Stepping Out of Character in Your Content

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

W

 

When the characters in a story seem to act against their own nature, Tiffany Yates Martin advises fiction writes in Writers’ Digest, that can feel jarring to readers, but it can also create interest. The author needs to lay the groundwork so that the character’s later actions will seem plausible, perhaps describing external forces that compel unusual action later on. The concept, as Martin goes on to clarify, is that, properly handled, unexpected and complex twists to a narrative can surprise and delight readers.

While, as content writers for business owners and practitioners marketing their products and services, we deal in fact rather than fiction, I believe that the Writer’s Digest “stepping-out-of-character” model can prove highly effective in capturing blog readers’ interest.

There are a number of companies that exemplify the unexpected by having two totally unrelated business lines, such as:

  • Chemed (hospice care) and Roto Rooter (plumbing)
  • Elxsi (sewer equipment and family restaurants)
  • Guiness (beer and recordkeeping)
  • Yamaha (musical instruments and motorcycles)

Diversification like that can be used as a defense, the Corporate Finance Institute explains. “In the case of a cash cow in a slow-growing market, diversification allows the company to make use of surplus cash flows.”

More to my original point, though, as Julie Thompson explains in business.com, business and professional practice owners often have a variety of hobbies, and interests, and interests. Building content around those interests (perhaps unrelated to the business or practice itself can make for refreshingly unexpected reading for searchers who land on the blog.

Another kind of “unexpected”‘ content focus can be charitable causes favored by the owner’s favorite charitable and community activities. But “the way you go about marketing your charitable efforts can either boost or tarnish your company’s public relations,” Thompson cautions, because there needs to be real commitment, not just lip service on the part of the business owner or practitioner. Still, the more unrelated to the type of business or practice the charitable “cause” appears to be, the more that “unexpecteness” factor will come into play…

Just as some of the most successful businesses represent new twists on old ideas and products, as content writers, we sometimes need to step out of character. surprising and delighting readers with a “twist”!

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Transform Into a Marketing Maven: the Art of Handling Your Own Business Marketing

/0 Comments/in , /by

(image via Pexels)

Today’s guest post was contributed by Claire Wentz, creator of Caring From Afar. Through her writing, Claire hopes to inform caregivers, offering them peace of mind. Here Claire shares valuable marketing  insights..

In today’s competitive business landscape, mastering the art of handling your own business marketing is crucial. As a business owner, you know that effective  promotion of your products or services can significantly boost your reach and profitability. This guide equips you with the essential steps to take charge of your marketing and transform into a self-sufficient marketing force. By adopting these strategies, you ensure your business not only survives but thrives in the market.

Revisit Your Current Marketing Strategy

The first step in handling your own business marketing is to thoroughly assess and revisit your current marketing strategy. What tactics have been effective? What hasn’t worked as well as you hoped? This initial audit will help you identify the successful elements that you can build upon and the areas where you need innovation. By understanding your past performance, you can make smarter decisions moving forward, ensuring that every marketing dollar counts.

Elevate Your Expertise Through Education

Consider enhancing your expertise by going back to school for a business degree to sharpen your business and marketing skills. Earning a degree in marketing, business, communications, or management equips you with valuable skills that boost your business’s performance. These programs cover essential aspects such as strategic planning, customer engagement, and effective communication. Online degree programs offer the flexibility to continue managing your business without disruption.

Identify and Understand Your Target Market

Effective marketing starts with a crystal-clear understanding of your target market. Delve deep into identifying who your ideal customers are — their needs, preferences, and purchasing behaviors. This focus allows you to tailor your marketing strategies directly to the people most likely to buy from you, increasing your efficiency and effectiveness. Use tools such as customer interviews, surveys, and demographic research to gather this vital information, making your marketing efforts more focused and impactful.

Refine Your Marketing Message

Once you know who you are targeting, refining your marketing message is the next crucial step in handling your own business marketing. Your message should clearly articulate the value your product or service offers, tailored to resonate with your target audience. It should be compelling, concise, and consistently reflect your brand’s voice across all platforms. This consistency not only reinforces your brand identity but also strengthens your relationship with your customers, making your business a preferred choice.

Evaluate and Adapt Your Marketing Channels

In handling your own business marketing, it’s essential to constantly evaluate and possibly adapt the marketing channels you use. Whether it’s social media, email marketing, content marketing, or print advertising, each channel offers unique benefits and reaches different segments of your audience. Stay open to exploring new avenues and technologies that can connect you to your target market more effectively. Regularly analyzing the performance of each channel will help you optimize your strategy and allocate resources to the most productive tactics.

Track and Measure Marketing Effectiveness

A key pillar of handling your own business marketing is to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Implement tools and techniques to monitor the outcomes of your marketing activities. Metrics such as conversion rates, website traffic, and customer engagement levels are invaluable in understanding what’s working and what’s not. This ongoing analysis not only helps in fine-tuning your marketing strategies but also ensures that you are getting the best return on your investment.

Handling your own business marketing is a dynamic and rewarding endeavor that requires continuous learning, strategic thinking, and proactive adaptation. By revisiting your current strategy, enhancing your skills through education, zeroing in on your target market, refining your message, reassessing your marketing channels, and tracking your effectiveness, you can turn your business into a marketing powerhouse. Embrace these strategies, and watch your business grow as you expertly manage your marketing in-house.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Losses Do Have Something to Tell You: Keep Telling!

/0 Comments/in , /by

Losing is the main thing that happens in contests,” Rosalie Knecht wryly observes In Poets and Writers Magazine. Most people who apply for a job don’t get it, most dates are not great dates, and thousands of fresh losers are minted each year by the Oscars, the Grammys, and the Emmys. It’s important to learn how to lose, she thinks.  In fact, in the social sciences, she knows, there is a whole field of inquiry called resilience studies, which examines the question of how people carry their losses and burdens.  “A loss is just a win that happened to someone else,” the author observes, “It has nothing to tell you,” she reassured writers who fall into despondency when their submissions are rejected or downright ignored by editors and publishers.

Long-term, unrelenting resiliency is the secret of success for content marketers. While remaining alert to the relative success of certain articles, case studies, and blog posts is instructive in creating new content, throwing in the towel before success has had a chance to develop is the single biggest reason for failure in content marketing. Truth is, when I started Say It For You seventeen years ago, I knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, the main key to success was going to be simply staying on task. Now, after years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that  while consistency and frequency are such  rare phenomema, success depends on “keeping on keeping on”. 

Unlike Knecht’s message to writers about “losses having nothing to tell you”, I believe those early “losses” have a lot to tell us about our content marketing efforts – we need to keep on listening, researching, reading around, and “telling our story”!.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Capturing Conflict in Your Content

/0 Comments/in , , , /by


“Every great story depends on conflict to propel it forward, Jane Cleland writes in Writer’s Digest. The conflict can be one of four types:

  • actual or threatened physical attack
  • emotional
  • spiritual (loss of faith or shaken beliefs)
  • mental (a puzzle or intellectual challenge)

However, Cleland cautions, “if someone doesn’t care about a situation, you don’t have a conflict.” That means, she says, “We need to understand what makes people care“.

When it comes to content marketing, “conflict is a problem that the customer is motivated enough to resolve,” Truss Creative adds. In brand marketing, though, it’s not about the business owner’s origin story or their “disruption story”, but about the customer’s story. Writing effective content, therefore, means identifying the customer’s:

  • everyday annoyance
  • burning desire
  • quiet wish
  • tower foe
  • existential threat

In other words, what does your audience notice, value, want to protect, and want to project to others?

Years ago, my friend and admired sales training expert Tim Roberts told me that, while salespeople try to develop good problem solving skills, he challenges them to  first find, then solve. Finding a problem that the prospect hadn’t considered is what makes a salesperson valuable.

In blog posts, we teach at Say It For You, the opening paragraph is there to make clear not only what need, issue, or problem is to be discussed, but also what “slant” the business or practice owner has on the issue. Then, it’s crucial not to end in a “fizzle”,  leaving web visitors trailing off in a disappointed move. The ending has to resolve the central conflict, issue, or problem you’ve raised, leaving readers with a path to action and positive expectations.

Capturing conflict in your content might be the secret to success.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Op Ed Piece Nails Allusion and Metaphor

/0 Comments/in , , /by

In Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box to care for, and when she opened it, all the world’s evils came out, including curses on humanity. The term “Pandora’s box” has become an allusion to something that seems valuable but turns out to be a curse… 

 In her opinion piece on leadership published  in the Indianapolis Business Journal, Samantha Julka uses the Pandora’s Box metaphor to encourage workforce leaders to go ahead and” open the box” by asking the kinds of difficult questions that are the only path to “hope” of improved performance…

The point of using cultural allusions in content marketing is to cement a bond between the writer and readers based on shared experience and knowledge, I wrote back in 2016. But if readers happen not to be familiar with the underlying tale or reference point, the danger is that the content will be frustrating rather than illuminating. “Know your reader when using allusions in business blogs!” I cautioned, advising marketers to gauge readers’ level of education, to avoid having “Huh?” be the reaction to their chosen metaphor.

Julka handled this very content writing issue superbly, I think. In explaining her thesis that the reason many workplace leaders don’t engage more with workers to learn about challenges and how to address them is that they fear questions might lead to requests they can’t (or don’t want to) fulfill. They fear “opening Pandora’s box” might anger workers rather than engaging them.

But, prior to illustrating her point using the Pandora’s Box metaphor, Julka actually reviews the story, putting all readers (regardless of their level of cultural sophistication) “on the same page”:

Pandora, the first woman on Earth, lets her curiosity lead her to open a mysterious gift she received from the gods. The gift contained all the world’s evils, which escaped when Pandora opened the box. It was impossible to put the contents back in.

 Having reviewed the reference, the author proceeds to state her recommendation to readers – “It’s better to find a way to open the box and deal with the contents constructively” framing questions in a way that benefits all of us”.

At Say It For You, we tell content writers to add picturesque metaphors to help readers remember the information.   I appreciated the way Julka used planning dinner for her own family as a metaphor for framing questions in the workplace. Rather than asking, “What do you want for dinner, boys?”, she now takes a more inclusive approach, asking the more criteria-based and abstract “What do you boys want out of dinner?”.

Julka’s “hope” is that her menu-planning query will allow mixing in some broccoli. As content creators, we’re hoping to mix in some search optimization terms ,along with are engaging content!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail