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Tell the Story Behind the Product and the Purpose

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In “So that’s why we do that!”, Karina Ebert tells where many common habits and inventions come from. The “10,000 steps” a day health benchmark, for example, was a catchy marketing move by manufacturer Yamasa, “since the Japanese character for 10,000 looks a lot like a person walking”. Credit for festive birthday candles likely goes to the ancient Greeks, Ebert tells readers, who purportedly made cakes in the shape of the moon to honor Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt, with the candles providing “moonglow”. Escape-release latches inside car trunks, mandatory since 2001, came about after armed kidnappers forced a couple into the trunk of their car in 1995.

“The story of how your company came to manufacture or sell a specific product can be helpful to a prospective buyer,” magoda.com says in advising about press releases. By sharing an original story highlighting how a product or practice evolved, the authors explain, “you can effectively link your brand with a solution while delivering details and insight to an interested audience.” While the spotlight is on the product, they caution, the content needs to explain why your company is important in the process of delivering the product to the user.

.History-of-our-company background stories have a humanizing effect, we know at Say It For You, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame adversity. At the same time, the stories call attention to modern solutions (in terms of both product improvements and customer service practices that grew out of those past experiences).

It’s worth repeating – people relate to stories about people more than to facts and statistics, and particularly more than to sales pitches. In representing our business owners and practitioners, we need to tape this mantra to our computer screens: Let the history of your industry and the history of your own business do the selling.

Keep telling the story behind the products and the purposes for which they’re used!

 

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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 Reader’s Digest Approach to Content Marketing

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Although reading is a way to keep you mind sharp, finding time to read can be a challenge,” Jason Buhrmester, Chief Content Officer for Reader’s Digest concedes. We can help,” he assures readers, alluding to the service Fiction Favorites, groups of four novels, hand-picked and shortened, delivered to readers’ homes.

As content marketers, I teach at Say It For You, we can take the same approach in offering content to our clients’ target audiences. I encourage freelance content writers and business owners alike to curate, meaning to gather OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) and share that with their readers, commenting on that material and relating it to their own topic.

Truth is, to sustain our blog and newsletter content writing over long periods of time without losing reader excitement and engagement, we need to constantly add to our own body of knowledge – about our industry or professional field, and about what’s going on around us in our culture. Business blogging can serve as a form of market research in itself, and through curating material we find and then adding our own original thinking about what we’re sharing – that brings our readers the best of both worlds.

Three cautions concerning content curation:

1. Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. 
Linking to a news source or journal article, for instance, adds credibility to the ideas you’re presenting in your post. Having guest bloggers explain their point of view and share their specialized knowledge. Make sure to include material only from trusted sources.

2. Communicate seeking to inform, comfort, and connect. 
The tone needs to be relationship-building and interpersonal communication. as your content helps visitors judge whether you have their best interests at heart.  Even if you’ve come across as the most competent of product or service providers, you still need to pass the “warmth” test.

3. Always attribute.
While quoting someone else’s remarks on a topic your covering can be a very good thing, reinforcing your point, showing you’re in touch with trends in your field, and adding variety, it’s crucial to give “credit where credit is due” by attributing the quote or comment to its author. Even if you’re not quoting an author directly, but using another person’s thoughts or ideas that are not your own or mentioning statistics you didn’t collate yourself, it’s crucial to acknowledge the source.
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Add value to your content by using the Reader’s Digest approach!

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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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Reminding Readers of Things They Already Know

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To appreciate a story’s narrative, readers must be constantly updating their sense of where they are in the tale, Amor Towles points out in Poets & Writers. Of course, Towles concedes, as we begin to read a novel, we already know something of what it contains (we’ve read the dust jacket, heard about the book from a friend, or have read other books by that author).

The same is true, of course, for content we post online. Readers will not have found their way to our content unless they have an interest in learning more about that very topic or need help related to our area of expertise. The delicate task facing us in “bringing readers up to speed” before moving on to the new information involves knowing just how much of an update is needed. Too little might cause puzzlement as we offer new information. Too much “review”, conversely, might be seen as repetitive or – worse – disrespectful of our readers’ sophistication level.

Like novelists, in creating regular blog and newsletter content, we attempt to create a cumulative effect. Some articles review the basics; others offer news of recent developments – new products or services, new changes in the law affecting our customers, new community involvements. The option of linking back to former content can be helpful to readers.

But, whether or not you decide to use linkbacks in your message, because blog content remains permanently on the website, with formerly posted content moving “down” a spot to make room, the cumulative repetition of key words and phrases increases the chances for the content to “get found”.

Public speakers should ask themselves how they can “make it personal”, John Maxwell teaches public speakers in his book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, and the best way to do that, he advises, is “to pair what they do know with what they don’t know.”The first part involves learning about the organizational culture of the group, their personal experiences, even their national origin. Then, the “what they don’t know” part describes the insights you’re communicating today about that already acquired knowledge.

For us online content creators, then, the challenge is finding ways to respect readers’ intelligence and knowledge while reminding them of things they already know, setting the stage to offer exciting new insights.

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