Picking on the words: audience

Photo credit: Vicki Lam

Think of content marketing as a conversation: spend time getting to know your audience beforehand so you don’t look unprepared

I’m sure you’ve heard it before: know your audience. But how does this help marketers, especially those responsible for creating content? That’s simple: in just about every way possible.

Whether you’re creating the content yourself (as a writer, video producer, designer, etc.) or directing the effort of others (freelancers, agencies), it’s critical you appreciate the value of understanding your audience — upfront. And I mean, understanding them as completely as you can.

If Abraham Lincoln were here, he’d probably say something wise like, you have to know where the target is in order to hit it. With apologies to Mister Lincoln, here are three ways that knowing your target audience can help content marketers:

1. Creative inspiration

Creative people need inspiration. They thrive on it. Given something that inspires them, creative people can deliver great things. But the opposite is also true — without inspiration, creative people are handcuffed and can only deliver what the person or group requesting the work thinks they want (which is usually not what the audience wants at all).

2. Message resonance

How can you know if the message you’re sending will resonate with those you want to reach? Only if you know who they are and what they want. This doesn’t have to be creepy where we need to know an audience’s innermost desires. But, if we’re trying to change behavior (getting someone to want what we have, buy what we’re selling or agree with our position on an issue), we need to know what will appeal to them.

3. Getting invited in

Back in 1970s America, brands could simply create a TV commercial and broadcast it out to the entire country. They could buy time on all three major networks at the same time (a media buying tactic called roadblocking) and people simply couldn’t avoid it.

This no longer works. Not only is it cost-prohibitive, people are now bombarded with more than 5,000 messages a day, so they have learned to ignore most of them. And technology (like TiVo and Netflix) helps them do it. In order for your message to break through and inspire someone, it has to be more targeted, reaching a specific group of people with a relevant message delivered in the way they prefer.

In reality today, your message has to be good enough to be invited in.

Of course, in order to do any of this you need to understand as much as you can about your audience. What do they like to do, watch, read? Who do they listen to, who is influential to them? What brands do they buy and what does that tell you about their world? And, perhaps most importantly, what do they need that you can provide for them better than anyone?

To paraphrase Mister Lincoln’s famous quote about the importance of sharpening one’s axe before chopping down a tree, if you have six hours to create a message, spend four hours learning about your audience.

Is content marketing growing up?

One of the biggest challenges we content marketers face today is ourselves.

Sure, it can be tempting to try to keep up with the latest marketing success story — the Oreo dunk in the dark, the Arby’s hat at the Grammy’s. And real-time affirmations from social media can make it easy to confuse attention with success.

But, if you study them, most truly successful content marketing examples focus on a very small group of targeted prospects, rather than trying to hit a home run with millions of people (even though the latter may be the result).

One of my favorite examples, from Jay Baer’s book, Youtility, is Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide, the humble, printed flyer created by a taxi driver who lives in a ski resort town in the Canadian Rockies.

As the story goes, Taxi Mike would routinely get questions from his riders about where to go and what to do in the small town of Banff, Alberta. But nothing existed that he could use to answer these frequent questions.

If nothing exists, an opportunity does

Realizing the need, Taxi Mike created a simple brochure that identified the best places for certain types of food and drink in Banff. He handed it out to people in his cab and gave it to local restaurants and bars. It wasn’t designed to ‘go viral’ or help people across the globe, just those who asked him for help.

As you know by now, Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide caught on…but why? Who do you think the grateful patrons who relied on his guide would call for a taxi at the end of the night?

Exactly.

A model for how to create great content

Did Taxi Mike create a series of high-production Vine videos? Did his guide spend weeks in design? Was it printed on 100-pound coated pearl white metallic card stock? Of course not.

And that’s exactly why it worked.

A big part of its success was in its authenticity. People could tell this was something created locally and that’s why they trusted it. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything should be humble. Or even printed.

But it does mean content marketers need to be aware of what their target persona are looking for. In this case, it was useful information — but it was also authenticity. In others, it will almost certainly be something else.

The point is to find out what your audience is looking for so you can give it to them as you’re helping them. Did Taxi Mike know all of this? Probably not, but who cares! His guide is a great inspiration for content marketers.

With everyone focusing on creating content today, we not only need to help people with our content, we need to do it in a way that builds trust. 

I, for one, think content marketing is up to the challenge.

Image courtesy of taximike.com

Did advertising create Content Marketing (and, perhaps more importantly, should horses wear hats)?

Back in colonial America, business owners had to rely on advertising (mail-order catalogs and newspaper ads, mainly) to pitch their products and services. But, as department store owner John Wannamaker is often credited with saying, no one knew for sure what was working:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

Promotional products became the solution

Searching for a way to measure effectiveness, companies started creating promotional items they could offer as an incentive to measure response. And, as you can imagine, some of these early giveaways were pretty bad.

While the traditional promotional product standbys like rulers and hand-held paper fans with printed messages were great (and are still popular today), some companies thought that hats for horses were a good idea.

Yes, hats for horses.

Okay, let’s place the blame where it really belongs

It’s more likely that printers of the day, who created the fledgling promotional products business to utilize their presses when they weren’t printing newspapers, came up with some of the more questionable ideas. It all started innocently enough with burlap book bags for students. That escalated to bags for marbles, card cases, calendars and the aforementioned horse hats.

Taking an idea and making it bigger (and better)

While horses everywhere shuddered, some innovative companies took the idea of creating something to measure response and elevated it — creating things that actually did more. Heard of John Deere’s Furrow magazine? Or the Michelin Guide? Or Jell-O recipe books? These companies went beyond horse hats (the 1880s version of click bait) and decided to create something that was actually useful.

So did advertising create Content Marketing? Maybe. But, now that technology has enabled Content Marketing to come into its own, the time is right to look for the next challenge.

What’s next for Content Marketing?

If we, as content marketers, think of ourselves as similar to those first companies that made a conscious choice to elevate promotional products to a more ‘useful’ status — shouldn't that cause us to think more broadly about the content we're creating today? (That's rhetorical...yes, it should).

The next time you have the opportunity to create content, think of those trailblazers who chose to elevate their content (even though they didn't call it that). Don't settle for something your audience will merely click on or subscribe to -- help them solve a problem.

In other words, create great content. People will thank you with their business.

Photo credit: roundstable.com

Picking on the words: native

Those of you in the content marketing space probably know where this is headed, but I want to challenge the way we use the word native more broadly than just in terms like native advertising.

So what is native, really?

Dictionaries say it’s a term that refers to a local inhabitant; something or someone that’s innate, not acquired. Based on that definition, very little about what we use the word for today fits at all.

Native software, for example, refers to programs that are created for or supported by a specific operating system (not typically those that were there to begin with). That’s a miss.

Native Americans refers to the people Europeans encountered when they discovered the so-called ‘new world’ they named America. How can you be native to a ‘new’ place that someone else has given a new name? They were certainly native, but I doubt they would consider themselves Americans. Miss.

And, finally, native advertising refers to messages created by a publisher to essentially deceive its audience by camouflaging a story from a brand to look as if it’s part of the publication.

Oops.

As expected, while there are some pretty big offenders in the use of the word, native advertising clearly wins.

Perhaps that’s what we should expect when combining a publishing industry desperate for some way — any way —to survive in the digital world they didn’t adapt to quickly enough with brands that are equally desperate for some way to stand out.

Expected? Perhaps. Does that make it okay? Absolutely not.

Tricking people who are not just your customers but also your greatest assets is more than offensive, it’s downright stupid. In fact, I’m not sure who’s more to blame here…the publishers who haven’t adapted and feel forced to take this path or die; or the brands who are clearly leveraging a short term gain in spite of those who would be their customers. Maybe both?

The bottom line is that native advertising is neither native nor advertising. And hiding behind a term that is deliberately nebulous to extract a short-term gain is cowardly and both the publishers and the brands that are participating should be called out for doing so.

But we probably won’t need to worry about that.

Today’s consumers are empowered, connected and smart. In the long run, they will understand (and remember) which publishers and brands are taking advantage of them currently through native advertising.

So what can these publishers and brands do? Not much.

Smart consumers know they are in charge and the publishers and brands attempting to fool them today through native advertising probably won’t be around too much longer to worry about it.

Photo courtesy of stockimages via freedigitalphotos.net

Picking on the words: campaign

Sometimes, when I comment (okay, rant) on a specific word choice, some of my friends (who shall remain nameless in hopes that they will remain my friends) will say I’m focusing on semantics or that I’m just picking on the words.

Exactly.

People, words are important. We should take care when picking the words we use, especially in this digital-first world where it’s likely people will ‘meet’ you online long before they do so in-person (if that ever happens).

Ironically, even as images and video become increasingly prevalent, the words you choose become even more important — because they represent you.

As Ann Handley says in her book, Everyone Writes, “Words matter. Your words (what you say) and style (how you say it) are your most cherished (and, yet, undervalued) assets.”Agreed (you should pick up her book, by the way).

Which brings me to the word for this time — campaign. Those of us who are self-proclaimed ‘purists’ of content marketing believe that content marketing is not a campaign, because a campaign has a beginning and an end.

Content marketing is ongoing, so to talk about a ‘content marketing campaign’ is akin to referring to ‘military intelligence’ or ‘jumbo shrimp’ — it just doesn’t make any sense.

Campaigns still exist, of course. There are political campaigns and advertising campaigns, both of which have a beginning and an end. And, remarkably, these kinds of campaigns aren’t going anywhere, even as consumers look for and find new ways to avoid both on an almost-daily basis.

Content marketing, on the other hand, isn’t about interrupting. It’s simply about helping. Or, what author and speaker Jay Baer calls Youtility in his book by the same name. Jay says, “The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.”

Content marketing doesn’t have an end because it’s merely an extension of your business (which hopefully doesn’t have an end, either). So the next time you find yourself talking about a ‘content marketing campaign,’ please,choose one or the other because they are very different things.

Want to nominate a word for next time? Please feel free to do so in the comments!

Advice for younger writers (Or what I wish I knew when my shoes looked as new as yours)

The world is a different place than when I got out of school.

That’s a phrase I swore I’d never speak, much less write down. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that:

A.     My parents are not, in fact, stupid

B.     Things change

C.     Keeping up with change is everything

So it is with the intention of helping you, younger writers, that I tell you things have, in fact, changed. I will share with you some public service announcements (PSAs) along the way in hopes that it helps you in your collective journeys. Here we go!

When I first graduated from college, there was no Internet (at least outside of the military) and certainly no Social Media. In fact, newspapers (my first two employers) were doing quite well, thank you very much.

If companies wanted to promote their products or services, they advertised. People couldn’t avoid ads back then (no TiVo, no Netflix) so that’s where I wanted to be. I could make great advertising and help companies promote whatever it was that they sold. My argument to myself: hey, who didn’t have things to sell? This is going to be great.

PSA: If you have to convince yourself of something, question it immediately.

While still in school, I sold advertising in the school newspaper. But it wasn’t selling, really. I attended a very large midwestern university with more than 50,000 students as a captive market (did I mention we were the school newspaper?) so we had to beat the advertisers back with a stick.

Selling? I didn’t know the half of it.

After graduation I thought this newspaper thing was going so well, I should do it full time. I accepted a job selling ad space for a local chain of weekly newspapers. I didn’t realize, until it was too late, that I was, in fact, selling space, not ads.

PSA: Make sure you understand what a job entails before you accept it (especially before you give up the one you already have).

In school, I had grown to love the creative side of crafting a message. This was also at a time when Macintosh started to mean less about fruit and more about computers. So, using a talent for writing I inherited from my mom, I started to realize I could lay down the occasional effective headline.

PSA: Try to notice the things you’re doing when people say things like, “You’re really good at that.” or “You make that look easy.” This is what you’re meant to do.

Alas, the weekly newspaper people didn’t hire me to create ads – they had a department for that, they informed me – I was supposed to be selling space. I was told to hit the streets. Yuck.

Needless to say, that first gig didn’t last long. The lesson from this part of the story is to learn to recognize when you don’t like something and get away from it as soon as you practically can. The key word here is practically.

PSA: Don’t quit your job today because you don’t like your evil boss. Everyone has to deal with evil bosses at some point. What I’m saying here is don’t waste too much of your life doing what you hate. This means you’ll have to work harder than most people, but it’s worth it.

So, I sold my soul to the corporate man and took a job in a Fortune 50 company to get out of the door-to-door sales business. I learned quite a bit in this next gig about communication to employees, rather than customers, and gained a lot of respect for my corporate communication brethren. But I needed to keep moving.

PSA: Different people like to do different things. Respect that. When I say I didn’t like sales, it’s because I sucked at it, not because it’s not a worthwhile vocation. Don’t stomp on others’ dreams as you’re looking for your own.

I finally landed a job in a marketing department, albeit a small one, and joined a four-person marketing staff of a large equipment and engine distributor. Perhaps this would be where I would make a difference (I told myself, both thumbs in the air!)

During my time with this firm – 10 years in all – the Internet came to be, cell phones happened and I became friendly with the corporate expense account. All good things, but I learned even more about business and life.

PSA: Appreciate what employers can give you beyond pay and benefits. Take advantage of any and all training opportunities and, if you don’t understand what a balance sheet is or how budgets are made — ask! At this company, I developed friendships I still have today and learned about the business world in ways I could never learn in school.

Rather suddenly, the company I worked for was purchased and my job was eliminated. This is not fun but, if it happens to you, realize two things:

A.     It’s not your fault

B.     This is exactly why you have a rainy day fund (Don't have one? Start one today.)

It was time for me to try the advertising agency world and I was more than ready. I was fortunate to hear about an agency that needed an account guy for one of its major accounts, which just happened to be my former employer. Remember the part about being sure what the job entails before you accept it? I should have known that no part of ‘account guy’ means writer.

PSA: Sometimes you’ll have to do work you don’t love in order to pay the bills. We all have. Don’t get mad at your employer or take this frustration out on your co-workers, they’re all trying to pay their bills, too.

It turns out that travel, another key element of my non-writing job, wasn’t something I loved either. And, with three small kids at home, they didn’t love it when daddy wasn’t home (and ‘daddy’ was my most important job).

But this time I had learned. I kept working and travelling while looking for something closer to home and finally found what I think is the perfect fit.

At an insurance company. Who knew?

PSA: Don’t pre-judge a potential employer based solely on their industry. A so-called boring category means it’s easier for your work to stand out!

Of course there are other words of advice I could offer, like start investing for retirement as soon as possible and make sure you get all of that company match, but you’ll get that elsewhere.

This diatribe is designed for writers, so I’ll leave you with these few final thoughts:

• Always read your work out loud before you publish it, you’ll be able to hear how it sounds to that little voice in your reader’s head

• Never publish a first draft; even if it’s a rush

• Always make sure you completely understand who your audience is before you start writing to them

• Never send a hastily written message (email, Tweet, etc.) you’ll almost always regret it; ‘save as a draft’ is a message purgatory created to save us writers from ourselves — use it

• Always be gracious to those you interview, they are providing you with an opportunity you wouldn’t have without their insights

• Never change direct quotes to fit your need

• Always try to be consistent; if your brand has standards, don’t just follow them, become the example of how they are followed

• Never present someone else’s work as your own

• Always be able to defend your position; you may not always win, but always have a well-thought-out point of view 

• Never stop writing

Three different levels of writing that radiate out toward your audience

Grammar is critical, but there’s so much more to consider

Some will debate if writing is grammar or something more. I’m in the camp that thinks of grammar as necessary (and often forgotten) but it’s certainly not all there is to writing.

As Ann Handley has said, “Writing is not grammar, writing is thinking.” Carmen Hill agreed, and recently added: “Yes, and grammar helps precisely express your thinking.” With that I couldn’t agree more.

Of course, most of us don’t have the luxury of writing just for the sake of writing. Many of us — even Ann Handley — have jobs. And people who have jobs write to support a brand, whether it’s a company brand or a personal brand.

So, while good writing is good thinking and grammar helps express that thinking, there is, of course, even more.

I recently developed a three-tiered approach to writing that my serve as a good way to help ensure you’ve got all the bases covered. Because each area affects the others, I see it as a series of concentric circles where the writer starts at the center and works his or her way outward toward the audience. I hope this idea will help you in your writing. So, here we go!

Start with core skills, work your way out

I believe the core skills needed for good writing are at the center of what a writer does. This includes pure writing measures for things like grammar, syntax, spelling, sentence structure…you know, the basics. If you’re not confident in your knowledge of these topics, study them. Learn them. Know them. They are your friend.

This also means including the right information (and nothing more). This requires asking the right questions…lots of them. If you haven’t done this basic level of work, your audience is likely to become distracted and unable to receive your message.

Layer on the brand’s voice

The next layer out from core skills is brand voice. This is where the basics that all good writers are capable of get more specific and differentiated. Is your brand a conversational brand (like Target) or are you more formal (like the IRS)?

The difference is important, because the way these two brands would say the same thing is necessarily different. That difference has to make its way into your writing, and this should happen right after the basic levels are assured.

And, of course, don’t forget message alignment

Finally, as you continue to move out toward your audience, the last filter you apply should be to insure your message is aligned with your messaging strategy. If there’s a creative brief, are you aligned with it? Have you done everything you can to assure that your specific audience will respond to your message in the way you intend?

What we need here is an example

Okay, here’s the message you have to deliver: your brand is changing the way it will accept orders and you can now accept credit cards (I know, it must the last brand on the planet. Sorry, I was a little short on examples today. Forgive me.)

Core skills: along with good grammar and spelling, include the basic information your audience will need:

·      Which credit cards will you now accept?

·      Is this additive or are you doing this for the first time?

·      When does this begin?

·      Do I have to use a credit card?

Brand voice: tell the story your way

If this message were coming from Target: “Hey, we can now accept that credit card. Hurry up and get over here!”

If this were coming from the IRS: “Effective April 15, 2016, we will be able to accept Visa, MasterCard and Discover Card.”

Message alignment: spend some time in your audience’s shoes

You can quickly see this message would be different for millennials than it would be for Baby Boomers. But what about male millennials (One swipe and you’re gone!) vs female millennials (Never worry about having to carry real money again!)

Of course, no approach like this is perfect for every situation. But I hope this will give you some ideas as you’re writing and perhaps it will help you hone your message as you’re creating it

Good luck!