Either Way, a Good Bottle is a Good Bottle

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For the average wine drinker, it’s a no-big-deal thing, but for serious aficionados of Champagne and for those in the wine industry, Alison Napjus points out in Wine Spectator, there’s an important distinction:

While small grower producers, or “RMs”, source their grapes only from vineyards they own ,” negociants”, or ” NMs”, purchase their grapes from different villages and subzones. Connoisseurs (“wine snobs”?) might value RM products, but transferring ownership of land among family members is “prohibitively expensive” under French law, Napius points out, and RMs have trouble meeting demand. NMs, meanwhile, have begun paying closer attention to viticulture in their own vineyards.

The result of all this supply/demand push-pull is that the ” perfect” Champagne product today is neither an RM nor an NM, the author explains. Consumers are really just looking for a steady supply of quality Champagne. “At the end of the day, it’s what’s in the glass that matters, not the code on the label,” the author concludes.

The same observation might be made in my field of content marketing, I couldn’t help thinking. “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.

  • Prefer to use straightforward or “Huh? Oh!” titles for blog posts? Doesn’t matter, so long as, in the body of the post, you deliver on headline’s promise.
  • Whether you post content once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience.
  • Statistics can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem or to provide data about products and services a company offers. Either way, when presented effectively, numbers can move readers to make decisions.
  • “Jargon”, industry or profession-unique terminology can be used judiciously by content writers for explaining and defining a point, or simply as a way to establish common ground with a select audience.

Either way, a good piece of content is a good piece of content!

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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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Huh?/Oh! Titles Revisited

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Browsing the shelves of the nearest Barnes & Noble, I was reminded once more of how fond book authors are of using titles that first grab attention, then have explanatory subtitles. Knowing the importance of titles in creating online posts and articles, I long ago dubbed these “Huh? Oh!” titles.

The “Huh?”s are there to startle and capture attention, while the “Oh!’”s are there to explain what the text is actually going to be about. Importantly, in online marketing, those “Ohs!” are there to match the content of the post or article with the terms users typed into the search bar.

My exploration of the shelves in the Health section yielded some “straight” titles, such as:

  • The New Menopause
  • Herb Care
  • Healing Back Pain

Several others were examples of the “Huh? Oh!” tactic. (Had these books been on a general display, my interest might have been engaged, but, without the explanatory subtitle,  I would never have guessed they had to do with health:

  • 5 Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health
  • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
  • Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America

There are a couple of things you can do to make sure your blog posts have good titles, medium.com suggests:

  • Use keywords in your titles, making it more likely that your posts will show up in search results.
  • Keep your titles short and sweet. People are more likely to click on a title that’s short and to the point. Aim for titles that are no more than 70 characters long.

Following my exploration of those “Health shelves”, I purchased the latest issue of Writer’s Digest, curious as to whether I’d find many Huh?/Oh’s there. I did:

  • Confounding Expectations: Start With the Villain for More Engaging Storytelling
  • Finding Light in the Darkness: How Comic Gary Gulman Effectively Blends Humor into His Story of Overcoming Major Depression
  • The Unexpected Sells: Why Agents Want Genre-Defying StoriesAt Say It For You, we know that, for either straightforward or “Huh?-Oh!” titles of posts and articles,, one way to engage readers is using the sound of the words themselves, repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or consonant sounds (alliteration), so that searchers use their sense of hearing along with the visual.

    Never forget, though – whether you choose to use “Huh?/Oh!s to engage reader curiosity, the most important goal is delivering, in the body of your post, on the promise in your headline.

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Some Simple Truths About Blog Marketing

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“Proverbs are brief, well-known sayings that share life advice or beliefs that are common knowledge”, preply.com explains. “Proverbs can also provide a shortcut for explaining or imparting information, adds grammarly.

In terms of offering advice to our business and practice owner clients about their content marketing “habits”, two particular proverbs come to mind:

1. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
After years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that consistency and frequency are rare phenomema. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate in posting content, with most efforts abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. The oh-so-important lesson here is that blog marketing is no sprint.  A long-term, drawn-out effort is required in order to “build equity” in keyword phrases, gather a following, and gain – and sustain – online rankings.

2. Out of sight, out of mind…
Adhering to a posting schedule is crucial. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience and improves a blog’s search engine ranking.
Sharing your blog posts on social media and through email helps keep you “top of mind”.

When marketing online – whether it’s a product, a service, or even a concept, several proverbs seem particularly apropos:

1. Birds of a feather flock together…
To be an effective marketing tool for your business, your blog must to be the result of a well-planned strategy aimed at a specific segment of the market.  Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people, so your content must focus on things you know about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions – and where they “flock” – what social media sites do they frequent? At which community events, rallies, and celebrations are they to be found?

2. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…
One of the goals of content marketing is to “humanize” a business, creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame the odds and went on to succeed. But what about negative comments that readers make about a business or practice? When those concerns or complaints are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” more weight. Go ahead and “let the client tell his story,” which then gives you the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from the situation.

The simple truth about blog marketing is that it brings owners and customers together through the sharing of wisdom.

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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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