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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Can You Be More Specific?

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“Capitalize on the post-holiday rush by driving incremental purchases amongst shoppers redeeming gift cards, taking advantage of longer sales windows or making returns,” the 2024 Digital Marketing Playbook advises. Just two weeks ago, at the Business Spotlight, I recall one of the presenters doing precisely that kind of “capitalizing” on post-holiday needs. When it was Troy Larson’s turn to give a 60-second “pitch” for his Alder Avenue Home Handyman business, he offered to help all of us not-so-handy parents assemble all those Christmas gifts.

“When a business understands their customers’ needs, they can tailor their products and marketing plan to better serve those needs, momencrm.com explains naming five main needs: 1. price points 2.convenience 3.sustainability 4.transparency 5.control/options. However, successful marketing messages are delivered “across channels when and where each person is most receptive”, epsilon.com emphasizes.

Researching and understanding your target market is one of the ABCs of all content marketing. Read, read, read, is my best advice as a content marketer, from local business publications to your competitors’ marketing materials – it all helps you hone your own message, we teach at Say It For You.

Using blog posts and newsletter issues to highlight specific services and product uses is a way to achieve razor-sharp appeal to prospects with an urgent, precise need. Interviewed for the article “Tips From the Inside” in Inc. Magazine, the purchasing agents of mega corporation Northrup Grumman answered: “Be as specific as possible when describing what you can do for us.”

 In Digital Marketing for Dummies, the authors stress that content marketing works only to the extent it is specific; the more specific you are in describing the shortcuts and solutions, the more engaging that content will be. What we have learned over the years at Say It For You is that the benefit of describing specific solutions holds true even if that solution is not one that fits precisely into the searcher’s inquiry – the general impression readers get is that they’ve come to a place where problems get solved!

Assembling the bicycle your daughter received for Christmas is only one of hundreds of different tasks that Alder Avenue handymen perform. But the secret of the “pow” in Troy Larson’s 60-second marketing “pitch” was that it was so very specific.

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Counting Down and Looking Up

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“Yes, the end of December is the perfect time for a year-end review, for taking a few moments to look at what you’ve accomplished over the past 12 months, and taking stock of all the things you still want to accomplish,” Nathalie Thompson of vibeshifting.com so aptly writes…

Counting down the past year, you are reading the 130th semi-weekly Say It For You blog post of 2023, There have also been twelve monthly Say It For You online newsletters, Meanwhile, year-round, the team has generated dozens upon dozens of blog posts and other content pieces for our clients.

Is blogging still going to be “a thing” in 2024 and beyond? A resounding “Yes!” is our answer, The Say It For You blog is on a WordPress platform; on that platform alone, there are now more than 20 billion views per month. “Even in today’s world,” Creative Boom remarks, “where brevity rules and attention spans are seemingly at an all-time low, there undoubtedly remains a place for a regularly-maintained blog that’s crafted with care and with its audience in mind.”

While Mark Prosser of Score.org lists reasons for keeping an active business blog (driving traffic to the website, informing customers about the good work you do, sharing client testimonials, finding out what customers want, promoting your brand to potential employees, and analyzing marketing demographics), there is one important thing about blogging that I try to impress on each business or practice owner: a blog is an ongoing training course for you.

You see, the interesting thing I’ve found over the past sixteen (yes, count ’em!) years of business blogging is that the very exercise of thinking through the themes and the ideas for the blog, even if the actual content writing task is being outsourced, helps train business owners and practitioners to articulate those ideas when interacting with their own customers. In a very real sense, maintaining an active blog not only helps your business, it can help you do your business better! 

Meanwhile, for us on the content writing team, the ongoing learning process is the true blessing. The tremendous variety of topics –  from dry cleaning to electromagnetic fields, from family law to finance, from HVAC to dry cleaning, from air quality to architecture, organ transplants to trucking, car painting to long term care…..every assignment is a doorway to fascinating insights.

At Say It For You, we’re right there with you, counting down to the end of 2023, and looking forward – and upwards – to 2024.

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Speaking Their Language in Content Marketing

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“I stepped up to the deli counter and gave my order: “Eight ounces of turkey breast, please.” “We don’t sell by the ounce, only by the pound,” the clerk informed me. “So, can I get half a pound of turkey breast?”  “Sure!” (from Reader’s Digest Dec./Jan issue’s “All in a Day’s Work”)

 “In order to write an effective sales page, it’s absolutely critical to speak the language of your target market,” Joey van Kuilenburg writes in Linkedin. Drafting a list of everything you know about the people you want to reach and constructing a profile, is his advice to content marketers. Pay attention to the terminology they use, van Kuilenburg adds, including phrases and word choices. (By joining social media groups in which they are participating, asking questions, and carrying on conversations with followers, you can get a feel for their ways of expressing themselves.) “Using terms, words, phrases and acronyms that your audience themselves use, will result in your audience feeling connected and included in the conversation,” BrainyGirl Kim Garnett says.

Your own language, meanwhile, can help audience members truly understand and imagine what you are saying, the University of Wisconsin tells students.

As content writers, we know at Say It For You, before we can position any client within the marketplace, we absolutely must study the surroundings of that client’s target audience. Planning content involves thinking about how “they” (those readers, not the average readers) are likely to react or feel about any chosen approach to the subject at hand.

As content marketers, our message to the business owner and practitioner clients who hire us is this:

Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people. Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for your ideal customer – the words we use, how technical we get, how sophisticated the approach to a subject, the title of each blog entry – all must focus on what together we learn about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions. – Only secondarily is it important to discuss how wonderful you and your staff are at satisfying those needs and preferences.

Helping our clients define their audience is the first step in the process. Are they more likely to ask for a pound or for eight ounces of that turkey breast? 

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