Mining What You Know Yourself

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To make your writing more unique and richly layered, Whitney Hill advises in a Writer’s Digest piece, mine areas of your own life.  “Writing to market”, she says is a common and very viable strategy, meaning familiarizing yourself with the websites, social media, and trends preferred by your likely readers.  But, on a deeper level than “market”, there’s audience, Hill says. Market describes the places, times, and offerings; audience is the people in those places, times, and offerings. Digging deep within ourselves for inspiration can help us connect with the right others.

People

“Our families, colleagues, friends, and other people we know may spark an idea for….a narrative thread,” Hill goes on to suggest. (It’s important to remember factors such as safety, privacy, and liability, she cautions.)  My own twenty-seven year financial planning career put me in touch with a variety of teachers, speakers, and clients, each with stories and lessons…

Background

Educated in the public school system in Pittsburgh, parochial schools in New York City, University of Missouri in Kansas City, and the College of Financial Planning in Denver, Colorado, I have been exposed to a variety of learning experiences that I’m sure have found expression in my writing. 

Field

Language has always been at the core of my work. Following years teaching of Hebrew using the Voix et Image method of second language teaching, then penning a weekly financial advice column for twenty two years, I’ve been involved, for the past seventeen years, in content marketing. The “leitmotif” of finding the right words has characterized my days for as long as I can remember. 

Focusing on what we know best – ourselves – can be a way to strengthen our craft, helping us write stories that deeply connect with readers. Since, at Say It For You, our purpose is to focus readers’ attention on our content marketing clients, we are taking on the readers’ personas, rather than our own, helping them ” interview” the business owners or practitioners in light of their own needs.

While Whitney Hill is advising novelists and short story writers, the concept of “mining what you know yourself” is very appropriate for content marketers. In order to truly connect with our clients‘ readers, we need to connect with those clients’ people, backgrounds, and fields, all while finding connections to our own backgrounds, enabling us to mine what we know ourselves!

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Getting the Most from Testimonials and Case Studies in Your Marketing Initiatives

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Most businesses today pull out all the stops when marketing their products or services. The use of flashy advertisements, dynamically responsive websites, and heavily promoted brand benefits and features is par for the course for many competitive brands trying to stand out from their competitors. However, when it comes to setting up your business for long-term success, there is one thing most organizations need the most – credibility.When you’re able to provide social proof of the value of your products and services, you’re able to establish a strong foundation of trust with your current and potential customers. Showcasing client testimonials and case studies is a great way to achieve this.

Testimonials vs. Case Studies: What’s the Difference?

Both testimonials and case studies are valuable forms of social proof that can be used to help validate a business’s feature or benefit claim for its brand. However, the format for both of these varies, as well as how they’re delivered:

  • Testimonials – Testimonials are a collection of customer quotes, often originating from client feedback surveys and online business reviews. They typically focus on specific brand highlights such as their customer service, product benefits, pricing, or other experiences.
  • Case Studies – Unlike testimonials, case studies are conducted by the business specifically and offer an in-depth look and analysis of a particular customer’s experience when engaging with a brand. These are formatted in a PAS (Problem, Agitation, and Solution) framework to help quantify exactly how and why a solution positively impacts a client.

Using the Voice of Your Customers

Your customers are one, if not the, most valuable asset to your business. When you work hard to take care of them, it’s important to leverage this effort and turn their experiences and opinions into brand advocacy.

The Benefits of Publishing Testimonials

Builds Trust and Credibility

There are very few industry markets today that haven’t been heavily saturated with competition – regardless of the quality of brands that represent it. Establishing your brand as one worth engaging with takes more than just great product development practices. Testimonials are a great way to establish credibility quickly. Positive feedback from current customers is often much more convincing to potential clients than simply hearing about feature benefits from the brand itself.

Helps Address Brand Doubts

It’s only natural for individuals to be skeptical about the new products or services they’ve just discovered. While the affordability of certain products will likely increase or decrease this level of skepticism depending on how high or low the costs are, it’s still important to look for ways to help new buyers get past their initial reservations. Having published testimonials is perfect for addressing this.

Humanizes the Brand

Brands will often have products that are very similar to those of other companies in the market. While individuals are likely to compare features, benefits, and price points when measuring their options, knowing that a brand provides a great experience to their customers overall is a great selling point. Testimonials help to humanize your brand, giving potential buyers peace of mind that it’s worth giving your brand a shot.

Strategies for Gathering Useful Customer Testimonials

  • Ask Customers Directly – There are plenty of opportunities to gain more useable feedback from your customers – you just need to ask. Whether sending an email request for feedback or attaching surveys at the end of customer service tickets, the more customers you ask for feedback, the more usable social proof you’ll have to leverage.
  • Make the Feedback Process Easy – Even though customers may have a great brand experience, this doesn’t necessarily mean they have a lot of time on their hands to write a glowing review. You can increase the likelihood of receiving more feedback by simplifying the submission process and asking fewer questions.
  • Provide Incentives – One way to encourage your customers to leave their feedback is to provide various incentives for their additional support. This could include small tokens of appreciation like gift cards or discounts on future purchases.
  • Obtain Consent – An important element of collecting customer testimonials is obtaining consent from customers if you ever want to publish their statements on public-facing mediums. You should clearly explain where and how the feedback will be used and provide them the right to either allow or decline public posting.

Creating Compelling Case Studies

Case studies are another powerful way to add more substance to your feature and benefits claims. These in-depth reviews of how your brand’s products and services impact others can be incredibly convincing by providing real, tangible proof of how and why your brand offers something different than others.

Below is a common framework used for creating these studies:

1. Present a Clear Problem or Challenge

To begin a case study, you’ll want to choose an ideal customer where your product or service specifically benefited their situation. Start the process by creating a compelling narrative about a specific problem a customer was faced with and why they needed a certain type of solution. This helps add important context to the reader.

2. Introduce Your Solution

You’ll then want to describe exactly how your solution was introduced and used to help address specific pain points the customer experienced. This is the chance to highlight many of the feature benefits of a product or service by using real-world examples.

3. Showcase Quantifiable Results and Data

The most important part of a case study is providing tangible evidence that your solution was the right choice for the customer. To do this, it’s important to present quantifiable data and metrics (often provided directly by the customer) that help to tell the “before and after” effects of implementation. Many times, it’s helpful to provide visual aids such as charts or graphs that can help increase the impact of the messaging.

4. Highlight Any Key Findings

Finish off the case study by summarizing the key takeaways from the customer’s experience. Emphasize the value proposition of your product or service and its potential to address similar challenges for other customers.

Start Providing More Social Proof In Your Marketing Initiatives

Both testimonials and case studies are great ways to add highly valuable social proof to your marketing initiatives. By strategically incorporating these powerful tools into your website content distribution, you can create compelling narratives that resonate with potential customers and drive more conversions.

Author Bio:

Jacob Sussman is the CEO and Co-Founder of BX Studio, a Webflow Enterprise agency widely recognized as one of the top agencies building on the platform. Jacob has launched sites for clients including Headspace, NBC, and Pentagram, and been recognized by Webflow itself with awards and speaking opportunities. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sussmanjacob/

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In Content Marketing, Are Listicles Part of the Problem or a Solution?

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What reunites you with your car keys, slashes your dessert budget, transports you to Margaritaville, and douses the flames shooting out of your head, all while making you nicer? Well, as Amy Maclin asserts in Oprah Daily, it’s mediation.

As a content marketing trainer at Say It For You, I couldn’t help both admiring  – and critiquing –  “9 Surprising Benefits of Mediation”. Turning your frown upside down? Providing TLC for your IBS? Soothing Your Achy-Breaky Back? All titles to induce a smile. Good, cleverly written explanations, too.

(“Reunites you with your car keys” alludes to the fact that meditation improves cognition, according to a study of older adults; “Transporting you to Margaritaville “refers to the fact that mediation turns on the body’s parasympathetic nervous system – the flip side of fight or flight.)

“There are good reasons listicles remain one of the most popular forms of content today,” Hubspot points out. They’re readable, and, precisely because they’re bite-sized, they’re sharable. What’s more, nobullmarketing says, list posts are shared more often than posts in other formats. Still, given the quality of some list posts, there’s a chance they might be considered lightweight, the authors caution.

Travel writer Eric Reed does consider listicles lightweight. “If there is one thing we can certainly agree on above all else” he says, ” it is that listicles constitute the lowest form of journalism.” When you write a listicle, he points out, you’re not providing a transition from one thought to the next. Difficult subjects need a unified narrative, and listicles lack the background readers need before they can really get into your story.

At Say It For You, where we create content based on a combination of independent research and interviews with our business and practice owner clients, their staff members, and their customers, we view content marketing as SME-DEV (Subject Matter Expert Development). While listicles certainly have a place in our content marketing “toolbox”, we prefer to utilize the “Power of One”, focusing each blog post on one new idea, or calling for a single action.

Focused on one thing, a post has greater impact, since people are bombarded with so many different messages each day. Ms. Maclin, what I’d love to read is one long, detailed article, focused on the research concerning the many cognitive health benefits of meditation.  The title might even be “Meditation Can Reunite You With Your Car Keys”.

 

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What-Would-You-Do-If Content

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‘What animal best represents you as a person?’ How would you survive a zombie apocalypse? What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow?

By asking questions that avoid routine, rehearsed answers, interviewers can get a glimpse into an applicant’s skills and personality, Lee Hafner explains in Employee Benefit News.  Talking about the traits of an animal reflects your own qualities, the author explains, with a lion symbolizing leadership or a dolphin characterizing communication skills. A zombie apocalypse represents crisis situations, allowing interviewees to emphasize their adaptability and resourcefulness.  The question about winning the lottery allows candidates to show they are motivated by more than money.  Applicants should be ready for such out-of-the-box questions, using the job posting itself to prepare, Hafner advises.

In marketing, as in hiring, what-would-you-do research is essential.  For one thing, as Cascade Insights points out, “Today’s sales process is largely independent, with 68% of buyers preferring to research on their own before creating a shortlist. If your website doesn’t connect with your buyer’s priorities, or your content doesn’t show up where they are looking, you are likely to lose a lot of prospects that could have been leads.”

“As a consumer, I’m more likely to be a fan of and give repeat business to brands that know what I like and cater to my interests,” Flori Needle of Hubspot observes. After all, for any business, there are going to be customers who are simply too advanced for the product or service, or who engage with your content only to gain knowledge,( not as potential buyers).Meanwhile, 94% of marketers surveyed agreed that offering a personalized experience increases sales.

Just as Lee Hafner advises job candidates to be prepared to present their own “personas” by comparing themselves to specific animals, content marketers must be prepared to demonstrate they can meet their  target buyer’s specific needs, behavior, and concerns.

At Say It For You, we know.  As content marketers, we caution our business owner and professional practitioner clients that their business or practice cannot ever be all things to all people.  We explain that the content marketing we will be doing for them will need to be tailor-made for their ideal customers.  That “tailoring” includes:

  • what words we use
  • how technical we get
  • how sophisticated the approach will be in each article or post

What-would-you-do-if content means anticipating how “they” (those readers, not the average reader) might react to or feel about our approach to the subject at hand?

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No-No Expressions in Content Marketing

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Earlier this week, our Say It For You blog highlighted some very good tips Bruce Sanders offers in Financial Advisor Magazine to financial advisors about staying in touch with their clients. As a content marketing, I particularly appreciated Sanders’ advice concerning specific expressions advisors would do well to avoid in their communications.  “You might say something you consider witty or simply plain speaking, but your client might take it the wrong way”, he warns…

1.   You’re meeting with a client and the phone rings. You say “I can ignore that call”. Your intention was to show that the person in front of you is most important and that this meeting should not be interrupted. The client, Sanders cautions, might wonder if their call might get the same “brush-off” treatment when they need to talk to you.

2.   A client has learned that they cannot do something they wanted to do, either because of technology or other changes in policy. If you say “It’s firm policy”, that’s a turn-off – your client feels you should be arguing their case. See this from the client’s perspective. Show that you understand their frustration. Then show how the change will benefit the client in the long run, Sanders advises.

3.   “I want all your money”. Don’t offer an “all or nothing” scenario in which prospects must sever relationships with other vendors or professionals as a condition of dealing with you, Sanders warns.

“Powerful customer service phrases can help you improve client interactions by instilling trust, touchpoint.com explains. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?” shows that a service representative is eager to go above and beyond to ensure the customer’s satisfaction. If concerns arise, saying “Thanks for bringing this to our attention!”, or “I apologize for the inconvenience” can help maintain trust..

For content marketers, this advice applies to negative comments that readers sometimes make about a business, using social media. When those customer complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (i.e. in the content available to all readers), it gives the “apology” more weight.  “Letting the client tell his/her story,” gives the owner or practitioner the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from the situation. But, even when there haven’t been negative comments or outright complaints, we must engage readers and show them we understand the dilemmas they’re facing, going right to the heart of any fears or concerns they might have.

Getting everything “out on the table”, thereby building trust? Why, that may be one of the most valuable functions of content marketing!

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