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Can Silence Sell in Content Marketing?

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“In all the noise from sales training, the underrated power of silence often speaks volumes,” Matt Nettleton of Sandler Trustpointe comments. “Handled correctly, silence allows prospects to reveal their deepest concerns and desires.” Skilled salespeople, the message is, listen intently, allowing the customer to speak.

“Successful selling requires a delicate balance between talking and listening. While you need to provide enough information to communicate your product’s value, you also have to make sure your prospect feels heard,” Aditya Kothadiya writes. “In our age of constant communication and short span of attention, genuine listening is a rare commodity and a great gift,” he adds. All those things are true only when you meet in person, Kothadiva admits. Even video conferencing, where salesperson and prospect can see each other’s faces, doesn’t create the same emotional connection as an iin-person encounter.

“Listening to customers isn’t just hearing about their problems. It’s not picking up the phone or answering the ringing bell at your service desk. It involves paying close attention to their needs and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals,” Sophia Bernazzani Barron says in Hubspot.

But how does all this work when it comes to online marketing? “Social listening”, InMarket’s Digital Marketing Playbook explains, involves monitoring keywords and paying attention to what people are saying about your brand. “You can leverage positive comments that you receive from customers about your products and service in your marketing strategy, sharing them on your website and other channels,” Hannah Smiddy of Swanky adds.

Certainly, as was discovered in a Schwab benchmarking study for Registered Investment Advisors, “when providers focus on the unique needs of their target audience, they can develop an experience that is perceived as valuable by those clients.” At Say It For You, we know that content must be tailor-made for your ideal customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry, all must focus on things you know about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions – and only secondarily on how wonderful you and your staff are at satisfying those needs and preferences.

Still, how can “silence sell” in content marketing, when, by definition, you are ‘sending out” messaging rather than remaining silent? Over the years, we’ve come to realize, “silencing” the features and benefits of your products and services, while “sounding” the voice of the people behind those products and services. After all, the people who find your blog are those who are already online looking for information, products, or services that relate to what you know, what you have, and what you do! Your online marketing challenge is not to seek out the people, but to help them seek you out and then show them you’ve been listening to “who they are”.

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Close Reading and Reading Around

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In the latest issue of Poets and Writers magazine, Natalie Schriefer describes what she calls her habit of “close reading”. Writing reviews of other people’s writing has made her a better writer, she’s convinced. “I read anything I could get my hands on”, she shares, “jotting down my favorite lines and unusual words.”

“Along the way,” Schriefer adds, “my reviews ended up being so much more useful than just a log of what I’d read. From them I learned how to write about writing, which in turn helped me develop my writing style.” As you read other’s work,” she advises, “consider their characters, plot, imagery, themes, extended metaphors, unexpected twists, and then consider your own intentions for your piece”.

For many years now, I’ve been “preaching” the same message to content writers: In order to create valuable marketing content, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.

There are a number of reasons what I dub “reading around” is so important for blog writers:

  • to keep up with news, including problems and questions that might be surfacing that relate to your industry or profession (or that of your client)
  • to keep a constant flow of content topics and styling ideas.
  • to get ideas about selling and marketing
  • to get ideas for tailoring individual posts to series to different segments of the client’s customer base
  • to find “tidbits” that can liven up our content
  • to curate others’ content for the benefit of our own readers
  • to develop our own storytelling structuring
  • to unlock our own creativity

The not-so-secret weapon for us content writers might take the form of an “idea folder” (that folder could be an actual folder in which newspaper and magazine clippings are collected, a little notebook you carry around, or take the form of a digital file on a phone or tablet).  We “load up” our folder with ideas for future posts and stay current in the “now” by reading, bookmarking, clipping – and even just noticing – new trends and information relating to each of our clients’ business fields.

With content marketing both a science and an art, it pays to do our own “close reading” so that engaged readers will pay “close attention”!
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Capturing Conflict in Your Content

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“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.

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Op Ed Piece Nails Allusion and Metaphor

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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!

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Create Compelling Content by Using Images!

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Do illustrations, graphics, images enhance content? If you think back to childhood, all your children’s books had many images designed to illustrate the content. Some books were picture books without any “content”. So, we are programmed from childhood to be attracted to visuals. I miss seeing them in adult books! I studied Illustration in art school before I segued into graphic design. It gave me a good foundation in thinking visually when communicating.

After starting my own design business, I was freelancing at the headquarters of an international furnishings and design company. They actually hired me fulltime and I worked there from 2012-2017 before going fulltime into my own business again. While there, I created many counter cards, as they called them. These were like little posters at letter size that would be placed on the counters where the receptionists sat in the design centers.

Here’s one for gift cards. I combined a fun type with the visual of the gift card taken by the in-house photography team. It made an effective ad for gift cards that could be seen by visitors and customers.

 

 

 

Another example is this counter card for a color trends event posted in a Missouri design center. I found and used an image of a paint roller to make it clear what the event would be about before the viewer even read the content.

 

I could bring out endless other examples but these are two of my favorites for showing how visuals enhance content. Without imagery, the message can be passed over in the clutter of content trying to gain our attention. Just think of these two examples without the visuals and you’ll probably agree!

 

 

This guest post was contributed by graphic designer Patricia Creedon.For more information, Pat may be reached at https://patcreedondesign.com or at 203 252-0909

 

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