Who Will Taste This Almanac Tidbit?

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“Have you ever wondered what “sugar plums” were? Like every child used to hearing about sugar plums in “The Night Before Christmas” poem, the author of Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac thought sugar plums were fruit.  He was wrong, he later learned. In England in the 1600s, sugar plums were confit candies with a core of nuts or dried fruit encased in layers of crystallized sugar. To make the comfit, a seed or nut would be placed in the center of a pan, with sugar is layered around it. Depending on the size of the candies, a batch could take up to a week to complete. Subsequently, sugar plums were a cherished luxury back in the 18th and 19th centuries, Readelysian.com explains…

I find seemingly inconsequential tidbits of information like this highly useful when it comes to content marketing. Tidbits, I explain to clients and to writers, can be used to describe your unusual way of doing business, or to explain why one of the services you provide is particularly effective in solving a problem. The time and care that went into producing the sugar plums can be compared to the complex processes that go into producing your own products. The image of a “solid core” can be used as a metaphor for solid business practices and ethical standards upheld in your own company.

 

Content writers need never run out of ideas if they keep a file of interesting tidbits of general information on hand, and including interesting tidbits of information in corporate marketing blogs can help::

  • educate blog readers
  • debunk myths
  • showcase the business owners’ expertise
  • demonstrate business owners’ perspective

There’s another purpose tidbits can serve – softening. One of my favorite business books is Geoffrey James’  Business Without the Bullsh*t . The author showcases a point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions – whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you’ve need to express an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers.  Well, including interesting tidbits softens the effect of the strong opinions the business owner or practitioner might express in the content of the post, while at the same time helping to explain the reasoning behind those opinions.

Readers will savor those “sugar plum” tidbits in your content..

 

 

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Never Start With the Solution

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“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:

  1. the group you want to serve
  2. the problem you seek to solve
  3. the change you want to see made

In terms of all three of these elements, Godin reminds readers that, as humans, our decision making is primarily driven by one question:

“Do people like me do things like this?

The “things like this” refers to the changes you want to see made and the problem you seek to solve, but the first and most important item to address is the “people like me”. (Who is the “me???)

To achieve any degree of success through blog marketing, for example, your knowledge of your target audience needs to influence every aspect of your content, including the content itself, the style of writing, the length and frequency of posts, and the degree to which you elicit comments and feedback. It’s all about knowing – in detail – who the “me” is.

Fully seven years ago, friend and admired sales training expert Tim Roberts explained that, when it comes to teaching problem-solving skills, he encourages salespeople to focus on finding problems (perhaps those your customer hadn’t yet considered) before offering solutions. Translated into content marketing through blogs I explain to Say It For You clients, when searchers’ query relates to what you sell, what you do, and what you know about, those readers will find your blog. But, what if your content, rather than jumping into the solution, focused on raising questions and inviting input, rather than offering standard answers?

As I heard sales trainer Tory Buchan of Great Deals Marketing emphasize the other day in a presentation, branding is never a one-and-done affair. That means that for us content marketing means answering the “Who is ‘Me’? question not once, but over and over.

Great marketers start, not with the solution, but with the people they aim to serve!

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Showing Ideas Instead of Telling Facts

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“Great stories show ideas instead of telling you facts,” storytelling expert Karen Eber explains. We live in a story world, she says, with stories providing ways to:

  •  differentiate yourself
  •  build connection and trust
  •  create new thinking
  •  bring meaning to data
  •  influence decision-making

The “tools” we can use to accomplish these goals include the three story elements of character, conflict, and connection, the author adds.

Working “against” us as storytellers, she cautions, is the fact that most of what is read is easily forgotten, citing the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, a visual representation produced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus of the way learned information fades over time. In fact, he discovered, the biggest drop in retention happens soon after learning.

For us storytellers and content marketers, the encouraging note is in the “how” – the same set of information can be made more or less memorable, Ebbinghaus discovered, depending on how well it’s communicated in the first place.

Two important elements important in improving retention are time and repetition, Olivia McGarry points out in the LearnUpon Blog. “Spaced learning is considered one of the best methods for combating the learning curve.” Varying the content format using visuals, storytelling, and gamification, helps enormously, making sure learners know that completing the training will help ease their “pain points” and solve problems.

McGarry suggests that, when students share knowledge with each other, that goes a long way towards improving retention of the material. In that vein, at Say It For You, I advise content writers to periodically compose entire blog posts around questions posed by readers.

As content marketers, with the ultimate goal of influencing decision-making, we must help clients differentiate themselves, build connection and trust, create new thinking, and bring meaning to data, always remembering to show ideas rather than merely telling facts.

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Rolling a Picasso in Your Content

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“Roll a Picasso” is an art game developed by Emily Glass for use in an art or art history classroom, but it it makes for a fun exercise for groups of any age. Each roll of a die relates to a printed key, directing the “artist” to draw the head, the left ear, the nose, the mouth, by copying the shape on the chart. The different combinations of the 24 shapes make for a high degree of variety in the finished product. It’s interesting that, just days after posting “Telling Your Business Story Through a Brand New Lens”, I was introduced to this visual proof of how, by creatively combining – and recombining – a finite number of elements, we can continue producing engaging marketing content.….,

In corporate content marketing training sessions, I teach that effective blog posts are centered around key themes, just like the recurring musical phrases that connect the different movements of a symphony.  As you continue to write about your industry, your products, and your services, we tell business and practice owners, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas – in fact, that’s exactly what you should be doing, we explain, to keep the content focused and targeted while still offering variety.

  1. It’s important to stress that blog and social media posts tend to be most effective when they focus on just one idea. A content writer might go about:

    – busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing

– offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service

– describing an unusual application for a product

– describing one common problem their service helps solve

– updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession

– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Each post is similar to one “roll of the dice”, with the long-term effect being your “Picasso” work of art!

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Telling Your Business Story Through a Brand New Lens

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“There are no original stories, but there are always original ways to tell old stories,” Mariah Richards encourages authors in Writer’s Digest. A “new voice” has the power to change the “old voice” for the better, or at least in a way that might appeal to different readers, she explains. Kali Rose, in Oh Reader magazine, agrees. In fact, she loves to revisit her favorite books, with subsequent readings allowing her to see things she missed the first time around.

In the field of content marketing,  one concern I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners is that sooner or later, they (and we, their writers) will have depleted the supply of new and different ideas to write about. “What else is left to say?” is the common thread in the questions I’m so often asked.

At Say It For You, our content marketers have long ago learned that there are many subsets of every target market group. Not every message will work for every person, so coming at a topic again and again, each time from a different angle, is the secret to assuring readers we’re “on the same page” with their very specific issues and approaches.

By its very nature of periodic messaging, blog marketing is going to be centered around key themes. As you continue posting content about your industry, your products, and your services, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas, adding detail, opinion, and story around each.

In writing for business, as blog content writers soon learn, the variety comes from the “e.g.”s and the “i.e.”s, meaning all the details you fill in around the central “leitmotifs”. Case studies and testimonials illustrating specific instances of the company’s products and services became solutions to various problems.  It’s these examples that lend variety to the blog, even though all the anecdotes reinforce the same few core ideas.

In fact, at Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates”, not in the sense of platform graphics, but in terms of formats for presenting information about any business or professional practice, including how-to posts, list posts, review posts, and op ed opinion posts.

There may be no original content, but you can always help them see your business content through a brand new lens.

 

 

 

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