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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Listen to Stand Out and Be Heard

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In recent Say It For You posts, I had been discussing the importance of understanding your target audience, by being alert to their preferences and opinions as expressed on social media. I invited friend and networking colleague Joe Rutenberg, owner of CCC Solutions, to comment on “listening” to connect with a target audience….

Buyers are flooded with inbound messaging so how can you stand out and be heard? Listen to the right sources to get started. Writing content and delivering it consistently is hard. How can you deliver effective content regularly? Answer 2 questions:

  • What excites your audience?
  • What do you want them to do once they are excited?

You want to move your audience using content delivered at key stages of their decision process to achieve your goal.

The Right Goals

Do you want to: Close a sale; Entice a prospect; or Inform a customer about product benefits. Where in your Sales Funnel is each prospect? Content is based on your audience and where in the sales funnel they are. Regardless of audience type, resonating content, delivered consistently, is the goal.

Prospects and Clients

Prospects and clients have overlapping and different attributes and needs.

  • Prospects need to trust you and believe you reduce their risk.
  • Clients need to see recurring value and best pricing.

Effective content focuses on what your audience believes is important.

Resonating Content is Important

When you listen, others listen, and you build trust. When your content shows empathy and speaks to poignant topics, it becomes “sticky.” Content that “sticks” is about your audience, not you. Being “sticky” makes you top of mind and the “Go To” person in your technical area. Sticky content is remarkable because it is specific to an industry, function, market, product, or geography and is what your audience cares about.

Listen to Hear Topical Content

Listen to the marketplace to find content. In addition to AI sources, sources include:

  • Your clients – Ask clients 4-5 questions about their business, industry, and why they chose you. It is a great way to touch base.
  • Client and prospect websites – What are they talking about?
  • Industry and trade association newsletters and websites.
  • Community and Civic groups – When your audience is geographic.
  • Social media channels – Choose channels based on what you sell (B2B or B2C).

Listen to the common questions and concerns and build your “Topic Library.”

Consistent Delivery to Multiple Audiences

How can you deliver consistent content to different audiences all at once? The solutions are the right content writer and the right CRM. Depending on company size, you may have:

  • In house or outsourced content writing. Both work as it is all about talent.
  • No CRM or an enterprise CRM. A CRM is a must for marketing and sales.

A talented writer and robust CRM are a winning combination.

How to Stand Out

Use your CRM to reach your audience before they make decisions. Review your sales cycle and trigger content driven outreach prior to milestones in your sales cycle. Use content that is relevant at each stage of your sales funnel. Make your content “Sticky” and you will be remarkable!

 

Want To Stand Out In Every Crowd?

Visit www.cccsolutions.com and Close More Sales 

Explore CCC’s Marketing And Sales Strategies

 

 

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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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