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Society-Happens-Here Content Marketing – Thanksgiving Food for Thought

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The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a new paradox at the heart of society. Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, yet most institutions, including government and the media, are not trusted to introduce these new innovations to society, and so people are looking to business leaders for guidance. That means business owners are expected to comment, not only on their own products and services, but on societal changes that affect their industry or profession…

At Say It For You, our content writers know readers are trusting our business owner and professional practitioner clients to help them with more than good products and skilled services. In addition to information, searchers need help making sense of all the changes happening in their neighborhoods and in their world.

“When customers provide more data, they expect better experiences,” salesforce.com cautions, so marketers need to create experiences that are:

  1. connected
  2. personalized
  3. immersive

What I’ve learned over the years of creating blog content for dozens and dozens of clients in different industries and professions is that, in order to “turn readers on”, we must incorporate one important ingredient – opinion. Taking a stance, I’ve found, is what gives content its “zip”. We must be influencers, I advise clients and blog content writers alike. Whether it’s business-to-business or business-to-consumer writing, the content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.
We need to be coming from a place of “who we are” as much as from a place of “what we offer”.

A content marketing alert: This Thanksgiving, an important part of our “food for thought” menu needs to be Society-happens-here content marketing.

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Convey the Concept through a Warm Human Storyteller

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Lately, brands increasingly prioritize people as the voice of their value, Robert Rose writes in “Trust the Story, or the Storyteller?‘

“Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to connect with customers on an emotional level, build trust and credibility, and ultimately drive sales,” Oxford Academic agrees, naming three reasons stories are so important a part of content marketing:

  1. Stories evoke emotions – empathy, joy, sadness, anger.
  2. Stories offer a glimpse into your values and beliefs.
  3. Storytelling gives your brand a unique personality. There are many different types of stories that can be used to connect with customers, the authors point out, including brand stories, customer experience stories, employee experience stories, customer testimonial stories, and case studies.  No matter the type of story, the point is to use vivid language to help readers visualize the event or happening.While it’s true that stories help us remember, that’s not good enough, Joe Lazuskas explains – they have to make us care.  Your stories need to talk about why you come to work every day, and about what you believe the future of your industry ought to look like. Two particularly important elements of a story are:
    a)Relatability – you’re telling the story of a person similar to the target reader.  b) Fluency – Realistically, Lazuskas reminds us, most U.S. adults can’t read at even a high school level; we need to keep a low barrier to entry between the audience and the story level.

    As a content marketer at Say It For You, I can never forget an article I read years ago about an experiment performed at Stanford University.  Students were each asked to give one-minute speeches containing three statistics and one story.  Later, students were asked to recall the highlights in each other’s talk.  Only five percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63% were able to remember the story line.

To convey marketing concepts, use a warm, human storyteller!

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Content Writers Help Readers Find the Quiddity

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In content marketing, you might say, it’s all about the quiddity, the essence of what you do, what you know how to do, and who you are that makes you different from any other. And, while Merriam Webster offers synonyms such as “center”, “core” and “heart”, vocabulary.com explains that politicians and lawyers sometimes use quiddity as an evasion technique, bringing up irrelevant and distracting points to avoid direct answers. 

“Capturing your brand essence succinctly involves distilling its core values, unique selling propositions, and emotional connections into a brief, impactful statement,” Alex Bundalla advises on LinkedIn. One way of expressing quiddity is Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, Bundalla explains.  Three concentric circles represent the “why” (values and principles), the “how” (methods), and the “what” (products and services) of your brand. Another visual expressing quiddity is the Brand Pyramid, showing levels of customer relationship with a brand, from experiential to symbolic and intangible.

At Say It For You, we often refer to blog posts as the sound bites of the Internet, in which we help business and practice owners convey t readers the essence, the “quiddity”, of their accomplishments and intentions. Hardly a simply task. You know your product, service, or company is amazing, but they don’t know how it works or why it’s so great, Brant Pinvidic writes in The 3-minute Rule. “You need to give them more knowledge in less time,” the author explains.

But what about those vocabulary.com “politicians and lawyers” who use quiddity as an evasion technique? It just doesn’t work for very long, is the answer. Putting a unique “twist” on a topic, in contrast, works extraordinarily well, I believe. Taking some good old ideas and using an individual approach to those ideas is no evasion, but a way to a. mark your content as uniquely yours. 

“The one that stands out is in essence the one that is not like the rest,” onsightapp.com agrees. “When people cannot distinguish brands from each other, they cannot form reliable relationships with those brands.” Not only does an effective brand have a well-outlined target audience, it may even offer a service or product exclusively to that target audience.

The essence of content marketing is finding – and communicating – the quiddity!

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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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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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