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Rolling a Picasso in Your Content

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“Roll a Picasso” is an art game developed by Emily Glass for use in an art or art history classroom, but it it makes for a fun exercise for groups of any age. Each roll of a die relates to a printed key, directing the “artist” to draw the head, the left ear, the nose, the mouth, by copying the shape on the chart. The different combinations of the 24 shapes make for a high degree of variety in the finished product. It’s interesting that, just days after posting “Telling Your Business Story Through a Brand New Lens”, I was introduced to this visual proof of how, by creatively combining – and recombining – a finite number of elements, we can continue producing engaging marketing content.….,

In corporate content marketing training sessions, I teach that effective blog posts are centered around key themes, just like the recurring musical phrases that connect the different movements of a symphony.  As you continue to write about your industry, your products, and your services, we tell business and practice owners, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas – in fact, that’s exactly what you should be doing, we explain, to keep the content focused and targeted while still offering variety.

  1. It’s important to stress that blog and social media posts tend to be most effective when they focus on just one idea. A content writer might go about:

    – busting one myth common among consumers of their product or service they’re marketing

– offering one testimonial from a user of that product or service

– describing an unusual application for a product

– describing one common problem their service helps solve

– updating readers on one new development in that industry or profession

– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Each post is similar to one “roll of the dice”, with the long-term effect being your “Picasso” work of art!

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Telling Your Business Story Through a Brand New Lens

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“There are no original stories, but there are always original ways to tell old stories,” Mariah Richards encourages authors in Writer’s Digest. A “new voice” has the power to change the “old voice” for the better, or at least in a way that might appeal to different readers, she explains. Kali Rose, in Oh Reader magazine, agrees. In fact, she loves to revisit her favorite books, with subsequent readings allowing her to see things she missed the first time around.

In the field of content marketing,  one concern I hear a lot from business owners or professional practitioners is that sooner or later, they (and we, their writers) will have depleted the supply of new and different ideas to write about. “What else is left to say?” is the common thread in the questions I’m so often asked.

At Say It For You, our content marketers have long ago learned that there are many subsets of every target market group. Not every message will work for every person, so coming at a topic again and again, each time from a different angle, is the secret to assuring readers we’re “on the same page” with their very specific issues and approaches.

By its very nature of periodic messaging, blog marketing is going to be centered around key themes. As you continue posting content about your industry, your products, and your services, you’ll naturally find yourself repeating some key ideas, adding detail, opinion, and story around each.

In writing for business, as blog content writers soon learn, the variety comes from the “e.g.”s and the “i.e.”s, meaning all the details you fill in around the central “leitmotifs”. Case studies and testimonials illustrating specific instances of the company’s products and services became solutions to various problems.  It’s these examples that lend variety to the blog, even though all the anecdotes reinforce the same few core ideas.

In fact, at Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates”, not in the sense of platform graphics, but in terms of formats for presenting information about any business or professional practice, including how-to posts, list posts, review posts, and op ed opinion posts.

There may be no original content, but you can always help them see your business content through a brand new lens.

 

 

 

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Ask “Have You Read?” and “Have You Tried?”

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“Have You Read?” (a two-page section of Bookmarks Magazine), I couldn’t help thinking, is a great way to offer options without being commanding or “pushy”.  A parallel tactic is described in a Learn Laugh Speak post on polite ways to offer alternatives. When customer service hospitality workers need to offer alternatives better suited for a customer, they need to do this without coming off as pushy or rude. It’s a good idea, the trainers explained, to offer have-you-tried choices, allowing the customer to feel more in control of the decision-making process.

  • What if you…?
  • How about trying…?
  • Have you considered….?

When it comes to converting readers into customers, our job as content writers is to present choice, we stress at Say It For You. Given enough “space” to absorb the relevant and truthful information we present over time, consumers are perfectly able to – and far more likely to – decide to take action. Defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. Even showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience in providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward.

Offering options using a “Have you tried…?” approach may prove the way to avoid a “hard sell”. At the same time, you don’t want to force a visitor to spend a long time just figuring out the 57 wonderful services your company has to offer!. What you can do is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts.

What we content writers can take away, I believe, from both the Bookmarks article  and the Learn Laugh Speak guidance for hospitality workers is the importance of allowing customers to feel in control of the decision-making process.

 

 

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The Content Marketing Challenge is Always the Same

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00:00:08 seconds is all you’ve got, Paul Hellman points out in his book You’ve Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World, referring to the precipitous drop in the average attention span,
The challenge, Hellman acknowledges, is always the same:
  • Getting heard
  • Getting remembered
  • Getting results
.For sellers and speakers, Hellman recommends three main messaging strategies:
  1. Focus – design a strong message
  2. Variety – make routine information come alive
  3. Presence: convey confidence and command attention
Whether you have an exciting new product to pitch, an inspired speech to give, or an important email to send, Hellman advises, start with your conclusion, tell how you got there, then repeat the conclusion.
In a sense, focus is the point in content writing, particularly in blog posts. At Say It For You, we firmly believe in the Power of One, which means one message per post, with a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business, geared towards one narrowly defined target audience. For readers who might want more in-depth information, provide a link to another source or landing page (or simply tell readers to watch for further information in your next post.
Still, as Marcia Hoeck of copyblogger.com emphasizes, “no matter how brilliant your ideas are, you can’t offer them to your prospect unless you’ve made her look in your direction first.” As content writers, our “bait” consists of article titles. These may or may not consist of “keyword phrases” designed to win search, but may be curiosity-stimulating “starters”, such as the ones I took from a news magazine:
                      Finding…  Could…Things just… The impossible…The hidden…Who is…
One very practical and specific piece of advice in Hellman’s book is this: Avoid lists longer than three items.  Being partial to bullet points myself (they help keep both readers and writers “on track”), I recalled that according to the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, the recommended maximum number of bullet points is five.
In content marketing, our ultimate challenge truly does remain the same – getting readers to take a desired next step. 
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The Best Way To Make It Personal

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“All the time I’m preparing my outlines,” John Maxwell teaches public speakers in his book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, “I’m asking myself three questions:

  1. How can I make it special?
  2. How can I make it personal?
  3. How can I make it practical?

The best way to “make it personal,” Maxwell advises, is “to pair what they do know with what they don’t know.” The first part involves “know-your-audience” preparation, the author cautions: the organizational culture of the group, their personal experiences, even their national origin..The “what they don’t know” part describes the insights you’re communicating about that already acquired knowledge.

Maxwell’s advising speakers, but in creating marketing content, the very same principles apply. The secret is knowing what your particular target audience already knows and how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) will be likely to react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your target readers are likely to value. For example, even if your readers are money-motivated, are they cost-conscious or might they prize luxury and exclusivity?  Yes, while building content, it’s important to consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where those target readers “hang out”, what they read and watch, and what they’re saying on social media.

“Chunking refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest new information,” explains e-learning coach Connie Malamed. “The reason the brain needs this assistance is because working memory, which is where we manipulate information, holds a limited amount of information at one time.”  Again, pairing information with which your audience is already familiar, then adding a different “spin” or new way to consider – and make use of – that information, offers a “pathway” for communication between the content creator and the consumers of that content.

 

Part of content marketing’s inherent challenge is that the information offered needs to be highly relevant to readers’ search queries.  How can we sustain content writing over long periods of time, yet avoid dishing up same-old, same-old? Maxwell’s two-part “make it personal” secret is the operative one:

  • Establish common ground, confirming to readers they’ve come to the right place to find the products, services, and information they need, and that the people in this company or practice are knowledgeable and passionate.
  • Offer lesser-known information, adding a layer of “new” to themes you covered in former posts, or perhaps a new insight you’ve gained about that existing information.

 

 

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