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Bringing Yourself to the Page

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” For better or worse, in today’s world, everyone is a brand, and you need to develop yours and get comfortable marketing it,” Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald point out in the Harvard Business Review special spring issue. The question to ask yourself is what can you bring to the table of your industry out of your own personal experience. Two examples the authors offer:

  • You studied psychology, and have insights into human behavior.
  • You’re a UX designer who understands how to create more-accessible products.

Whatever your special talent, know-how, or experience, you can bring that to bear as an employee or executive to add value, is the point.

For us as content marketers, in essence “ghost-writing” newsletters, web page content, and blog posts for our business owner and professional practitioner clients, the concept of “bringing self to the page” has a double meaning. Yes, as Whitney Hill advises in a Writer’s Digest piece, “mining” areas of our own lives helps us connect with the right others. But since our purpose is to focus readers’ attention, not on ourselves, but on our content marketing clients, we use our own experience and wisdom to help readers “interview” those owners and practitioners in light of their own needs.

“Some articles have greater impact and reader engagement if written from personal experience, The Writer’s College explains. Writing an article from personal experience can avoid sounding generic, especially if you bring personal experiences to life with vivid sensory details, “showing” rather than just telling. Still it’s important to reflect on the impact and growth that resulted from the experiences you’re describing.

In using content marketing to translate our clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms, I prefer first and second person writing 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. I compare the interaction between content writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews, where the concept is to focus, not on facts, but on discovering the “person behind the resume”.

In bringing our clients to the page, we know that “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective marketing content for both business owners and professional practitioners. True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice, not to mention showcasing the special empathy those providers have for their clients and customers.

Through messaging, ghost writers, providers, and customers are all “brought to the page”!

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Staying in Touch With Content

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“You need to take control of the narrative,” Bryce Sanders cautions financial advisors in Financial Advisor Magazine. When the stock market is going up, some advisors don’t see the need to call their clients. Others don’t think they need to call when the market is going down. But either way, Sanders cautions, it’s a big mistake not to stay in close touch with your advisees.

At Say It For You, we realize, every single one of the reasons Sanders cites for staying in touch with financial planning clients is true for business owners and professional practitioners in every field:

1. Your clients should be expecting you to be in touch with them on a predictable basis.
In content marketing, it’s a big mistake to take your foot off the gas. Yes, creating a steady stream of content takes time and patience. As online marketing guru Neil Patel stresses, websites that publish regular, high-quality content are providing real value to users.

2.    Give the client credit for the successes they have achieved using the information you’ve provided.
Your website can include customer testimonials to boost credibility in two ways. Success stories boost your credibility with new prospects, helping them decide to do business with you. At the same time, testimonials also foster commitment from those providing those testimonials.

3.  Clients need to know where they stand with you, knowing you are paying attention.
To maintain that “paying attention” stance, it’s crucial to avoid “yo-yo content posting”. Spacing marketing content pieces at regular intervals and maintaining consistency allows regular readers and newcomers to the site to expect – and benefit from – a regular flow of information.

4.  Clients have the potential to invest new dollars with you, and are looking for direction.
When it comes to content marketing, the word “news” can mean several different things, including “your own news”, introducing a new employee, a new partner, a new product, a new service. Community news relates to “what’s going on and how we fit in”.

Content marketing is nothing more than staying in touch with what’s happening in your community, in your industry, in your business or practice – and sharing those insights with your readers!

 

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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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Today, I’m Working on Being a Content Expert In…

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The vast majority of reporters are constantly thrown into topics, issues, controversies, and specialties they know little about, Indianapolis Business Journal editor Lesley Weidenbener admits. In fact, being a journalist requires diving into unfamiliar topics, she says.

Often, upon learning of the content marketing my team members and I do at Say It For You, someone will ask, “So do you specialize in marketing for a particular industry or profession?” In fact, not only does being a ghost writer of marketing content require diving into unfamiliar topics, much of the joy we take in the work derives from precisely that experience of gathering information, interviewing practitioners and business owners, and then (just as Weidenbener puts it), “massaging” that information into stories that help readers understand things better.

From data analytics to death care, from HVAC services to nutritional supplements, from personal injury law to retirement planning to leadership training, dental surgery, and leadership training, each content marketing assignment has offered a new “today I’m working on being an expert in…” opportunity.

One of the most telling acknowledgments of this “working-to-become-an-expert” philosophy came in the form of a recent client testimonial:  “Say It For You worked hard to understand nuance in our industry, including external research…”

Being a lifelong learner is a big part of online content marketing, to be sure. In order to deliver quality writing of any kind, you’ve got to keep educating yourself, reading everything you can get your hands on. While it’s important to cite sources by paraphrasing and hyperlinking back to the page where the information originated, the skill lies in “translating”” that information, putting it into the context of your primary topic.

When content marketing works, though, it’s about much more than the technical details.  The goal is to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to the information by filling in the finer details about the people behind a business or practice and sharing the reasoning behind the choices they’ve made.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, my fervent hope is, I’ll be working on become an expert in…who knows?

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Losses Do Have Something to Tell You: Keep Telling!

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Losing is the main thing that happens in contests,” Rosalie Knecht wryly observes In Poets and Writers Magazine. Most people who apply for a job don’t get it, most dates are not great dates, and thousands of fresh losers are minted each year by the Oscars, the Grammys, and the Emmys. It’s important to learn how to lose, she thinks.  In fact, in the social sciences, she knows, there is a whole field of inquiry called resilience studies, which examines the question of how people carry their losses and burdens.  “A loss is just a win that happened to someone else,” the author observes, “It has nothing to tell you,” she reassured writers who fall into despondency when their submissions are rejected or downright ignored by editors and publishers.

Long-term, unrelenting resiliency is the secret of success for content marketers. While remaining alert to the relative success of certain articles, case studies, and blog posts is instructive in creating new content, throwing in the towel before success has had a chance to develop is the single biggest reason for failure in content marketing. Truth is, when I started Say It For You seventeen years ago, I knew that, while my own considerable experience in writing newspaper columns was going to be an asset for blogging, the main key to success was going to be simply staying on task. Now, after years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that  while consistency and frequency are such  rare phenomema, success depends on “keeping on keeping on”. 

Unlike Knecht’s message to writers about “losses having nothing to tell you”, I believe those early “losses” have a lot to tell us about our content marketing efforts – we need to keep on listening, researching, reading around, and “telling our story”!.

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