Minding Your Metaphors in Creating Marketing Content

“When CEOs use war metaphors, analysts worry,” Joao Cotter Salvado and Donal Crilly point out in this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, citing Oracle executive chairman’s statement about “bulldozing” competitors or First Solar’s description of an acquisition as an “offensive”. Business should never be perceived as a battleground, the authors opine.

I thought of this article when, earlier this week, in her guest post about building “killer sales pitches”, Chantal Briggs made use of some very powerful metaphors. (“A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by stating that one is the other,” Alice Underwood explains in grammarly.com.)

Chantal Briggs’ metaphors of note:

• “You need tactics that punch above your size.” This expression comes from boxing.
• “messaging that doesn’t just land, it sticks.” (In gymnastics, a perfect landing means maintaining balance and control without any movement of the feet after hitting the ground.)
• “You’re not just a boutique coffee roaster; you’re the shop that sponsors open mic nights and buys beans from farmers by name.”
• “If your sales muscles feel flabby…”

“Metaphors are commonly used in the marketing space due to their ability to communicate complex topics in relatable ways,” IntuitMailchimp points out. In fact, certain metaphors (think “hold your horses”) are used so often they lose their original meaning and become part of our language pattern, the authors note.

In marketing content, we teach at Say It For You, one technique to engage readers is using an unlikely comparison in order to explain an aspect of a business or professional practice. Given the short attention span of the typical web searcher, “startling” comparisons can turn out to be good teaching tools, and suggesting, through an “off-the wall” comparison, a totally new way of using a product or service —  well, that has the power to open up new possibilities of doing business with you.

Putting ingredients together that don’t seem to match is not only an excellent tool for creating engaging business content, but also a good teaching tool. Going from what is familiar to readers to the unfamiliar
area of your own expertise, allows your potential customers to feel smart as well as understood.

As head of a content marketing team, I took a somewhat different “thought path” down one of Chantal’s metaphors. She uses “Sometimes the best advice is a mirror” to encourage entrepreneurs to go back to business school: “When you see someone who looks like you —same hurdles, same goals—succeeding through education…”.

To me, the core message of the “mirror” metaphor is that, as content marketers, we need never stray from reflecting, in our content, the needs and preferences of our “target market”, those who may not “look like us”, but who do face common hurdles and who have similar goals. “Envisioning your likely target market is part of the process of creating and refining a product. It informs decisions about its packaging, marketing, and placement,” Margaret James writes in Investopedia.

Minding our metaphors is key in managing content marketing. After all, none of us want our messaging to merely land – we want to stick the landing!