Tell Them What They’re Getting for Their 1%

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Over time, in the financial planning industry, advisors went from phoning clients and executing transactions to fee-based money management. “It’s becoming a 1% business,” one advisor grumbled, noting that sometimes clients don’t “get” the total value of the relationship and the many ways planners can help their clients. Don’t those clients ever ask, he wonders, “What do I get for my 1%?”

The author, Bryce Sanders, proceeds to discuss different tangible benefits effective advisors can offer their money management clients, including

  • a dedicated advisor with whom you can meet face to face
  • a live person answering the phone
  • someone to help measure your progress towards your goals
  • college planning, retirement planning, and even some estate planning advice
  • referrals to specialists when needed

Sanders conclude his article with a point I find highly relevant to the work we do in content marketing: Advisors who seek to build long term relationships with clients, he emphasizes, “need to bring substantial value to the table to make this case. If the client feels they are getting substantial value, cost often becomes secondary.”

That is precisely the reader reaction we are after as business content writers, we realize at Say It For You. Content writers must learn to become value creators, and blog content is all about value, not pricing. . “People like to know how much stuff costs,” Marcus Sheridan of social media examiner.com warned. Still, at Say It For You, we don’t think price is the No. 1 consumer question on the minds of web searchers who land on our clients’ content. Instead, what the writing needs to do is provide value – answer questions, offer perspective and thought leadership.

Yes, inquiring minds want to know, and searchers need to know they’re being introduced to a business or practice where they can find value. Rather than emphasizing the 1%, tell ’em what they will be getting for their 1%!

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Can Nature Journaling Help Your Content Writing?

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“As you begin to explore a regular nature journaling practice, your skills will improve…You’ll aspire to write with more clarity, draw with more accurateness and learn about the flora, fauna, and natural phenomena that you’re observing,” Christine Elder tells kids and teens.

Nature journaling can help your writing in general, Marie Bengston asserts in Writer’s Digest.  “We need to conjure our written world with evocative, multi-sensory detail that immediately resonates with our reader,” she suggests.

For us creators of marketing content (our topic may or may not be related to nature), I think Bengston’s Three Prompts will prove particularly helpful: 

  1. I notice that…..
  2. I wonder if…..
  3. It reminds me of….:

I notice that… it’s essential for blog content writers to focus on a target audience, showing readers you’ve “noticed” them and have taken note of their unique preferences and needs.

I wonder if…In content marketing, the goal is to induce “wonder” in searchers who found their way to your site. Your post should have served up just enough food for thought to make them wonder if, after all, there are even more ways in which what you have to offer is exactly what they have to have! 

It reminds me of…In writing for business, the variety comes from the details you fill in around the central themes. Different examples of ways the company or practitioner helped solve various unusual problems in the past help reinforce the core advantages being offered.

  For content marketers, “journaling” might take the form of an “idea folder”. This could be an actual paper folder which we stuff with newspaper and magazine clippings, a notebook kept in a purse or pocket, or a digital file on a phone or tablet. Since at Say It For You, we train freelance content writers to “learn around”, the material they save up in that folder can help them keep track of what they notice, what they wonder, and what those tidbits call to mind.

Could getting into a journaling habit help your content writing?

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Another and Yet Another Almanac Tidbit

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Tuesday’s Say It For You blog post centered around one information tidbit from Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac, explaining what the “sugar plums” famously mentioned in “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”. Today I’ll cite some other tidbits from the Almanac that I and fellow content marketers can put to good use in our content…

Tidbits about the history of popular products:

(Possible content writing purpose: educating readers about the history of the product the client manufactures or sells)

  1.  The origin of Rubik’s Cube
    The Rubik’s Cube, never intended as a toy, was a 3-D model used by a Hungarian professor more than fifty years ago to explain spatial relationships to design students.
  1. The origin of Post-It Notes
    A chemist at 3M Company found the slips of paper he used to mark his place in the church hymnal book would not stay put. Wondering if an adhesive previously created by a colleague (a product which had been considered useless because it was not very sticky or strong) might work on paper…  

Tidbits about company or product names:

(Possible content writing purpose: educating readers about the history of the company and choice of company name) 

  1. The sport of volleyball
    As educational director of the YMCA in Holyoke, Mass, William Morgan noticed that not al the men had the vigor and stamina needed to play basketball. He invented s sport he called “mintonette”, asking A.G. Spaulding & Bros. to develop a ball for the new sport. The game proved a hit, but one delegate was troubled by the name and suggested “volleyball”.
  2. From one code to another
    When Drexel Institute of Technology graduates Joseph Woodland and Bernard Sliver discovered a way to stock and track inventory, they filed a patent describing  “article classification through the medium of identifying patterns”. Since Woodland knew Morse Code, the new technology was named the barcode.

Tasty “almanac tidbits” help content readers who visit the website feel an “I’m-in-the-know” connection with the providers of products and services.

 

 

 

 

 

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Who Will Taste This Almanac Tidbit?

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“Have you ever wondered what “sugar plums” were? Like every child used to hearing about sugar plums in “The Night Before Christmas” poem, the author of Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac thought sugar plums were fruit.  He was wrong, he later learned. In England in the 1600s, sugar plums were confit candies with a core of nuts or dried fruit encased in layers of crystallized sugar. To make the comfit, a seed or nut would be placed in the center of a pan, with sugar is layered around it. Depending on the size of the candies, a batch could take up to a week to complete. Subsequently, sugar plums were a cherished luxury back in the 18th and 19th centuries, Readelysian.com explains…

I find seemingly inconsequential tidbits of information like this highly useful when it comes to content marketing. Tidbits, I explain to clients and to writers, can be used to describe your unusual way of doing business, or to explain why one of the services you provide is particularly effective in solving a problem. The time and care that went into producing the sugar plums can be compared to the complex processes that go into producing your own products. The image of a “solid core” can be used as a metaphor for solid business practices and ethical standards upheld in your own company.

 

Content writers need never run out of ideas if they keep a file of interesting tidbits of general information on hand, and including interesting tidbits of information in corporate marketing blogs can help::

  • educate blog readers
  • debunk myths
  • showcase the business owners’ expertise
  • demonstrate business owners’ perspective

There’s another purpose tidbits can serve – softening. One of my favorite business books is Geoffrey James’  Business Without the Bullsh*t . The author showcases a point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions – whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you’ve need to express an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers.  Well, including interesting tidbits softens the effect of the strong opinions the business owner or practitioner might express in the content of the post, while at the same time helping to explain the reasoning behind those opinions.

Readers will savor those “sugar plum” tidbits in your content..

 

 

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Showing Ideas Instead of Telling Facts

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“Great stories show ideas instead of telling you facts,” storytelling expert Karen Eber explains. We live in a story world, she says, with stories providing ways to:

  •  differentiate yourself
  •  build connection and trust
  •  create new thinking
  •  bring meaning to data
  •  influence decision-making

The “tools” we can use to accomplish these goals include the three story elements of character, conflict, and connection, the author adds.

Working “against” us as storytellers, she cautions, is the fact that most of what is read is easily forgotten, citing the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, a visual representation produced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus of the way learned information fades over time. In fact, he discovered, the biggest drop in retention happens soon after learning.

For us storytellers and content marketers, the encouraging note is in the “how” – the same set of information can be made more or less memorable, Ebbinghaus discovered, depending on how well it’s communicated in the first place.

Two important elements important in improving retention are time and repetition, Olivia McGarry points out in the LearnUpon Blog. “Spaced learning is considered one of the best methods for combating the learning curve.” Varying the content format using visuals, storytelling, and gamification, helps enormously, making sure learners know that completing the training will help ease their “pain points” and solve problems.

McGarry suggests that, when students share knowledge with each other, that goes a long way towards improving retention of the material. In that vein, at Say It For You, I advise content writers to periodically compose entire blog posts around questions posed by readers.

As content marketers, with the ultimate goal of influencing decision-making, we must help clients differentiate themselves, build connection and trust, create new thinking, and bring meaning to data, always remembering to show ideas rather than merely telling facts.

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