Chocolate Chip Content Marketing

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“No one is buying chocolate chip ice cream anymore,” a Mental Floss Magazine article points out. Thanks to a buffet of options and flavors, chocolate chip is now being perceived as passe and boring.  What’s more, due to health concerns, overall consumption of ice cream has dipped in recent years, the authors lament.

Ice cream is hardly the only area in which what was once the rage is now hardly remembered. Ponchos? selfie sticks? Hoverboards? (Who’d be caught dead?) Some things, of course, were made obsolete by technology (think paper maps, pagers, overhead projectors, typewriters, and telephone books).

Staying on top of trends becomes a crucial element in content marketing.

“The information you put on your website reflects your business, so ensuring you strike the right tone and include the necessary information is critical, IntuitMailChimp cautions. E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) have risen to the top of copywriting trends, Lauren Jefferson writes in Focus Copy.

“As consumers increasingly seek alignment between their purchases and personal values…brand ethics will become essential,” Vericast.com adds. “Instead of relying on broad demographic information, new technologies allow brands to create highly tailored campaigns to resonate with specific consumer groups.”

Despite all the trends that have come and gone, as content writers, we’ve learned at Say It For You,we can take courage from the fashion industry. There a sense of nostalgia has been awakened, with trends from the 70s and 80s making a comeback over the past decade.  Tailored jackets and cinched waists are fashion staples that have made a comeback.

Reminding content writers that there is no lack of resources available to our readers, I recommend going beyond presenting facts, statistics, features and benefits. By sharing some “chocolate chip ice cream” nostalgia, we have a better chance of engaging our readers.

 

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Reaping Testimonials of the Right Kind

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A new marketing rule issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission has now opened the door for financial advisors to incorporate testimonials, and Andrew Johnson, writing in ThinkAdvisor, wants to make sure advisors reap testimonials of the right kind and in the right way….

Many of the cautions and concerns Johnson mentions are centered around compliance (legal) issues. For example, advisors should disclose if the testimonial is coming from a current or past client, if that client has been compensated in any way for providing a testimonial, and if there are any conflicts of interest.

But at least two of the questions the author raises are relevant for any business owner or practitioner, I believe:

  1. How will you request a customer’s feedback? What will be the timing of the request?
  2. Once testimonials have been received, will all of them be displayed? If not, how will those used be selected?

Remember the 1977 movie about aliens called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”?  As I like to remind both the content writers at Say It For You and the clients who hire us, the goal of a blog marketing is to not to attract customers per se, but customers “of the right kind”. These are customers who have a need for and who will appreciate the services, products, and expertise being showcased in the marketing content.  On our end, “getting it right” takes planning and thought. Ask yourself: Are you selecting the right keyword phrases? Are you establishing the right clear navigation path from your posts to your landing pages? Are you blogging for the right reasons and with the right expectations?

In one of my earliest Say It For You blog posts, I recommended using testimonials and success stories to boost credibility. I quoted an observation by Webcopyplus.com that testimonials help your business in two ways, helping new customers decide to do business with you, but also fostering commitment from those providing the testimonials.

One common practice I’ve been careful to avoid when it comes to testimonials is writing remarks, then asking the client to approve and “own” them. In every one of the testimonials shown on my website, the words were created by the customer, never by myself or by another of the Say It For You team. I strongly disagree with Quora contributor Michael Stephen who says the following: “If a customer agrees to provide a testimonial, don’t wait for them to write it. They are busy, they are distracted with life, they don’t have the time. The solution? Write it for them forward it to them and let them know they can change it anyway they like.”

Yes, we “say it for you” in case study, blog post, and newsletter content, but, when asking for (“the right kind” of testimonials, we want our clients to say it for themselves!

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Love Those Contextual Links

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(Don’t you love it when someone confirms the correctness of a process you’ve always thought was right? ) “Quality content can get your web pages ranking higher in Google search results. But contextual links can help, too,” Aaron Anderson asserted in a May Content Marketing Institute piece.

Contextual links appear in the body of the text (just as shown in the paragraph above), citing the source of a claim or statistic, providing readers with the opportunity to get more in-depth information on the subject you’re discussing. “After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful,” Google says. “To do this, they identify signals that can help determine…..expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”.

With a contextual link-building strategy, Anderson adds, you encourage other sites to use your valuable content to provide their readers with additional information. The author suggests two tactics related to contextual links that marketers can use to improve their own website’s SEO rankings:

  • seeking out sites that have broken links and offering to fix the problem by using your content as a replacement
  • reaching out to other sites, offering to write guest posts on topics relevant to their audience (including a backlink to your own site)

At Say It for You, we consider two aspects of contextual links to be most important.

  1. Adding value: When online visitors some to our clients’ websites, it’s important to provide interesting, relevant information. While not every visitor will want to – or need to – “go deeper” into the subject, the benefit is there for those who do.
  2. “Giving credit where credit is due” by properly attributing ideas and content to their creators. “Information from sources can be paraphrased or quoted directly, but in both cases, it should be attributed,” ThoughtCo’s Tony Rogers explains. (As a longtime college tutor, I appreciated Sherice Jacob’s comments in the Originality.ai blog: “When attributing content to its creator, you don’t have to go through a long, lengthy footnote. You can simply mention the author with a link back to their website,”.

For me as content creator for clients in varied fields, “reading around” and “learning around” have become prescriptions for keeping content fresh and engaging. While gathering snippets of O.P.W. (Other People’s Wisdom), I enrich my own knowledge. But then, using contextual links, I get to “share the bounty with others..

 

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The Power of Op Ed Content Marketing

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A couple of weeks ago, at a meeting of our Financial Planning Association chapter, IU professor Greg Geisler* shared his opinion (proceeding to demonstrate why) that popular money guide Dave Ramsey’s advice to  recent graduates is absolutely wrong. (While Ramsey advocates getting rid of student debt before investing, Geisler shows why making monthly student loan repayments over the 10-25 years following graduation, all the while contributing to 401(k), health savings accounts, and Roth IRAs offers the potential for much greater wealth accumulation…)

*Geisler, Greg, and Bill Harden. 2023. “Maximizing Tax Alpha in both Accumulating and Decumulating Retirement Savings” Journal of Financial Service Professionals 77 (2): 46- 58.

One point I often stress to content writers is that whether you’re creating content for a business, a professional practice, or a nonprofit organization, you must demonstrate an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers.  Of course, you can aggregate other people’s insights, even succeeding in making your own website the “go-to” destination for information.  But, whether you’re creating business-to-business content or business to consumer marketing, the content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.

 In other words, when online readers find your site, one question they need answered right away  is “Who lives here?” What do they think? How much depth of knowledge – and of opinion – am I going to find here? We must be influencers, I advise clients and blog content writers alike. 

In 10 Tips for Writing an Opinion Piece, Median.com advises starting with an attention-grabbing opening line that cuts to the heart of your key message. (At the FPA meeting, both the name Dave Ramsey and the hot topic of student loans drew immediate attention). Chris Anderson, head of TED Talks, tells speakers: “Don’t share the obvious.  Nobody want to print what everyone already knows…Argue the point and elucidate as only you can.”

 

 

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Can Silence Sell in Content Marketing?

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“In all the noise from sales training, the underrated power of silence often speaks volumes,” Matt Nettleton of Sandler Trustpointe comments. “Handled correctly, silence allows prospects to reveal their deepest concerns and desires.” Skilled salespeople, the message is, listen intently, allowing the customer to speak.

“Successful selling requires a delicate balance between talking and listening. While you need to provide enough information to communicate your product’s value, you also have to make sure your prospect feels heard,” Aditya Kothadiya writes. “In our age of constant communication and short span of attention, genuine listening is a rare commodity and a great gift,” he adds. All those things are true only when you meet in person, Kothadiva admits. Even video conferencing, where salesperson and prospect can see each other’s faces, doesn’t create the same emotional connection as an iin-person encounter.

“Listening to customers isn’t just hearing about their problems. It’s not picking up the phone or answering the ringing bell at your service desk. It involves paying close attention to their needs and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals,” Sophia Bernazzani Barron says in Hubspot.

But how does all this work when it comes to online marketing? “Social listening”, InMarket’s Digital Marketing Playbook explains, involves monitoring keywords and paying attention to what people are saying about your brand. “You can leverage positive comments that you receive from customers about your products and service in your marketing strategy, sharing them on your website and other channels,” Hannah Smiddy of Swanky adds.

Certainly, as was discovered in a Schwab benchmarking study for Registered Investment Advisors, “when providers focus on the unique needs of their target audience, they can develop an experience that is perceived as valuable by those clients.” At Say It For You, we know that content must be tailor-made for your ideal customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry, all must focus on things you know about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions – and only secondarily on how wonderful you and your staff are at satisfying those needs and preferences.

Still, how can “silence sell” in content marketing, when, by definition, you are ‘sending out” messaging rather than remaining silent? Over the years, we’ve come to realize, “silencing” the features and benefits of your products and services, while “sounding” the voice of the people behind those products and services. After all, the people who find your blog are those who are already online looking for information, products, or services that relate to what you know, what you have, and what you do! Your online marketing challenge is not to seek out the people, but to help them seek you out and then show them you’ve been listening to “who they are”.

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