In the 1st part of this series we learned to look at content marketing from the clients’ perspective, how to write in the shoes of your client. Now we look further into the way you create a unique space for your content.
Strategy Eight – Tell a story
Do you want to adopt a content marketing campaign that will really impact with clients and prospective clients? Then look to a communication strategy that has been paying dividends since you were born. Tell a story, the same way your parents did whilst you sat eagerly on your bed, straining to hear every word they read. You loved these stories because they had a beginning, a middle and an end. There were heroes and villains. It had a narrative. It made sense, or helped you make sense of your own world. You may not think this is suitable business strategy, but it’s precisely the best way to explain who you are, what you do, and what you can achieve for your clients.
Clients love a story. In fact, as every professional knows, it is the way most clients explain their problems. What does a client tell a family lawyer in the first interview? It will inevitably be a story about the breakup of their relationship, not their immediate legal needs. Why does this happen? Because telling a story allows them to convey to a stranger a sense of their experience. We all want competent advice, but we also want the adviser to be empathetic. And the client usually does not understand their immediate needs, that’s the job of the professional. Telling their story is often the only way they know to establish the parameters of the problem. First they must introduce you to their world, especially if their experience is painful.
It’s not just clients or prospective clients, we all love stories – we love a narrative. Why? What were our ancestors doing when they gazed at fires in the African Savannah 130,000 years ago? They were telling stories. The delight we have in stories, and the ability to explain otherwise complicated issues by using stories, is hardwired into our brains.
Stories connect your clients to your firm on a personal level – the right story creates empathy. The right story can help prospective clients identify with your firm, not in the cynical manner of advertising, but because you have taken the trouble to reach out and uniquely explain yourself in a way your competitors cannot replicate. Either they don’t know how, or more likely they believe it’s not “professional”. While they elucidate the minutiae of retirement funding, you have made the same point by telling the story about one of your clients who used a managed fund to take their dream trip around Australia in a vintage Airstream caravan. How did they achieve this? By taking your excellent investment advice, that’s how. Your prospective clients will have their own dreams to fulfill, what matters to them is whether you can help them do it.
The heart of plain English content marketing is its authenticity. That’s why consumers have now become, and will become increasingly so, conditioned to reject the conventions of overt marketing. This is good news for professionals who can tell a story. When online, consumers adopt a different psyche than their passive radio or television counterparts, and instead identify with the “social” aspect of the media, which is unmistakably interactive compared to earlier technologies. For mature professionals, who well understand the value of effective communication, this is an opportunity to leverage already honed skills.
We love stories that have a message, and that message can certainly be commercial in nature. When she was little, my daughter used to write stories, wonderfully descriptive, but they were just events followed by more events. One day I said to her, “in a story something can happen that changes everything and that’s why the word ‘suddenly’ is such a great word”. Off she went and returned a few hours later holding her newest creation. In this story she enjoyed a walk, bought an ice cream, went to the park, played a game with friends, then headed home. On the way home there were people in the street and SUDDENLY they turned into aliens. She had accomplished the one thing we want to achieve with any story, even in a professional context, because now I was hooked. I wanted to know what happened next.
We thrive on rich imagery – words are always better when they create an image. If you are a lawyer describing a Will, don’t assume your readers have in mind the same document you do. Instead of describing a will as a “document that deals with your estate”, try to give it some colour:
Why do you need a will? Imagine your family are grieving, they are confused and anxious about the future. The last thing they need is to have those anxieties exacerbated by your failure to leave a Will. One of your legacies can be to take care of their needs, even when you are not there to make your presence felt in a physical sense.
That’s a story that invokes imagery. Your client or prospective clients read this and see their own family, with faces and needs to match. That’s what they care about, not a dry description of a legal document.
Remember, intellectual understanding is overrated. You will explain most professional concepts a lot better with metaphors and analogies than any jargon that you believe, wrongly, demonstrates your professional expertise.
Strategy Nine – Show don’t tell
If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. ‘High-performance’ is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. (Chip and Dan Heath)
This is a follow-on strategy from telling your story. Don’t tell clients that the service offered by your firm is “proven to get results”. That’s abstract. Instead describe its content and let them draw their own conclusions. “Our customised Powers of Attorney allow you to undertake a myriad of substitute decision making. This might be the purchase of property when you are overseas. Or it can allow you to make appropriate arrangements with banks that enable a trusted person to operate your account. Or it will mean that your financial affairs are always supervised by the person you choose – not a court – if you are unable to make reasonable financial decision for yourself because of illness or injury. No matter what you require, we can tailor a customized Power of Attorney that suits your personal needs and special circumstances.”
In this example the client or prospective client hears in rich imaginative terms what you can achieve for them, and then fills in the blanks with their own circumstances. That’s called “marketing”.
Strategy Ten – Create a buy-in
The idea of content marketing has always gone hand in hand with professional practice, but it’s online variant, and the attendant culture that underpins it, are unfamiliar to many professionals. It will fail if the firm’s stakeholders do not get on board, though obviously this will be a greater imperative the larger your firm. This does not mean that every professional in the firm must contribute to the production of online content, but there must be a general agreement that the appropriate resources should be allocated to the effort.
This can be achieved by a thorough analysis of the business case for content marketing.
Strategy Eleven – Repurpose your content
Content marketing is labour intensive. This is especially so for the Home Page, FAQ, About Us and similar pages, because they are generally static (the content does not change much over time). But the ongoing content production – primarily a blog, articles, newsletters etc – takes a continuing effort. Luckily there is plenty of scope to reuse that content.
It’s best to proactively choose a subject that lends itself to repurposing, but in many cases this can be achieved in retrospect. Let’s start with a blog post about flood insurance by an insurance broker. It will require a good deal of research: statistics; client stories; legislative provisions; a viewpoint that motivates clients to act; the effects of underinsurance; costs of flood reclamation and rebuilding; a strategy for clients to be properly insured; what should be included in a property inventory to make a proper claim; copywriting and SEO etc.
What else can be done with this content written for the blog post?
- A number of blog posts can be the basis for an eBook, especially a free guide that creates added value for email subscribers
- Combined with other blog content, it can be used as the text for a presentation or SlideShare
- Create an infographic to visually present the data
- Turn it into the script for a video or podcast
- A summary (or the whole blog) in a newsletter
- A webinar – yes, this is a little more ambitious, but easily doable with basic technology
- Speaking engagements. Many do not consider public speaking as a content strategy, but of course it is
- Create a link to the post on your Twitter account
- Use the post to spread your message on Social Media
Strategy Twelve – Create a niche
Content marketing is by it’s nature a perfect fit for a niche target. As a professional you have a wonderful opportunity to carve out a niche that is your own and hard to replicate by competitors. Can you be perceived as a thought leader in your profession or amongst clients and prospective clients? Where is your greatest expertise? How narrow can you target the content and still reach a profitable client segment?
“Thought leadership” may sound a little bigheaded, and beyond your reach, but all it means it that you are able to:
- write authoritative content that is not ghost-written
- create at least a blog a week
- publish some long-form content e.g. an eBook or White Paper (these can be edited collections of the blog posts on one topic)
- ideally have some public exposure, an article in an industry publication or have spoken at a conference.
Strategy Thirteen – Have A Regular Content Schedule
Like a resolution made with bravado as the minute hand marches to midnight on New Year’s Eve, we all have the best intention to regularly feed the content beast. Well, not so fast, buster!
The general advice seems to be to get an Editorial Calendar – a piece of software or a WordPress plugin that creates a schedule of blog posts with a drag and drop program. This is especially helpful if you have a number of authors writing the blog. It’s a neat use of technology, but if you are looking to do only one or two posts a week, it is easy enough to rely on that archaic piece of technology, a list.
Here’s what I do. I have a Word file (any word processing program will do) that has headings of topics I want to cover in my blog. When I get an idea, or more often when I read an article that looks like it might provoke a blog post, I include it under an appropriate heading. When I’m done with that idea I simply delete it from the document. No fancy programs, just a means to ensure that I always take note of anything useful I read.
It doesn’t matter how frequently you choose to write. Some people can support a daily cadence. Others can only commit to an update once a week. Whatever you select, be sure that you are consistent and that your audience is aware of how often you’ll be creating new content. (Scott Monty)
As far as the regular writing schedule is concerned, here’s my tip. Set a pace that is manageable, let’s say a 700 words article once a week, and then do it.
Strategy Fourteen – Give away an information product
You can decide to offer a free “gift” to readers as part of a strategy to gain subscribers, perhaps using a landing page and appropriate call-to-action, or just as an obligation free giveaway. This is an especially attractive strategy for professionals, who are essentially information providers.
There’s a tension between what is offered for free and what should be held back as proprietary information, but in general you will benefit greatly from information that is given with a sense of generosity. There is no doubt that information giveaways, usually an eBook or White Paper, will work their karma. Clients are reassured, sometimes grateful, often impressed and generally more trusting. Remember, it is always possible to repurpose previously published content to create a free information product giveaway.
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