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Yes, I Do Want to Hop on a Call — After You’ve Read My Blog Post

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Your colleague asks you a reasonable question.  You could take five minutes to write a cogent reply, but instead you say “Let’s hop on a call”.  What you’re really saying, Wes Kao opines in Entrepreneur Magazine, is that “I don’t want to do the work of clarifying my own thinking”. (It’ll be easier, you reason, to think out loud.) The problem isn’t calls, Kao explains; it’s defaulting to calls. When you draft a written reply and your audience takes time to read it and consider the content, everyone is in a better position to move forward, he emphasizes. By writing, Sarah K. Peck agrees,” you’re giving information that is helpful, documented, repeatable, and shareable”. In Rob’s Notes, the reviewer’s “take” is that Kao “encourages readers to invest in thinking and in crafting responses.”

As head of a content marketing team, I found this discussion in Entrepreneur especially interesting. At Say It For You, I’m always talking about the “training benefit” of blogging and content creation in general. While our business purpose is to present our clients as subject matter experts, a “side effect” for the business owners and practitioners themselves comes about in the process of conversing with us!  In essence, a blog is about giving readers information that is “helpful, documented, repeatable, and shareable”. The planning and exploratory conversations between owner and writer are, in effect, “training” entrepreneurs to better understand their own core business principles and practices

One very practical aspect of that “training” benefit accruing to entrepreneurs as they engage with their ghost writers has to do with the competition. Although one aspect of creating content about a business is comparing their products and services to others’, we “coach” our clients to emphasize the positive rather than “knocking” their competitor.  Rather than creating content about what the competition is doing “wrong”, we teach, the content needs to demonstrate what you value and the way you like to deliver your services.

And, for the very reason that Wes Kao encourages thoughtful written responses to workplace questions that arise, the process of creating content that will be “documented” and shareable, the process of owner/”ghost” collaboration results in productive self-examination and “training”.

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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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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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Is Three Perfection in Content Marketing?

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Aristotle taught it. Hemingway used it. Matthew McConaughey still does.  In “The Oldest Rule of Compelling Writing”, Linda Caroll is referring to “Omni trium perfectum”, meaning Three is Perfection.  With the human brain a pattern-seeking machine, the smallest number it identifies is three, Caroll explains.  As an example, in McConaughey’s Oscar acceptance speech, he said that, in life, we all need three things: someone to look up to, something to look forward to, and something to chase.

 

The laminated student guide “Writing Tips & Tricks” by quickstudy.com advises: “Ask yourself what you want the reader to know about your topic….Think of three details or three examples for each idea.”  Quick Study is referring to student essays, typically much longer, much more formal, and more detailed than blog posts. In fact, their sample outline format contains three main ideas, each with three details and examples.

In content writing for business, by contrast, I recommend a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business, a practice, or an organization.  Other aspects can be addressed in later posts. Focused on one thing, I tell business owners and practitioners, your post will have much greater impact, since people are bombarded with many messages each day. Respecting readers’ time produces better results for your business.

That doesn’t mean blog content writing shouldn’t make use of the “the three-legged stool” idea, with three examples or details supporting the main idea of each post, and using the three elements of:

  • Visual (images and charts)
  • Word content
  • Delivery (expression of the opinion clarifying the difference between the business owner and his/her competitor )

Three may be perfection, but all three of those must support one main concept in each content piece.

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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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