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Content to Get Them Going

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“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”, Charlotte Westerhaus-Renfrow, in an IBJ piece, reminds business owners eager for employees to “take a long, confident gulp from the digital watering hole”.  Getting employees onboard, though, is a human problem, not one of the technology itself, the author maintains, reviewing Robert Caldini’s six principles of persuasion to explain how each of those principles can be used to gain AI “buy-in” from employees.

Realizing that those same six principles can be applied to content marketing, I’m devoting this week’s Say It For You blog posts to showing just how I believe that can be accomplished….

Make it approachable – Success stories from employee champions who are approachable, not just tech experts, will resonate more deeply than top-down memos, Westerhaus-Renfrow explains. When it comes to content marketing, I call that “reaping testimonials of the right kind”. Testimonials in general help your business in two ways – not only helping prospects decide to do business with you, but also fostering commitment from those providing the testimonials. At Say It For You, we believe a testimonial is most “approachable” and believable when it’s actually created by (not only approved by) the customers themselves.

Show the payoff early – Demonstrate immediate value, the author cautions.  I remember a National Speakers Association teacher saying that “Customers do not want your products and services – they want what those products and services will do for them”. You might say that content marketing is all about demonstrating value. Although “listicles” can be popular with readers, that’s true only if the information appeals to searchers’ (how-do-I-?)..immediate interests.

Use the principle of scarcity – Highlight immediate opportunities that may be “going away”, Westerhaus-Renfrow advises. In content marketing, calls to action (CTAs) often use imperative verbs designed to provoke immediate positive action: find out more, call now, provide contact information, etc.. creating a sense of urgency around the offer.

No, having led them to the water, you still cannot make them “drink”. But sharing knowledge and showcasing  business owners’ and practitioners’ experience and expertise can certainly help “get them going” towards taking a sip.

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Teaching While You’re Learning

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Friend and writing coach Myra Levine, who often contributes guest posts to this Say It For You blog, had the most interesting thing to say in a recent newsletter:  “I’ll teach YOU what a fabulous writing instructor is teaching ME,” she promised. Explaining that she’s taking an online course with her own writing guru, Sands Hall, Myra offers: I’ll help you be ready sooner than I was!” 

For a new study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers led by Aloysius Wei Lun Koh set out to test their theory that teaching improves the teacher’s learning because it compels the teacher to retrieve what they’ve previously studied.  The work of learning by teaching is also known as the Protege Effect.

As applied to content marketing, one aspect of  the teaching-while-you’re learning concept is expressed by Lissa Delbrosse in Quora: “Teaching others necessitates anticipating questions and objections, which can assist you in identifying gaps in your own understanding.” I know this was particularly true for me in the early days of Say It For You (we’re now in our eighteenth year of content writing). As I was learning the ABCs of blogging, I would pass along insights I had gained that could be of use to readers.

As just one example, I’d attended a mini-seminar about trade show marketing called “Making Event Participation Work For Your Business”.  “Don’t sit behind a table. The table becomes a barrier,” Kathleen Haley had pointed out.  “Make it easy and inviting for customers to come inside your booth, away from the flow of trade show traffic.  Inside, you can talk to them, find out their needs, and share ideas with them”

“You want your blog to function like a great trade show booth,” I taught my readers. “The customer needs to come inside the booth (meaning click on to your website). Once you have customers inside your website, you get the chance to find out more about them and help them find out more about you.”

In another instance of teaching while learning, leafing through Southwest Airlines’ Spirit magazine, I’d come upon a feature story about country music stars and the songs that made them famous.  “Unlike on the coasts, where soloists write their own material, the author explained, in Nashville it’s the writers who feed the stars”. “It’s called co-writing”, she explains.  Now, isn’t that exactly true, I thought, about the way in which a business uses a ghost writer to bring its message and tell its story to as many customers and clients as possible using the power of the Internet?

Eighteen years later, teaching while I’m learning is still what content writing is all about for me!

 

 

 

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Taking Visitors From Then to Now

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A recent entrepreneurship piece in the Indianapolis Business Journal really caught my eye…”When you take visitors to tour your business, you usually want to show off your crown jewels: your latest product, a humming production line, a fancy new office remodel, etc., ” notes Ilya Rekhter. But at his company, Megawatt, they start by taking guests to their least impressive facility. “Unpolished and rough around the edges, it serves as a living archive of our early lessons and our growth…”, Rekhter explains. In fact, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve already missed the boat… After all, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Sharing stories of past failures and how your business overcame them can demonstrate resilience, growth, and a willingness to learn, Obehi Ewanfoh writes on LinkedIn. Failure stories, in fact, can educate, inspire, and engage your audience. But, while such stories humanize your business, making your brand more relatable, it’s important to tell about the creative solutions you developed and how the team pivoted to overcome obstacles, Ewanfoh cautions. You want to show that you and your employees take ownership of mistakes.

At Say It For You, we agree, having learned early that true stories about mistakes and failures add to the trust readers place in the people behind the business. What tends to happen is the stories create feelings of empathy and admiration for the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame the effects of their own errors.

A case study is just one way to frame a past failure – you use a post or article to “narrate” the story, providing details of what went wrong and how the situation was turned around to a positive outcome. In an “advice column” format, you might share your analysis of  “what to try when a certain business decision goes wrong”. In a “cautionary” piece, you warn readers about steps or situations to avoid.

In every one of these formats, the more specific and detailed the account, the more valuable the piece is likely to be to the audience.

Actually apologizing for mistakes in content marketing can serve as a damage control mechanism. Blog content writing, we’ve learned, can be a great tool for offering apologies, as compared to, say, email or letters.  Why is that?

  • Timeliness: Business blog material can be immediately created, published, and updated

(as compared to the typical corporate website).

  • Public acknowledgement: A blog post is “public”, which means the company’s owners are recognizing the customers’ complaint or concern in front of other people, which can give the apology more weight.
  • Ego-centricity: Angry customers want to heard and recognized, not just “made whole” financially. 

To take visitors from “mad” to “glad”, try taking them from then to now!

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Staying in Sync Without Stirring up Sting

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“Content must solve problems, answer questions, or entertain. You are not selling with content, you are building relationships,” the Core dna team advises. “Think about what your audience needs to figure out or decide, then build a tool around it.”

Yet, with such a culturally divided society, “advertisers may be asking themselves how they should show up in a society that’s culturally divided,” the current.com says.  While it’s important to stay relevant, recognizing community, national, and even worldwide events and trends that are at the forefront of readers’ minds, the question is how to create content that “connects with reality” without being “political”.

While marketers might choose to offer a respite from politics by promoting feel-good stories and product updates, as Okeeffe PR suggests, one of the most common – and most effective – ways to get consistent hits on your blog is to tie your content to current events,” Ray Access points out. In fact, the practical SEO-related suggestion Access offers to us content writers is to get in the habit of scanning headlines of a daily news site so as to use “newsworthy keywords” in our own content.

Aside from SEO tactics, at Say it For You, what we’ve learned over the years is that a huge part of engaging readers is reflecting and even directly alluding to current happenings and concerns in the community. People tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who “give back” and who actively participate in home town events and activities.

Consumers do want to buy from brands whose values match their own, Clare McKinley admits in basis.com, but this alignment does not have to be political, she points out. Values such as diversity, ambition, or work-life balance serve as a connecting factor. Hyper-personalization is the key in the long run, McKinley concludes. The population of eligible voters  in content marketing (think “eligible buyers“), is made up of many smaller groups, each of which creates specific opportunities for messaging”.

Of course, no piece of content, no campaign, can be all things to all people. Each post or article must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who are most likely to want to do business with you. And, as our world appears to be come ever more “political” and polarized, we content writers must work on “staying in sync” without “stirring up sting”!

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Can Marketing to Anyone Help Sell to “Someone”?

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In this Say It For You blog, I love to share with readers marketing insights gleaned from  my own “reading around”. On Tuesday of this week, I shared thoughts from Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, highlighting ways insights gained from customer complaints can be turned into positives through content marketing. Today’ I want to share some ideas I found in Leil Lowndes’ How to Talk With Anyone…

In her “self-help” book, Leil Lowndes offers tips and suggestions for building strong relationships with others, discussing the importance of body language and teaching how to use “mirroring” (imitating  another person’s mannerisms to make them more comfortable relating to you). As a content marketer, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by one of the 92 tips the author lists for keeping a conversation from coming to a hard stop…

Brief, “naked” introductory questions often lack conversational “bait” to encourage further dialogue, Lwondes points out. For example, when asked “Where are you from?”, if you respond with “Washington, D.C.”, there’s no easy way for the other person to continue the conversation.  Instead, use an expanded statement to offer a specific, interesting detail, making it easier for them to ask a follow-up question and keep the conversation going. At an encounter at an art show, Lwondes would follow “Washington, D.C.” with “which, by the way, was designed by the same city planner who designed Paris.” At an all-woman gathering, she might have added “I left D.C. because there were seven of us females to every man there”…

In content marketing, we’ve learned over the years at Say It For You, while you’re offering facts, opinions, and observations, it’s important to keep the “door open”, so readers can relate their own experiences to the topic and encourage them to “continue the conversation”.

Most business owners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services, which means that not every piece of content is going to be helpful to everyone. Fortunately, content is made of very “stretchable fabric” Today’s blog post can slant in one direction; tomorrow’s can take the same theme or “leitmotif” and deal with it in a different way, offering some valuable information or advice relating to just one aspect of your business.

Yes, you’re from Washington D.C. But how does that relate to where your reader is “coming from”?

 

 

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