CHAPTER 7
Start the Conversation
Early on in this book, we talked about the “handshake moment,” and in this chapter, we'll unwrap that concept further. After all the planning, segmenting, and analyzing, the channel strategy is in place, and at some point, you have to start the conversation. But, just how do you get noticed? This chapter addresses how to gain the attention of the audience so you're not just part of the noise.
It's no longer a question of whether you should insert yourself into the world of content marketing. It's a matter of when you are going to start talking and what you are going to say. What is your handshake moment? What is your unique value proposition to the audience?
This chapter is all about deciding what you are going to say. Everything, we've discussed so far—being humble, storied, and relevant—has been leading up to this point. You still have to come up with memorable content that's interesting and unique. You need to plan your handshake moment.
Remember What You've Learned So Far
Your target audience, the ones you are attempting to start the conversation with, only care about themselves when they read your content. They are looking to solve a problem immediately or looking for incremental knowledge they didn't already have about your area of expertise. Designing a story that helps someone is not peddling; it's your content marketing obligation. You're taking action to help someone.
If you had the time, you'd ask every audience member individually about themselves. But because that's not the role of content, you need to frame an answer to a question you know your audience has that is relevant to your industry and the audience but that isn't about you or your product.
For example, if you're in the travel business, instead of a blog post titled “How to Get Your Next Vacation at Half the Price” (you-focused), you might opt for something like “Discount Travel: Smart Vacation Hacks to Live Like a King at a Pauper's Price” (uses a smart keyword phrase with a clever, problem-solving angle). If you're a wine distributor, don't be tempted to write and distribute a blog titled “Five Ways to Save on Wine.” Try writing instead “Sour Grapes? Five Tips for Spotting a Bad Wine Before Uncorking It.”
Remember that storytelling is about a narrative. So it's critical to remember that when you tell your story, the reader is the hero. And the hero is living in an unfolding story that you want to join and be an integral part. Every experience has a story, and when you start a conversation, you need to tap into the hero's story to drive him or her ultimately to action.
As you begin any conversation, you must speak the language of the channel. Social media has colloquialisms appropriate for each channel and often only that channel. LinkedIn sounds different than Twitter; Snapchat sounds different than Facebook; and so on.
Always in the back of your mind should be the question “What's the big idea?” Before you embark on any content creation, you must decide what you're going to write about. Then, as you move forward, ask these questions:
- Why did you start this?
- What was the broad subject matter you wanted to cover?
- What makes you the industry leader?
- Why should people listen?
Tips for Starting a Conversation
As always, when starting a conversation, you lead with the audience member, not with you. Once your id is out of the way, then you can start the conversation.
Find the Right Angles
Don't be a “me, too” marketer by writing about the same topics you and everyone else can find all over the place. Be a thought leader and dig to discover the unobvious. Sometimes, this might be incremental knowledge about topics your reader didn't realize they wanted and needed to know. Think of yourself as an entrepreneur in the problem-solving business. Then, when your customers need you, your expertise, or your products and services, they come to you because you're the voice of authority. In the downtime, when they aren't seeking you out to meet their needs, you're still interacting with them with your always-on content marketing. Let your competition fight for the bottom with the next article about “Five Reasons to Do This or That.” Figure out the right angle—the one that hasn't been talked about—and don't be afraid to go there. Your audience will appreciate that you did.
Go Deep
Make 'em laugh, cry, get angry, cringe, hope, dream, and so forth. Once you've figured out the topic you want to write about, you have to make it memorable. Connect with your audience on an emotional level, and they'll not only share it, but they'll stick around for more from you. Today, brand ambassadors are won and lost at the content level. Make them love you, and they'll talk about you forever.
Craft Your Headlines
There's a “function over form” debate among content marketers. Are you writing for bots or humans? If you write headlines that are keyword rich, you'll help your search engine results. But just slapping up keywords and adding “Ten Tips” in front of them could lead to awkward headlines devoid of rhythm and difficult to remember. And ultimately, you'll soon be forgotten—the very minute the reader leaves your article. It's worth putting some time into thinking through your headlines. As marketing pioneer David Ogilvy said, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as they do the copy. When you've written your headline, you've spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”1
Writing Content Made Easy: Ask Three Questions
To earn attention, we discussed that you should have useful, memorable, and sharable content. Three questions at the core of a successful content creation process for your content marketing strategy are:
- What does your target audience need to know about right now? In other words, what is a relevant, useful (and trending) topic at the moment?
- What's the right angle? That is, how can you talk about the topic in a way that hasn't already been talked about?
- What's the punchline? What do you want them to do?
Imagine you're writing content for a financial brokerage firm and you're tasked with educating active investors on how to protect their portfolios against market swoons. This is a familiar topic for most people with a long-term portfolio, and one that has been written about ad nauseam. How would you approach this differently using the three questions above?
My firm was faced with this task when one of our clients asked us to write a series of articles on the subject of portfolio protection. Simple enough on the surface. But you would find no shortage of articles written about a subject such as that. Not wanting our client to sound like a me-too firm and get lost in the crowd, we focused on the tools and the market conditions themselves. In an article entitled “Bear Market Radar Detector,” we focused on how to identify toppy markets that might be ripe for a fall. Oh, and it just so happened that our client had tools (of course) that the investor could use.
By simply answering the three content questions beforehand, we effectively solved for a small hurdle:
- What does your audience need to know about right now?
Answer: Portfolio protection tips.
- What's the right angle?
Answer: How individual investors can identify the warning signs a bear market is near as part of an overall portfolio strategy.
- What's the punchline?
Answer: How to use the broker's unique set of online tools to effectively accomplish this without actually selling the tools.
As with any article, you're tying the information needs of the client with the marketing objective (in this case, introduce the tools), and it's a win-win for the investor and the broker.
Beyond the Headlines
Outside of the headline and substance of the article, there are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when before you write a single word.
Don't bury the thesis. Tell them what you're going to tell them upfront. People's attention spans are short. If you only have thirty seconds to grab someone's attention, don't take sixty seconds to get to the point. Once you grab their attention, avoid colorful language that can distract.
Know your stuff. If you're selling paint, you better know a thing or two about painting. This may sound obvious, but even if you know your industry cold, be sure your content team isn't green. Your audience is looking to you for thought leadership and guidance, so you need to know your topic cold. Consider influencers to help with this (externally or internally). (More on this in Chapter 9.)
Hire writers who know your stuff. If you don't have the time to write your own material, hire specialists, not just writers who claim they can write on any subject. Two mistakes are most often made here: hiring cheap writers or hiring writers who write about any topic, particularly those who don't specialize in your industry. You get what you pay for, so if you're in a field that requires specialized knowledge, you may need to pony up for experienced, skilled writers in your industry.
Create an “editorial board.” Outside writers should be expected to deliver good ideas regularly. This is a huge benefit that saves you time and money. You're not just paying writers for words on a page. You're also paying them for ideas, making them a part of the ideation process for topics.
Big Ideas for Longer Conversations
There are several types of content that truly grab an audience's attention. And those types of content are founded in capturing people's attention in an engaging way; providing them with useful, usable information; and positively influencing their thoughts about your brand.2 Most attention-getting content can be used in various forms on multiple channels.
Content that addresses trending information delivers needed guidance on changing circumstances that are affecting your audience from you, the expert in the industry. Whether the changes are evolving slowly or occurring rapidly, your content should present solutions for your audience in relevant and supportive ways.
Another popular approach that captivates audiences is content that explains how to accomplish some task, activity, goal, or result. This type of content must be relevant, delivering information critical to success, for the audience and appear on a channel where the topic is already a part of the ongoing conversation.
Do Something Totally Unexpected
Totally unexpected content is content developed with the intention of going viral and building an audience quickly. Touch a nerve, funny or emotional. Keep in mind that humor is nearly always a winning formula. Videos seem to work well in this format. A few examples are: The Dollar Shave Club's “Our Blades are F***ing Great” viral video, the Blend-it video series, and the TD Bank #TDThanksYou campaign.
Other companies have done well with the “totally unexpected” angle and used it quite effectively. Take the whimsical music video from Jordan Vineyard & Winery parodying the mega-hit song “Despacito” to promote their cabernet sauvignon. The video was so successful that Jordan Winery discovered their voice in the crowded wine space that kicked off their video content brand (jordanwinery.com/videos). Though the company doesn't disclose the numbers, since the channel was introduced, sales, social media engagement, visits, and earned media have all gone up.5
A word of caution is needed here: Unexpected content doesn't always last as long as you'd like. Once you've done it the first time, it's simply not sustainable. But if you're starting a new campaign or looking for a jolt in engagement, this is a positive strategy to consider to kickstart things. Once you've established your content brand to your audience, be ready to parlay your success into content that is more long term.
Go Niche
In other words, go where others haven't. What if you could not only talk about something in a way nobody else did, but you invented a content brand that specialized in that topic?
To find your niche, start by exploring and researching content experiments through the years. Why, for example, did Saturday Night Live resonate with its audience when it first aired in 1975? Simple: Lorne Michaels thought the then-young late-night baby boomer audience needed a departure from the traditional format of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. He was right. They needed, and wanted, something irreverent and cynical that wasn't going to ever be on Carson's show. He sold the idea to NBC. He knew the language of the Boomers, and the platform he developed for live, irreverent comedy was the perfect content channel. It was a niche that hadn't been capitalized yet because others feared breaking from the status quo.
In the world of content marketing, thinkMoney magazine that T3 Custom created for TD Ameritrade was not only unexpected, it was irreverent. The magazine targeted hyperactive online traders and gave this very niche audience something to connect offline with the brand. Not only that, it gave them the opportunity to learn new, tradable ideas, and laugh while doing it. Though online trading hit critical mass nearly a decade earlier, by 2007, no other financial brand had seen or capitalized on the opportunity. Most had only been interested in carving out marketing budgets for the greatest audience (buy and hold investors) rather than nurturing their smallest, most valuable audience (hyperactive traders) who often generate vastly more revenue than the average investor client.
And it worked. After reading thinkMoney, traders traded more, opened new accounts, consolidated old ones, and best of all, shared the information with their trading friends, who migrated to TD Ameritrade and did the same. The magazine became a cult hit, and its loyal readers became loyal customers. It was truly a differentiator.
Another outstanding example is the Content Marketing Institute. In 2009, Joe Pulizzi founded the Content Marketing Institute with a smart idea: build a business using only content marketing. It was a huge risk at the time.
His business concept was to target the fledgling content marketing industry with a new type of education firm. The plan: First, using a blog, build an audience of marketers entirely on content from other influential marketers eager for the exposure. Then develop a product this audience would not only want but come to need—an annual conference for showcasing content marketing best practices by other industry experts and influencers. Throw in a well-written, well-designed magazine, some limited, lucrative sponsorships, and—voila!—you have a recipe for success, all built on the back of content marketing itself.
There are many other examples of successfully going niche. It's worth the time and research to see if this method can help you start the conversation.
Five Wrong Ways to Start a Conversation
For all the ways we've mentioned for starting a successful conversation with your target audience, it's worth mentioning a few that you need to avoid. Although it's been said that even bad publicity can be good publicity, that's simply not always true in content marketing. Here are five surefire ways to stumble in starting the conversation.
1. You Don't Pay Attention
There's a great scene from Woody Allen's classic Play It Again, Sam. Woody Allen's character (Allan) is in an art museum standing next to a woman with whom he's trying to strike up a conversation. The woman (Museum Girl) is admiring a painting when this conversation ensues.
Allan: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Museum Girl: Yes, it is.
Allan: What does it say to you?
Museum Girl: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
Allan: What are you doing Saturday night?
Museum Girl: Committing suicide.
Allan: What about Friday night?6
It seems Allan starts the conversation pretty well, using an object of shared interest (the painting) to kick things off. He even has a good follow-up question (“What does it say to you?”). However, as the rest of the conversation shows, he blows it in the end because he's obviously not paying attention to what she's saying.
In content marketing, once you get a conversation started, your job isn't over. In fact, it has only begun. You have to focus and listen to what the potential customer is saying during the conversation to fully understand their needs. Like so many inward-facing content marketing flops, in the scene, Woody Allen's character is so focused on his own needs (essentially selling himself as a product to a highly desirable customer) that he pays no attention to anything she's actually telling him. His desired end overtakes his ability to listen. Don't make his mistake. Don't blow it. Pay attention to what your potential customers are saying.
2. You Talk About Yourself, Not Your Customer
Nobody wants to listen to someone drone on about how great they are. Yet, throughout the decades, acceptable advertising copy has been what amounts to descriptions of a product's features and benefits, with a nod to what it will do to enrich consumers' lives. This is not cool if you're producing content that's doing the very same thing, however.
Here's a quick test to determine whether you're talking too much about yourself. Randomly pick some content you've already produced and count the number of times you mention your company's name or your product's name. Once or twice may be okay, depending on context, but any more than that, and you need to check your ego at the door because you have a problem.
A successful content marketing strategy turns traditional advertising on its head and asks customers to consider what they need, only then bringing up what the company offers to meet those exact needs. Do you have a tool that will solve your customer's problem? Great news. Talk about the situation that inspired the need for the tool—the same pain points your customer is experiencing— then talk about the solution. A screenshot of your solution in action as part of the educational experience would deliver greater value than you boasting about how great you are for having developed it.
A lesson from the seminal 1930s book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, still holds true eighty years later. You tend to make the best impression when you focus on the other person, not yourself.
Conversation starters are not unlike those you use on first dates as you're getting to know someone, questions like “What makes you laugh the hardest?” and “What is something I wouldn't guess about you?” Except, here, instead of asking questions while trying to get to know the other person, you're making assumptions based on the research you've done on your potential audience, about what they want to hear. You may not be asking any icebreaking questions in your handshake moments. You need to think of ways to make the conversation about your audience and their needs, not about you, your brand, or your product.
3. You Bring Up the Sale Too Early
Some companies have the wrong idea about content marketing. They create a YouTube video to park their TV ads or promote their product in an online blog, and immediately expect the proverbial phone to start ringing off the hook. And that approach might work for billboards selling fifty-cent burgers to hungry drivers, but it's definitely not a handshake moment.
It's hard for some marketers who are under pressure to produce immediate return on investment (ROI) to grapple with the longer sales cycle of content marketing. It requires more patience than putting up a billboard and quickly seeing those hungry drivers line up at your drive-thru window. The ultimate satisfaction of getting into a conversation with your audience is the personal relationship you can build with your customers and the ability you have to address different types of customers who need unique solutions from your company.
When advertising on a channel designed for visual storytelling like YouTube, and the story you're trying to tell the world is that you make cheap burgers, you are showing them you don't really value their time. This isn't a conversation; it's an interruption. Remember the golden rule of content marketing: Don't pitch. Teach.
4. You Offend Your Listener
Everyone can probably relate to committing a social faux pas by having said something that offended another person in the conversation. And though you probably never talked to that person again, you did survive the encounter. Businesses aren't so lucky.
A few years back, amid a spate of controversial police shootings across the U.S., Starbucks decided it could help bridge the racial divide by engaging in conversations about race at its coffee shops. It called the effort “Race Together,” and asked its baristas to write the same phrase on its coffee cups and engage in conversations with their customers. Photos were snapped and pushed out on social media.
Arguably, Starbucks had the best intentions in mind, and certainly, they didn't intend for the campaign to sound condescending, but that's exactly how it was interpreted. With Howard Schultz, CEO and chairman of Starbucks, leading the charge, people felt as if they were being lectured by an individual who'd never experienced racism. Within forty-eight hours, the backlash produced more than 2.5 billion impressions, mostly spurred by outrage over the gesture.7
5. You Don't Do Your Research
If you've ever talked to a know-it-all who makes completely false statements, you understand the feeling of not trusting that person then, now, nor likely in the future. The same goes for your company's content when you spout falsities that could've been prevented with a little fact checking before your content is put out there for all to see.
A fact that seems difficult for marketers to understand is that if you're publishing content, then you have the same journalistic responsibilities as traditional media. Anyone and everyone producing content today are publishers. As such, everything your brand distributes out there could be consumed by the media landscape in equal proportion as traditional journalism. And as a result, there should be no less journalistic integrity.
Picking on Starbucks one more time (sorry, Howard), the company had to apologize in 2012 after inviting its Irish Twitter followers to “Show us what makes you proud to be British” as part of a Diamond Jubilee promotion.8 Apparently, whoever put up the post didn't realize that Ireland is separate from Britain, and the company received threats from people who said they wouldn't come back to the coffee shop. Oops.
The lesson here is to fact check, fact check, fact check before you put a marketing plan forward. Know your audience and know the landscape. Starbucks failed in its Irish effort. But they learned from their mistake, and you can, too.
Icebreaker
Imagine you've been handed the task of producing your company's next blog post. Using the “three questions” discussed in this chapter, develop a topic of your own relevant to your industry and your audience that you can discuss in an educational way, with a twist you're not likely to find anywhere else. Remember to ask:
- What does your audience need/want to hear about right now?
- What's the right angle?
- What's the punchline?