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Putting the Personal Before the Factual

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Rules are important in English grammar, especially when using multiple adjectives to describe a single noun, Bennett Kleinman reminds us on wordsmarts.com.  All ten distinct adjective types aren’t required in a sentence, Kleinman reassures us, but, used in the wrong order, adjectives make for very awkward sentences. While most of us pick this up based on common speech patterns, Kleinman reminds us of the correct order, with personal opinion being first, followed by factual descriptions (size, quality, shape, age, color, origin, material, type, and purpose). 

The way Chris Tor explains the “rule” is that “the closer you get to the noun being modified, the more inherent to the nature of the noun the adjective is”. “You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but if you mess with that word order you’ll sound like a maniac,”  @MattAndersonNYT cautions in a tweet. 

Is the same rule applicable to content marketing? You bet. How can you create ads that draw your intended consumers towards commitment? Using emotional appeal advertising is the ticket,‌ Nitzan Solomon reminds us in a wisestamp.com post. When ads evoke emotion, he explains, they are more likely to:

  • be remembered
  • influence opinion
  • drive action
  • build loyalty

Your smart phone may feature a high-resolution display, lightning-fast processor, and long battery life, but don’t start with that.  Instead, begin by describing the phone as being “the perfect companion for capturing and sharing all of life’s moments”. Solomon suggests.

One interesting perspective on the work we do as content marketing professionals is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms.  That’s the reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

At Say It For You, we’ve learned, corporate and professional practitioner content is part promo, part advertising, part bulletin, part tutorial, and part mission statement, but the bottom line is that it includes both the personal and the factual – in just that order of importance!

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In Content Marketing, Are Listicles Part of the Problem or a Solution?

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What reunites you with your car keys, slashes your dessert budget, transports you to Margaritaville, and douses the flames shooting out of your head, all while making you nicer? Well, as Amy Maclin asserts in Oprah Daily, it’s mediation.

As a content marketing trainer at Say It For You, I couldn’t help both admiring  – and critiquing –  “9 Surprising Benefits of Mediation”. Turning your frown upside down? Providing TLC for your IBS? Soothing Your Achy-Breaky Back? All titles to induce a smile. Good, cleverly written explanations, too.

(“Reunites you with your car keys” alludes to the fact that meditation improves cognition, according to a study of older adults; “Transporting you to Margaritaville “refers to the fact that mediation turns on the body’s parasympathetic nervous system – the flip side of fight or flight.)

“There are good reasons listicles remain one of the most popular forms of content today,” Hubspot points out. They’re readable, and, precisely because they’re bite-sized, they’re sharable. What’s more, nobullmarketing says, list posts are shared more often than posts in other formats. Still, given the quality of some list posts, there’s a chance they might be considered lightweight, the authors caution.

Travel writer Eric Reed does consider listicles lightweight. “If there is one thing we can certainly agree on above all else” he says, ” it is that listicles constitute the lowest form of journalism.” When you write a listicle, he points out, you’re not providing a transition from one thought to the next. Difficult subjects need a unified narrative, and listicles lack the background readers need before they can really get into your story.

At Say It For You, where we create content based on a combination of independent research and interviews with our business and practice owner clients, their staff members, and their customers, we view content marketing as SME-DEV (Subject Matter Expert Development). While listicles certainly have a place in our content marketing “toolbox”, we prefer to utilize the “Power of One”, focusing each blog post on one new idea, or calling for a single action.

Focused on one thing, a post has greater impact, since people are bombarded with so many different messages each day. Ms. Maclin, what I’d love to read is one long, detailed article, focused on the research concerning the many cognitive health benefits of meditation.  The title might even be “Meditation Can Reunite You With Your Car Keys”.

 

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First, Offer Readers the Right Questions

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When it comes to interest rates, “investors are seeking the right answers to the wrong questions,” Boston-based MFS investment management portfolio manager and global investment strategist Robert Almeida suspects.  When planning a long-term investment portfolio strategy, the precise timing of a Fed rate cut is not the issue.  We should be asking what the fact that rate cuts are even being considered reveals about the fundamental health of our economy, Almeida asserts…

The most serious mistakes are not the result of wrong answers, the Corporate Learning Network editors agree.” The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.” Why is that so? “A wrong answer to the right question can, as a rule, be repaired and salvaged. But if you ask the wrong question and get the right answer, chances are it will take a lot longer to discover and inevitably lead to even more costly errors. As an example, the editors quote a comment by Steve Jobs on the birth of the automobile industry: “If Ford had asked people in a focus group what they wanted they would have said ‘faster horses’.”  Translation – your marketing content cannot focus on satisfying a need for your client’s product or service without prospects first recognizing that need! “You have to start with figuring out what problem you’re solving, instead of searching for the answer,” Nicolas Cole writes in Inc. Magazine. ” Great ideas are answers to the right questions.”

Duotech Services lists questions business owners should be asking possible vendors and suppliers, including:

  • Does your company have experience with a business like ours and understand our needs?
  • If there was a boost in productivity could your adjust to meet our increased needs? If we needed to slow down production, are you flexible enough to adjust to that reality?

(Notice that these questions are not centered around  cost, but around ease of communication and adaptability.)

Blog posts, as we so often stress at Say It For You, are not advertisements or sales pieces (even if increasing sales is the ultimate goal of the business owner).  Whatever “selling” goes on in effective content is indirect and comes out of business owners sharing their passion special expertise and insights in their field.  When content marketing “works”, readers are moved to think, “I want to do business with them!”.

Before offering solutions or answers, offer readers the right questions!

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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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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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