases become hackneyed and lifeless, turning your calls to action and reader engagement into big “yawns”. In another book I found, Powerful Writing Skills, author Richard Anderson agrees with Lederer that one sure-fire way to bore readers is using clichés, which he feels numb readers’ senses.

As content writers at Say It For You, we know we must be constantly on the prowl for words and expressions that help online readers feel a connection with our clients’ businesses and professional practices. And sometimes, a familiar comparison can help readers understand the latest development in the field, or better comprehend the benefit of a product or service being offered. “Snowclones”, a form of cliché mentioned in The Book of Random Oddities, can be used to reinforce the benefits of an activity (“Knitting is the new yoga.”).

“Like” clichés provide sardonic and funny answers to the question “compared to what?”, and that question is one it’s crucial for content writers to address. That’s particularly true in citing numbers. Real numbers dispel false impressions people have about an industry and can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem before you set about showing how you help solve that problem. However, numbers, when used in content marketing, tend to be tricky business. For every statistic about the company or about one of its products or services, even with the addition of comparisons, content writers must be careful to address every reader’s unspoken question – So, is that good for me (compared to what I am doing or using now)?

Comparison represents just one of many tools we content writers can use to get the point across, making the word “like” just about unavoidable “Like is a preposition you can’t refuse in our language,” Lederer observes.  But,  the author warns, use that word with caution. After all, you wouldn’t want your content to go over “like a lead balloon”!

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Convey the Concept through a Warm Human Storyteller

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Lately, brands increasingly prioritize people as the voice of their value, Robert Rose writes in “Trust the Story, or the Storyteller?‘

“Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to connect with customers on an emotional level, build trust and credibility, and ultimately drive sales,” Oxford Academic agrees, naming three reasons stories are so important a part of content marketing:

  1. Stories evoke emotions – empathy, joy, sadness, anger.
  2. Stories offer a glimpse into your values and beliefs.
  3. Storytelling gives your brand a unique personality. There are many different types of stories that can be used to connect with customers, the authors point out, including brand stories, customer experience stories, employee experience stories, customer testimonial stories, and case studies.  No matter the type of story, the point is to use vivid language to help readers visualize the event or happening.While it’s true that stories help us remember, that’s not good enough, Joe Lazuskas explains – they have to make us care.  Your stories need to talk about why you come to work every day, and about what you believe the future of your industry ought to look like. Two particularly important elements of a story are:
    a)Relatability – you’re telling the story of a person similar to the target reader.  b) Fluency – Realistically, Lazuskas reminds us, most U.S. adults can’t read at even a high school level; we need to keep a low barrier to entry between the audience and the story level.

    As a content marketer at Say It For You, I can never forget an article I read years ago about an experiment performed at Stanford University.  Students were each asked to give one-minute speeches containing three statistics and one story.  Later, students were asked to recall the highlights in each other’s talk.  Only five percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63% were able to remember the story line.

To convey marketing concepts, use a warm, human storyteller!

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Effective Marketing Content Makes It Achievable

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“To succeed with a decision-maker, the person proposing a change needs to demonstrate that the plan is achievable,” Garett Mintz writes in the Indianapolis Business Journal. If you’re in business development, you need to position yourself in a way that demonstrates you are the low-risk option, he explains – not necessarily in terms of costs, but in terms of the buyer’s time and reputation.  In “de-risking” the option you’re offering, Mintz suggests the following formula:

Proximity + Follow-through = Trust

Proximity through frequency

There’s a lot of wisdom here for online content marketers, I couldn’t help thinking. For example, in order to achieve “proximity”, Mintz says, the more time a business development professional can spend with a prospect, the more rapport and connection will be built. When it comes to online “pull marketing”, we know at Say It For You, proximity is achieved through frequency of posting new content.

The issue we find so often (and this has not changed in the seventeen years I’ve been the business of creating content) is that, even knowing that winning search and driving business to the website involves frequency of posting content, the majority of business and practice owners simply cannot spare the time – or maintain the discipline – of researching, creating and posting content frequently enough to make a substantial difference in their marketing results.

Proximity through recency

As we work with the owners of businesses or professional practices, we always stress how important it is to use the blog to provide information – especially new information – related to their field. Whatever the nature of their business or professional practice, we always advise using the blog to provide that kind of new information.

Couldn’t online searchers find more complete and authoritative sources of information, some ask?  Certainly, is my response. but readers need you to help them make sense of the information. And, the very fact that you’re posting new content frequently demonstrates that you’re maintaining “proximity” to what’s going on around you and in your profession or business area.

De-risking through content

Since, as Mintz so strongly emphasized, buyers are protective of their own time, content consisting of case studies, anecdotes, and testimonials (showing how your product or service saved valuable time) are important in building trust. In another sense, de-risking through content involves “de-bunking” of prospects’ unfounded fears and biases. By offering content in the form of “guiding principles”, you can allow prospects to move forward.

To succeed in our content marketing efforts, we need to demonstrate that the plan is achievable!

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