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What-Would-You-Do-If Content

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‘What animal best represents you as a person?’ How would you survive a zombie apocalypse? What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow?

By asking questions that avoid routine, rehearsed answers, interviewers can get a glimpse into an applicant’s skills and personality, Lee Hafner explains in Employee Benefit News.  Talking about the traits of an animal reflects your own qualities, the author explains, with a lion symbolizing leadership or a dolphin characterizing communication skills. A zombie apocalypse represents crisis situations, allowing interviewees to emphasize their adaptability and resourcefulness.  The question about winning the lottery allows candidates to show they are motivated by more than money.  Applicants should be ready for such out-of-the-box questions, using the job posting itself to prepare, Hafner advises.

In marketing, as in hiring, what-would-you-do research is essential.  For one thing, as Cascade Insights points out, “Today’s sales process is largely independent, with 68% of buyers preferring to research on their own before creating a shortlist. If your website doesn’t connect with your buyer’s priorities, or your content doesn’t show up where they are looking, you are likely to lose a lot of prospects that could have been leads.”

“As a consumer, I’m more likely to be a fan of and give repeat business to brands that know what I like and cater to my interests,” Flori Needle of Hubspot observes. After all, for any business, there are going to be customers who are simply too advanced for the product or service, or who engage with your content only to gain knowledge,( not as potential buyers).Meanwhile, 94% of marketers surveyed agreed that offering a personalized experience increases sales.

Just as Lee Hafner advises job candidates to be prepared to present their own “personas” by comparing themselves to specific animals, content marketers must be prepared to demonstrate they can meet their  target buyer’s specific needs, behavior, and concerns.

At Say It For You, we know.  As content marketers, we caution our business owner and professional practitioner clients that their business or practice cannot ever be all things to all people.  We explain that the content marketing we will be doing for them will need to be tailor-made for their ideal customers.  That “tailoring” includes:

  • what words we use
  • how technical we get
  • how sophisticated the approach will be in each article or post

What-would-you-do-if content means anticipating how “they” (those readers, not the average reader) might react to or feel about our approach to the subject at hand?

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Target Content But Leave No One Aghast

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The Certified Financial Planners Board ‘Perfect Job” ad campaign has apparently left Certified Financial Planners aghast, Tracy Longo reports in Financial Advisor Magazine. Meant to encourage young people to embark on “perfect” careers in financial planning, the ad depicts prospective CFP®s as snoozing, taking bubble baths, and competing in burrito-eating contests. The apparent intent was showing that careers in financial planning offer life-work balance, but the content ended up offending rather than informing.

As a CFP Board Emeritus® and now owner of a content marketing company, I view this “Perfect Job” marketing fiasco as a cautionary tale. Certainly, when building a plan to connect with an audience, we need to consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where members of  the target audience are “hanging out” on social media, Interviews, and focus groups. The creators of “Perfect Job” were obviously aware of the high value the younger generation places on work-life balance. But, because they were clumsy in using exaggeration to create a humorous effect, their ploy failed.

A number of years ago, I found material on some research done at the Saimaa University of Applied Sciences on the impact of humor in advertising. The researchers concluded that, while humor is an effective method of attracting attention in advertisements, it offers no advantage at increasing persuasion.

For the content writers at Say It For You, our “employers” are business and practice owners whom we work to connect with their target audiences, positioning those owners and practitioners as Subject Matter Experts in their respective fields. Because we are figuratively “putting words in their mouths”, it is they who must embrace the messaging prior to our “sending it out” to their target readers.

In the case of the “Perfect Job” campaign content, the marketers failed to consider the very financial planners they were positioning as models in the eyes of future entrants into the profession.

In defense of the campaign, CFP Board officials said the ads were “facetious portrayals” intended to help student audiences think about “what their dream job might look like”.

As a longtime content creator, I have learned that “facetious” marketing content too often combusts. As content marketers, the “trick” lies is targeting our content while leaving absolutely no one aghast.

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Content That Sets a Standard

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Absolute perfection!  (That was my first thought upon reading this Patek Phillippe ad in a special issue of Forbes:

 At Patek Phillipe, when we make a watch, however hard we work, we can only go at one  speed. One that ensures we adhere to the high standards for which we are respected. 

We understand that some people express frustration at this. They want to us to go  faster. But at our family-owned watch company, fast is the enemy.  Because to accelerate the time it takes to make a watch, we would have had to cut corners  and lower our quality.

 And then the watch might be a very good timepiece.  But it would not be a Patek Phillipe and would not merit the Patek Phillipe seal.

Thierry Stern, President

Notice how the president of Patek Phillipe never puts down competitors, in fact never even mentions other watchmakers. For that reason, he comes across as a leader, not a follower.

In content marketing, we teach, negatives against competitors are a basic no-no. Sure, in writing for business, we want to clarify the ways we stand out from the competition.  But, to get the point across that readers should want to choose your business or practice, or your products and services over those offered by the competition, it’s best to emphasize the positive.

An alternate approach to mentioning the competition in content marketing includes acknowledges that there may be alternative approaches to reader’s problem or need, then offering evidence backing up your own viewpoint.

A point I often stress in corporate blogging training sessions is that you’ve got to have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, content, to be effective, can’t be just compilations of other people’s stuff, making that be your entire blog presence. Yes, aggregation may make your site the “go-to” destination for information on  your subject. The bottom line, though, is that Thierry Stern understands the power of thought leadership, of staying true to the care values on which your business or practice was founded.

Sure, your competitors’ products and services may be very good products and services, but they wouldn’t be uniquely yours, and your content wouldn’t set a standard.

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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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Writing About WIne and Other Difficult Content Tasks

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“Using words to describe wine is fraught with peril and leaves wine writers exposed to ridicule,” Gus Clemens writes in an article  I found reprinted in my Indianapolis Star the other day. “Writing about wine is like dancing about architecture,” he complains. Although many familiar terms about wine tastes and smells are delicious to imagine and easy to understand because we know them from the fruit we eat, other terms, such as “leather”, “granite” or “green bell pepper” sometimes make us ask, “Are they just making stuff up to appear superior?”

Interesting. Just a couple of months ago, I posted a piece on introducing “insider terminology” to blog readers. The point I was making is that, in content marketing, once you’ve established common ground, adding new vocabulary  or “in-words” actually adds value to readers’ visit, giving them a sense of being “in the know”.

Offering online readers more than a description, but an “experience” is, in fact, one of our biggest challenges as content writers. Our goal is, through what they see on the page, to give visitors a “taste” of the benefits and satisfactions they stand to enjoy when using your products or services. 

“Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story,” observes Seth Godin in his book All Marketers Tell Stories. While effective stories have authenticity and an implied promise of satisfaction, they must also, he stresses, appeal to the senses rather than to logic

With readability being a critical yet often-overlooked aspect of writing (as StraightNorth.com explains, content  must be matched to the education and sophistication level of your intended audience. In the case of a wine vendor, is the content targeted towards experienced wine consumers or is it intended to draw in “newbie” enthusiasts?

Humanizing your marketing content is a way of bringing readers “backstage”, keeping the company or professional practice relatable. Building a story around the “leather” or “granite” element in the services and products you have to offer can mean turning information-gathering into an experience!

 

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