How Do You Want Your Content to Make Them Feel?

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Hobbies present an escape, helping you get out of your head and calm down, associate professor of health psychology Matthew Zawadzki explains, but it’s important, in choosing an activity, so ask yourself how you want it to make you feel. Should the hobby result in your feeling:

  • mentally engaged?
  • distracted?
  • socially connected?

“Marketers aim to understand the needs, wants, and behaviors of their target audience in order to effectively promote and sell their products or services, Official Insights remarks on Reddit.com.  “This often involves researching and analyzing data on consumer demographics, psychographics, and buying habits.”

One study conducted by professors at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that content inspiring awe, surprise, or humor is much more likely to be shared. But audiences differ, and, as content marketers, we need to know our target audience’s pain points, desires, and frustrations, in order to understand what emotional context we should include in our content, contentwriters.com cautions. Going even further, emotional context actually includes phrase and word choices, even terms, and acronyms with which your readers are familiar.” BrainyGirl Kim Garnett points out.

The best way to “make it personal,” Maxwell advises in  his book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, is “to pair what they do know with what they don’t know.”  Learn the organizational culture of the group, their personal experiences, even their national origin, then communicate the insights about you have about that already acquired knowledge.

Our Say It For You content writers have come to understanding that our purpose is not to  admonish, warn, frighten, or even inspire online readers, who have arrived at our site on a fact-finding mission, looking specifically for information The tone of the content should assume that with information presented in a way that mentally engages them and forges a connection, they will move forward with action.

As we plan our content, while we aren’t aiming at presenting an readers with an escape, we do want to make them feel both mentally engaged and socially connected – with our business owner and professional practitioner clients, that is!

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The Long and the Short of it When it COmes to Content

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“The best content is the right length, includes keywords, and is relevant to the reader”, Intuit Mailchimp explains. You want your blog posts to engage readers and improve SEO, and the length of your posts is an important metric.

Fill with no fillers.
As a content creator at Say It For You, I particularly appreciated Mailchimp’s observation about length: “There’s a lot to learn about some topics, but others are simple and straightforward…Some blog posts need to be short and sweet… The moment you feel like you’re adding filler content, you should start trimming down your blog post to the important parts.”

Having composed blog posts (as both a ghost writer and under my own name) numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to fix on any rule about length other than “It depends!” I like to remind writers of what Albert Einstein said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Compose to fit.
Factors to consider in deciding the length of a post, MailChimp reminds marketers, include:

  • the target audience’s sophistication and prior knowledge of the subject
  • the purpose of each blog post
  • the complexity of the topic itself
  • the frequency of posting
  • the actual metrics of past postings (how much time have your readers been spending on the site?)

Position the owner or practitioner as a Subject Matter Expert.
Establishing trust and credibility by offering usable information and insights is not directly related to length. Once readers feel assured that you know your stuff and that you care about offering good information and good service, they might be ready to take action before they even read all the way into the blog post!

Consider SEO.
“Search engines tend to prefer longer content, so go with longer content if you’re trying to improve your search engine rankings,” Intuit Mailchimp advises.. The “golden” blog post length, according to WIXblog, is actually 2,300 – 2,500 words: Articles of this length, the authors state, are “typically thorough and educational, and therefore have a much higher chance of ranking on search engines.”

When it comes to length of blog posts, the long and short of it might simply be “it depends!”

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Focusing on the Reader of the Story

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“Here’s how to introduce yourself to a reporter so that you will be a source for a news story on the subject,” consultant Janet Falk writes. The five W’s, she advises (who, what, when, where, why) should serve as the framework for your pitch.

In blog marketing, the “Who”, of course, denotes narrowing down your audience in order to “target” the content to those you most hope will be reading your post. “Be as specific as possible,” Falk cautions.

The “what?” has two components: What idea or concept will you present? Then, what will they do next with that idea? Think of readers’ situation before they learned this information; compared to after they hear about it, Falk writes.

Translated into content marketing, the “what” relates to the “where”. In the Call to Action, what alternatives are you offering for next steps? There should be more than one: those ready to buy should be enabled to do that right away (link or phone number). Those who need more information before making a decision should be able to message you. For those not quite ready for any of those steps, provide a link to a video or white paper. Navigation to that “where” needs to be very easy.

The “Why” is the most important question of all, Falk explains. “How will your idea help someone save time, save money or make more money?”

When it comes to blog marketing, there’s a lot of talk about “traffic”. Yes, blogging is part of business owners’ and professional practitioners’ “pull marketing” strategy, designed to attract readers’ eyeballs. In practice, however, fewer might actually prove better, I explain to Say It For You clients. The real goal is attracting readers of “the right kind“, customers who have a need for and who will appreciate the services, products, and expertise being showcased in your content.

 

In the scenario Janet Falk describes, you are introducing oneself to a reporter as a source for a news story, In content marketing, the “reporter” is the search engine algorithm, which serves as a “gateway” for you to tell your story to the target reader. “Social media algorithms can be a powerful ally in growing one’s online audience. Think of them as virtual matchmakers designed to match users with content that suits their interests,” sproutsocial,com explains.

Whether you’re introducing yourself to a reporter or to an algorithm, define your five W’s, always focusing on the ultimate reader of the story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Watch Your Tone of Content Creation

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“Sometimes we have no choice but to implement rules,” my speaker friend Todd Hunt admits, but we may have a choice as to how we present those rules. While one hotel at which Hunt stayed posted a notice reading “Breakfast buffet food not allowed beyond breakfast area”, another facility took a different approach, saying “We request our guests to have breakfast only in the lobby area to maintain the food safety standards on our property.”

“Tone of voice plays a crucial role in effective communication. It allows us to express emotions, convey meaning, establish rapport, and influence others’ perceptions,” everydayspeech.com explains. “One element of communication stands out — tone,” Tracy Brower, PhD, writing in Forbes, agrees, citing data from Grammarly and the Harris poll showing that working remotely increases the need to be a better communicator.

Tone and language are tricky to deal with when it comes to written communication, universalclass.com explains. A speaker’s body language, voice, intonations, eye contact, and general demeanor  offer essential clues about what the speaker is feeling; with print content, this instant give-and-take of nonverbal signals is not possible.”  Still, written messages can take a conversational, a cajoling, or an apologetic tone.

In the case of the two hotel signs Todd Hunt saw, the second message had a more positive tone in that it explained “the why” (the reason guests were to keep all food within the breakfast area). In content marketing, calls to action (CTAs) often use imperative verbs to provoke readers to take positive action, from requesting further information to actually signing up for a newsletter, to actually making a purchase.  But online visitors who’ve found themselves at your blog want to know why they ought to keep reading and why they should follow your advice. Why the urgency about the specific solution you’ve proposed?  Why this price point?

Even couched in a polite, rather than bossy tone, it’s simply not enough for content creators to provide information to online searchers who’ve landed on our client’s corporate blog. The facts need to be “translated” into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action – in readers.

For positive marketing results, pay close attention to the “tone” of your content!

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Content Creation By –and For — Humans

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AI algorithms can produce thousands of words quickly without needing a human to do research or writing. What’s more, “most AI-generated content will be grammatically correct,” itseeze.com authors concede. AI tools are certainly cost-effective in terms of time-saving, but “there are also risks that you need to be aware of.” As a blog post content creator for so many years, I was interested in  itseeze.com’s list of specific disadvantages of using AI for blogging:

  • Inaccuracies (the more AI content generated in the public space, the more likely it is that inaccuracies will increase, as the algorithm searches its own content).
  • Plagiarism (by “stitching and combining” content, as well as “parroting’ existing content), AI tools can easily fall into plagiaris.
  • Devaluing of content (AI is capable of mimicking humans, but lacks personalization and the ability to generate new ideas).
  • Lacking in personalization (because AI relies on already existing content, it is not identifying the user’s intent and “common sense behavior”).

Wow! Talk about food for thought for us content marketers…Revisiting our own Say It For You mission statement, we note our devotion to creating content based on understanding  each client’s unique ways of doing business. Our policy of one-client-per-market is designed to avoid conflicts of interest, so that we can give our best work to each business or practice owner, based on coming to understand and then helping express their personal values and priorities.  What’s more, as per our Say It For You client agreement, all rights to the content we’ve created are assigned to the client.

As to the potential devaluing of content through using AI, in surveys, it was discovered that the main reasons people share online content is that they enjoy bringing value to others, but also as a way to define themselves to others, coschedule.com explains. In practical terms, that means adding value (not devaluing), helping business owners and practitioners express their own new and original ideas, and their “take’ on current happenings in the community they share with their target readers.

“Human writers play a crucial role in content creation. They bring creativity, emotions, and empathy that are difficult to replicate by machines. They also have the ability to understand nuances of language, context, and cultural subtexts that are often lost in machine-generated content,” aicontentfy.com  opines. “AI does not have emotions.”

At Say It For You, content creation will continue to be generated by human writers, meant for our very human readers!

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