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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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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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Content Marketing Must Make Readers the Winners

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“Shark Tank likely would not be the household name it has come to embody had it not been for Clay Newbill, Daymond John admits. “it was Newbill who pitched the idea and his choice of ideal cast members to a team of writers and editors”. In his book Powershift, Daymond John recalls a key change to the seating arrangements on the set that Newbill had made in the show, putting the Sharks at eye level with the entrepreneurs instead of on a raised stage. John’s advice to entrepreneurs is to “hone a win-win negotiating style”, striking a deal that works to the benefit of both parties.

In order to bring about a successful result in negotiating any deal, John elaborates, you need to do your homework, set the tone for the discussion, make the first move, and play to win-win. Understanding that people are people, just like you, bring value to the table without expecting anything in return, he advises. Always consider the needs of the buyers, not only those of the sellers.

Think like a buyer in your blog, I tell content writers. As Keith Rand, my late friend and co-member of Circle Business Network put it, achieving success in business means understanding – and focusing the conversation on – not what you have to offer, but on what the other party is seeking. Keith would explain that in a business transfer, the focus needs to be not on why the seller has decided to sell, but on what on what’s going on inside the buyer’s head as he or she pictures owning and running that business going forward. 

In advising professional speakers on ways to drive revenue, Aussie consultant Peter Sheahan advocated being buyer-centric, doing everything with buyers’ needs in mind. Your content marketing, I tell business owners and professional practitioners, will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers: 

  1. You understand their concerns and needs.
  2. You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. 

The content  marketing principle emphasized ten years ago in a piece by socialmediatoday.com remains true: “Content marketing should be beneficial to your customer, reflective of your brand, and optimized for Google, in that order.

Content marketing must make readers the winners!

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