How Do We Know What We Know and Let Them Know It?

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How do we learn to string words together into statements? How do we know to say “I don’t have much money”, but that the opposite is not “I have much money”? How do we know that “a picture of Paul” and “a picture of Paul’s” mean totally different things? In his piece in the March issue of the Mensa Bulletin, Richard Lederer ponders these language mysteries. Think about it, he urges. Why do we say “the bicycle is next to the building”, but never “the building is next to the bicycle”?

“In marketing, language is a key tool for influencing, persuading, and manipulating an audience,” writes Sambuno. Through language, marketers create messages that are tailored to the specific target audience in order to elicit a desired response.

  • a car company might use language that appeals to the emotion of safety and security when targeting parents who are car shopping for their families.
  • a fashion company might use language that appeals to the desire for self-expression when targeting young adults.

Marketers can craft a powerful emotional bond with the audience through carefully selected language. We may not know precisely why “I have much money” sounds funny, but grammar matters in content marketing. “When you publish content with grammar mistakes, you risk affecting your reputation, search engine rankings, and even conversion rates,” SEO.com explains. “While some grammar errors won’t affect communication, others will force people to re-read your content or guess what you’re trying to say.”

On the other hand…. (I enjoyed reading this dissenting commentary on the subject of perfect grammar): “Nobody cares how well-written it is, unless it solves a real problem, or who wrote the article, as long as it makes sense.”

While, at Say It For You, I reassure content writers that, if their marketing blog posts are filled with valuable, relevant, and engaging material, the fact they wrote  “a lot” when they should have said “many” or substituted “your” for “you’re” isn’t going to be a content marketing deal breaker.

We’re out to focus readers’ attention on the bicycle or the building, not on which is next to which!

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The Three Dimensions of Content Marketing

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“Researchers looking for strategies and solutions for increasing financial literacy have identified three dimensions,” Jalene Hahn explains in the Indianapolis Business Journal, consisting of knowledge, attitude, and awareness.

The goals of content marketing, it occurred to me, are the same as those named by Hahn:

Knowledge:

When it comes to content marketing, teaching is the new selling. With so much ready access to so many sources of information, visitors to your site want to know that you and your organization have something new to add. At the same time, people generally don’t like to have their assertions and assumptions challenged, even when they’ve arrived seeking information on a particular subject. As content writers, we want our vendor or practitioner clients to be perceived as subject matter experts offering usable information and insight in addition to readers’ own knowledge level.

Attitude:

In the book Stop Hiring Losers , when authors Minesh and Kim Baxi  talk about hiring and retaining good employees,  they name six defining attitudes, or things that motivate different people. These include learning, money, beauty/harmony, altruism, power, and principle. When it comes to content marketing, the secret is knowing your particular audience and thinking about how they (not the average person, but specifically “they”) would probably react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

Awareness:

Social media can be used to raise awareness about social issues and encourage users to make changes in their own lives, a University of Plymouth professor explains. Online search can’t create awareness of something people don’t know exists. Once awareness is raised, readers are ready to learn more from reading content and become more engaged.

As is true of helping consumers gain financial literacy, content marketing is a way of helping business owners and professional practitioners use the three dimensions of  knowledge, attitude and awareness to appeal to their online audiences.

 

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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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Bringing Yourself to the Page

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” For better or worse, in today’s world, everyone is a brand, and you need to develop yours and get comfortable marketing it,” Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald point out in the Harvard Business Review special spring issue. The question to ask yourself is what can you bring to the table of your industry out of your own personal experience. Two examples the authors offer:

  • You studied psychology, and have insights into human behavior.
  • You’re a UX designer who understands how to create more-accessible products.

Whatever your special talent, know-how, or experience, you can bring that to bear as an employee or executive to add value, is the point.

For us as content marketers, in essence “ghost-writing” newsletters, web page content, and blog posts for our business owner and professional practitioner clients, the concept of “bringing self to the page” has a double meaning. Yes, as Whitney Hill advises in a Writer’s Digest piece, “mining” areas of our own lives helps us connect with the right others. But since our purpose is to focus readers’ attention, not on ourselves, but on our content marketing clients, we use our own experience and wisdom to help readers “interview” those owners and practitioners in light of their own needs.

“Some articles have greater impact and reader engagement if written from personal experience, The Writer’s College explains. Writing an article from personal experience can avoid sounding generic, especially if you bring personal experiences to life with vivid sensory details, “showing” rather than just telling. Still it’s important to reflect on the impact and growth that resulted from the experiences you’re describing.

In using content marketing to translate our clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms, I prefer first and second person writing over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message. I compare the interaction between content writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews, where the concept is to focus, not on facts, but on discovering the “person behind the resume”.

In bringing our clients to the page, we know that “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective marketing content for both business owners and professional practitioners. True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice, not to mention showcasing the special empathy those providers have for their clients and customers.

Through messaging, ghost writers, providers, and customers are all “brought to the page”!

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How to Use Numbers Without Being a Numbers Nudnik

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With both of this week’s Say It For You blog posts representing my reaction to Ryan Law’s very provocative piece “The Four Forces of Bad Content”, today our focus is on what Law mocks as “deference to data”.  Yes, Law accedes, content marketing should be data-driven, but “the way most writers use evidence…actually undermines their argument.”  Three specific practices he mocks are a) injecting a tired-out statistic into an opening sentence  b) using questionable, outdated data points  and c) dumping quotes from experts with only a thin narrative to link them to the argument.

As a content writer and trainer, I actually believe that numbers, which can be used to “build belief” are often underutilized.  Statistics, I explain to business owners and professional practitioners, are not merely attention-grabbers, but can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem their product or service helps address. If there’s some false impression people seem to have relating to your industry, or to a product or service you provide, I explain, you can bring in statistics to show how things really are. Using data in content marketing relates to the theory of social proof, meaning that, as humans, we are simply more willing to do something if we see that other people are doing it. I agree with Law that, when using statistics in marketing content, it’s important to include the source, providing the answer to readers’ unspoken question: “Why should I accept these statistics as proof?”

A few years ago, I remember reading an Indianapolis Business Journal article titled “In the workplace: Data is a commodity, but insight is gold”. When numbers are tossed around, people generally view it as vital information, she says, but people may not want to read raw data; they want someone to tell them what the data means. When explained effectively, her point was, it can make people think and then move to making decisions.

Pedro Cardoso of Enterprise Apps Today has some very relevant commentary about data. Typically, websites are used to provide data, he says – what products and services the company offers and in what “packages”, who the players are, in what geographical area the company operates. (I believe that, on the better sites, there is also data presented pertaining to the owners and the history of the company). The real value, though, Cardoso points out is in the information behind the data.:

Go ahead and use numbers, we recommend at Say It For You, but avoid being a numbers nudnik!

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