Use Stories to Humanize Your Brand

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“We learn who characters are the same way we get to know people in real life: We are introduced to them, we get a first impression, we see how they act and behave, what they do, how they react and interact, and little by little, we form a composite, ever-deepening picture of who they are.,” Tiffany Yates Martin observes in Writer’s Digest, teaching ways to bring characters to life on the page.

Post COVID, the Made For Knoxville initiative attempted to do that very thing, celebrating and  uplifting Knoxville founders and entrepreneurial leaders by highlighting their individual stories, asking the question “What was your big pivot moment that led to entrepreneurship?”.

To create a brand story that builds authenticity with your target audience, Adobe Express emphasizes, use storytelling for long-lasting impact, conveying the company’s message through compelling narratives rather than relying on “dry facts and features. Through storytelling, the authors assert, you can:

  • connect with customers on an emotional level
  • foster brand loyalty
  • humanize the brand

Our work at Say It For You is based on that precise concept, translating our clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, that’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message. I compare the interaction between content writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews, where the concept is to focus not on facts, but on discovering the “person behind the resume”.

For that very reason, “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective blog content for both business owners and professional practitioners. True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice, not to mention the special expertise and insights the providers gained that can now be applied, much to the benefit of customers.

In today’s technology-driven world, humanizing your marketing content is a way of bringing readers “backstage”, keeping the company or professional practice relatable. AI advances notwithstanding, the old saw still applies: People want to do business with people!

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Are Your Marketing and Sales Teams on the Same Page?

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Whether you are the owner, marketing manager, or sales manager, marketing and sales need to be on the same page. If not, too much time will be wasted by all. What can you do to make sure both functions work together?

Focus on the Prospect
Prospects move through  one to four phases of your sales cycle: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action (or Conversion), based on whether they convert to clients or drop out during your sales cycle. When do they drop out? Why did they drop out?

Your sales cycle is the timeframe that buyers (prospects and customers) take to make a purchase. Review your prospect’s journey using the 4 phases below:

  • Awareness – People become aware through multiple channels.
  • Interest – People want to know that you solve their problem and engage using your call to action (CTA).
  • Decision – People recognize you meet their need and ask about pricing.
  • Action (or Conversion) – People make the decision to buy from you.
  • Upon review, you will find answers to when and why prospects drop out of your sales funnel.

When and Why Prospects Drop Out
When prospects drop out often tells you why prospects drop out. For example:

  • Awareness – Marketing is driving the wrong people.
  • Interest – Your CTA (Call to Action)is not enticing.
  • Decision – What prevents them from buying?
  • Action – Why did they buy from a competitor?

Use your funnel to see what is going on.

Track Prospects with a Sales Funnel
Depending on business size, there are many ways to track prospects. A robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will:

  • Track prospects and report by sales funnel stage, sales agent, and value.
  • Trigger texts and emails to prospects (with CTAs) and reminders to sales reps to follow up.
  • Analyze which prospects are stuck at each stage.

A robust CRM helps you close more sales with less follow-up fatigue!

What If I Don’t Have a CRM?
If you have marketing and sales teams, you need a CRM. Robust CRMs deliver:

  •  Automation to engage with clients and prospects and to communicate internally.
  • Email and quote templates that replace repetitive manual work and use current branding, logo and format.
  • Segmented contact lists based on your criteria to send key messaging.
  • Lead scoring so that reps spend more time on their best prospects
  • Reports to show which prospects were not contacted in the last 30 days.
  • Leaderboards that report on your agreed upon metrics and milestones.

A robust CRM frees you up for your highest priorities.

Keeping Marketing and Sales on One Page
Think about the twelve “touches” needed to close most sales and spread them across the four phases. As you measure your results, you will find the answers to when and why prospects drop out of your sales funnel.\

Make sure your marketing and sales teams are on the same page!

 

This guest post was contributed by Jon Rutenberg, owner of CCCSolutions.com. Jon helps his clients close more sales with less followup fatigue and helps them manage their prospects, clients, outreach, and mail lists. He automates marketing and sales processes, organizes client sales funnels, and segments client contacts to deliver unique messaging, installing and supporting Customer Relationship Management systems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sharpening Your Content Creation Saw

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“Imagine if you learned 1% more today. That doesn’t seem like very much, right? Now, imagine you learned 1% more every day, 365 days a year. You would have increased your knowledge 365%,” estate planning attorney Brian Eagle wrote in honor of the March 2nd Read Across America Day, emphasizing that reading can keep your mind sharp and creative..

At Say It For You, we couldn’t agree more. Reasons our content writers make “reading around” such an important part of our daily routine include:

  • We need to keep up with what others are saying on the topic we’re handling. What’s in the news? What problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to the industries/professions of our clients?
  • We need a constant flow of ideas, and those ideas can come from unexpected sources.
  • We improve our own writing skills by reading books and articles about good writing.
  • By reading, we uncover little-known facts that we can use to explain our clients’ products, services, and “corporate culture”.
  • Since we’re in the business of selling and marketing, books and articles on those topics are interesting to us and important to our work.

Not only does “reading around” itself sharpen our skills and broaden our horizons, we often both collate and “curate” others’ material for the benefit of our own readers.

Collating is one important way in which content marketers can bring value to readers. Using content from our own former blog posts, newsletters, or even emails, then adding material from other people’s blogs and articles, from magazine content, or from books, we “collate”, or sort, that material into new categories, summarizing the main ideas we think our clients’ readers will find useful. When we curate content, on the other hand, we are giving credit to the authors of an article or post, but then adding our own “take” on that topic.

The term “sharpen the saw”, spica.com explains, comes from a story about two foresters. Competing to see who could cut down trees faster. While the younger man kept hard at work, the older of the two took a break during which he sharpened his saw. Although he had worked less time, he ended up winning the contest.

For us content marketers at Say It For You, reading around is our way of sharpening our saws!

 

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Don’t Lead Readers Into Content Word Traps

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My favorite article in the monthly Mensa Bulletin always seem to come from Richard Lederer, who excels in making witty observations about the use of language. In his latest “April Foolishness”, Lederer demonstrates how easy it is to unintentionally mislead readers….

  • “Pronounce out loud the words formed by each of these titles: B-O-A-S-T, C-O-A-S-T, R-O-A-S-T. Now, what do we put in a toaster?” (See how easy it is to answer TOAST? You don’t put toast into a toaster; you put in bread and it comes out toast!)
  • “How many times can you subtract 5 from 25?” (Only once. After that, the number is 20.)
  • What was the highest mountain on earth before Mount Everest was discovered? (Before it was discovered, it was there!)

Did you get all three answers right??

Mythbusting

Mythbusting is used in many fields to counteract what researchers suspect is counterproductive thinking, and I’m a firm believer in using debunking in content marketing. In the normal course of doing business, misunderstandings about your product or surface might surface in the form of customer questions and comments.  (It’s even worse when those myths and misunderstandings don’t surface, but still have the power to interrupt the selling process!)

The technique of mythbuting is not without risk, because customers and prospects don’t like to be proven wrong or feel stupid.  The trick is to engage interest, but not in “Gotcha!” fashion. In other words, business owners and professional practitioners can use blog, newsletter, and landing page content to showcase their own expertise without “showing up” their readers’ lack of it.

Engaging, but honest headlines

Don’t mislead readers by using sensational headlines, fastercapital.com cautions, because readers will be turned off if they feel they’ve been tricked into clicking on your content. It’s OK to use attention-grabbing words that evoke curiosity and emotion, but be specific about what readers can expect to learn or gain, Prova Biswas writes in Quora.

Unclear words and phrases

“On the surface, language traps refer to words or phrases whose meaning isn’t clear to readers and, worse, can potentially mislead them into thinking you mean something you don’t, hureywrite.com explains.

Mis/disinformation

“Knowing how to shield your company from mis/disinformation can be challenging. Your audience may lack the ability to critically evaluate media content, and this can negatively impact your brand,” Clara Doyle admits in publicrelay.com. “If you are not prepared to manage fake news, your audience may be likely to believe stories containing misleading information.” Since, at Say It For You, our writing team often functions as “communications director” for clients who hire us to bring their message to online readers, we know the important for mounting a strong defensive “play” in the form of blog content.

Content marketing is actually the perfect vehicle for defusing false news, correcting misunderstandings, and protecting readers from word traps.

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To Say Me Is To Know Me

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“There is a lot happening out there, seeming as if it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. The events are relentless, but so is the pace with which language adapts to the changes—with new and newly prominent ways of referring to a wild variety of very specific things,” Nick Norlen, Senior Editor of Dictionary.com writes. “The most recent additions to Dictionary.com come from just about everywhere, spanning the multiverse-like complexity of modern life.”

Norlen explains several of these new nouns:

  • Digital nomad (person who works remotely while traveling for leisure)
  • Nearlywed (person who lives with another in a life partnership with no wedding planned)
  • Rage farming (the tactic of intentionally provoking a political opponent)
  • Heritage language (a language used at home and spoken natively by the adults in a family, but not fully acquired by the next generation)
  • Deadass (adverb meaning extremely or completely)
  • Superdodger (Person who remains uninfected or asymptomatic even after exposure to a contagious virus)

Then, at our quarterly meeting of the Financial Planning Association of Greater Indiana, one of the speakers discussed the difference between the terms “phishing (fraudulent e-mails and websites) and “smishing” (fraudulent text messages), not to mention “vishing” (fraudulent phone calls).

Plain language matters in marketing, LinkedIn advises. Users – “Whether you want to inform, persuade, or engage your audience, you need to use language that they can easily comprehend,”

There’s another way to look at terminology, I remind content creators at Say It For You. Once we’ve established common ground, reinforcing to online visitors that they’ve come to the right place, it’s actually a good idea to add lesser-known bits of information on our subject. Doing that might take the form of arming readers with terminology that is new to them, adding value to the visit, but also giving those visitors a sense of being “in the know”.

Psychologically speaking, content writers can introduce industry “jargon”, then allude to those new words later on the content, giving an impression of “collusion” with the reader, smoothing the way towards a call to action.

New words and phrases emerge as a direct response to new concepts, the Macmillan Dictionary explains. Creative combinations of words stick “because they fill lexical gaps.” As content writers, we can help prospects “know” our clients by giving them the words to express what those business owners and professionals do.

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