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Content Marketing Using How-Tos and How-To-Avoids

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How do people avoid killing themselves when swallowing swords? According to The Big Book of Big Secrets, one of the secrets is not swallowing. When you stand and face upward, the upper gastrointestinal tract is straight and flexible enough for a sword to pass through it – if you can resist the urge to swallow, keeping the two sphincters (one between your pharynx and esophagus, the second between the esophagus and stomach) from closing. In other words, sword “swallowers’ have to suppress their gag reflex. (“Practice” includes cramming progressively larger objects into the back of the throat while trying not to gag.) in addition to avoiding damage through mind control, some swallowers, the authors reveal, coat their swords with a lubricant such as olive oil.

“Content marketing works by capturing the attention of your desired audience members and helping them address their informational and task-oriented needs,” Jodi Harris of the Content Marketing Institute explains. The aim is for the audience to rely on your guidance, so providing advice about a tool or technique that can make their lives easier is key. “Tips and tricks” – meaning information on how to do things – add value.

Using your content to teach readers how to avoid negative outcomes is another way to provide value. To the extent in which you provide research, data, and logic to back up your advice, it will be perceived as even more valuable, Dana Herra explains.

Some business and practice owners new to the concept of content marketing worry about providing how-to or even how-to-avoid tips, fearful that they will be “giving away” their expertise. But there’s every reason to do just that, and to do it without fear, we explain to new Say It For You clients.

  • Caterers can showcase their skills by “giving away” how-tos in the form of recipes and table decorating tips.
  • A hospital operating room supply company might “gives away” how-to-avoid tips on pressure ulcer prevention.
  • An insurance professional might “give away” how-to-avoid household accidents tips.
  • Jewelers might “give away” tips on safety cleaning and storing necklaces.
  • A search firm might “give away” valuable how-to-prepare-for-an-interview advice.

Think of those “how-tos” and “how-to-avoids” as the “olive oil” helping the online visitor reading your content “swallow” your advice and ask you for more!

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The 3-Step Approach to Helping Readers Solve a Problem

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“Precedents thinking”, involves innovating by combining old ideas, Stefanos Zenios and Ken Favaro write in the Harvard Business Review. In teaching Stanford University’s popular course on entrepreneurship, they suggest a three-step approach to problem-solving and innovation:

  1. Frame – through a series of interviews, define what challenges need to be tackled.
  2. Search – develop a deeper understanding of those challenges.
  3. Combine – Take pieces of past innovations and solutions, even those used in different industries, that may be pertinent to the elements of this challenge (a sort of old-wine-in-new-bottles approach).

This discussion brought to mind a 2017 fourdots.com blog post that made a case for textual content as a primary driver of online communication as compared with video:

  • Text gives you the option to stop exactly where you want to, wrapping your mind around a certain piece of information.
  • Text can be easily updated and upgraded.
  • B2B buyers consume informational pieces and case studies, looking for industry thought leadership.
  • Text stimulates the mind and is more focused.

In the process of creating content that helps readers solve problems, we use text to frame the challenge, demonstrating that our business owner or professional practitioner client has, indeed, developed a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the reader. In fact, it is only once these two steps have been accomplished that readers will be ready to appreciate – and hopefully implement – the course of action recommended by the “Subject matter Expert”.

“Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problems; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems,” is the concept behind Seth Godin’s marketing philosophy. That is why, he tells us content writers, never start with the solution, but with the problem you seek to solve.

Use the 3-step approach in helping readers solve a problem!

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Approaching “the Big Reveal” – from Front or Back?

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To create a compelling story line in a novel, one with maximum impact,  Writer’s Digest editor Tiffany Yates Martin explains, you need to understand when and how to reveal crucial information to readers. On the one hand, it’s important to give readers enough information to feel invested, but you have to keep back enough to keep them “hooked”.

There’s a case for having the information revealed sooner: readers need enough information to give them a reason to care. Vague hints at a “dark secret” can feel manipulative, Martin admits. What’s more, “sometimes you gain more narrative mileage by spilling the beans sooner, so readers see the … impact of the secret on the characters and story.”

Nathan Ellering of coschedule.com translates this very piece of advice for creators of content marketing articles. The pro tip he offers is this: “Write your blog title before you write your blog post. This practice will help you define the value proposition so you can connect it into the blog post, which guarantees your blog title will deliver on its promise.”

At Say It For You, one compromise I’ve discovered is often used by book authors is the “Huh?” and “Oh!” title. The “Huh” title startles and arouses curiosity; the “Oh!”subtitle clarifies what the focus of the book will be. For example, the book title Notes from Scrooge entices, while the subtitle Why Gift Giving is a Lousy way to Demonstrate Love – At Least According to Economist reveals the financial counseling nature of the book.

In content marketing, the “reveal” may take the form of a personal story that showcases the unique slant of the business owner or practitioner, even describing the biggest mistake made in starting that business or practice and what was learned from that mistake.  Precisely because it is so very human to act inconsistently, revealing seemingly out-of-character aspects of the people involved in the business or practice is a way to foster empathy and engagement.

Still, content marketing cannot succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter and deal with online readers’ very short attention span.  “You’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it,” Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Made to Stick.

 

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Speaking the Silent Language Through Content

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“An important and often overlooked aspect of culture is that, despite its subliminal nature, people are effectively hardwired to recognize and respond to it instinctively.  It acts as a silent language.”  For us content marketers, that provocative statement, part of a fascinating article in the Winter 2024 special issue of Harvard Business Review, raises a number of issues.

In the book The Silent Language, Edward  T. Hall discusses the impact of  non-verbal communication, which includes a speaker’s gestures, facial expressions, posture, and personal distance. Even when communicating with fellow Americans, Andrea Jones explains, your body language can account for 55% of the message you’re communicating, with 38% of the impact coming from your tone and voice.

Whether we want to admit it or not, communication is strategic, Tim Sullivan says.. ”Any salesperson worth his or her salt knows this intuitively. It’s all about getting others to buy what you’re selling, whether it’s a widget, an analysis of a situation, a proposal, or just an offer of friendship. In all cases, it’s about releasing a desired response.”

In her guest blog post (published on our Say It For You blog just a year ago), Candace Sigmon of At Home Helper tells how important it is to know your target audience’s values, interests, and lifestyle in order to understand how and why they buy.

In content marketing, we don’t have tone of voice, facial expressions, or gestures, but we can use cultural allusions, referring to a fairy tale, the Bible, a TV character, or an expression to put ourselves on the same page as the readers – a sort of “You know what I mean!”

By knowing your target audience , you can speak their silent language through your content.

 

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Saying Less, Getting More

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From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out” (on the TV show “Shark Tank”), it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3 Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information, he cautions.

Ironically, what we’ve learned at Say It For You, saying less actually translates into more work and more prior thought in creating content that has a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business or practice. At the same time, each article or post should have three examples or details supporting the main idea.

Short is not easy, USA Today founder Al Neuharth liked to say. “It takes longer to keep things short.”  Yet being short and to the point is the most important thing to keep in mind, he wrote. For content marketers, I offer advice that’s a compromise – make blog posts as long as they need to be to get the point across, but not a single sentence longer. At the same time, our content needs to be personal and conversational rather than terse.

The number “three” in the 3-minute rule is significant in another sense.  Since we tend to process information using patterns, threesomes (think “stop, look, and listen” or “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, or “I came, I saw, I conquered”) not only make titles more memorable, but are a good model for organizing ideas within an article.

Among writing mistakes, K.M. Weiland admits, one of the most common is simply over-explaining. We distrust our ability to explain things well enough the first time around, she says, so we stick in more content just to make sure readers get the point. Don’t, is Weiland’s advice.

Of course, we freelance content writers have to overcome the challenge of the short attention span of online searchers (if we say more, we literally stand to “get less” across!) At the same time, in our efforts to make our marketing content personal, we need to be short AND sweet!

Over the years of creating content for a variety of clients, I’ve arrived at a 3-part standard of sorts for considering ourselves “done” composing a post:

  • We’ve covered one aspect of a topic in some depth.
  • We’ve offered value in terms of advice or information.
  • We’ve offered a visual to complement or symbolize the main point.
  • We’ve verified our research and facts and properly attributed quoted content to its author.

Whether you’re pitching a project on Shark Tank or composing marketing content, saying less can mean getting more!

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