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In marketing circles, we tend to rely on things like flow charts, diagrams, and pyramids. But according to Hausmann, that’s no way to tell a story. “You wouldn’t summarize a trip by saying, I’d like to show you a couple of the key message points and summarize those for you in a beautiful pyramid and diagram,” he says. To close the time and efficiency gap between the typical (and boring) marketing strategy language and creative execution, bringing a screenwriters’ toolkit into the process can make a world of difference, according to Hausmann. At #ThinkContent Summit 2017, he provided step-by-step instructions for “brand scripting,” which he defines as identifying a company’s core brand narrative and building the story structure that aligns all executional efforts. Take a look at Hausmann’s script for content marketing success, illustrated through the brand Beats by Dre....
At Contently, we’ve taken the principles of the Five Factor Model to construct our own tone analyzer that will make pairing writers and brands more data driven. Because we’re analyzing content, rather than actual people, we’ve given each traditional trait a new, more editorially friendly name. How does it work? The analyzer scrapes a website for as much text as possible, then assigns this aggregated content with a numeric “score” for each of the Big Five personality traits. The process is the same for analyzing a writer’s body of work. Scores range from zero to one. By assessing the trait scores, we can detect the character of the publication or writer, and match the two accordingly....
The way to think about where voice and content creation intersect is to consider audience: the audience you have, and the audience you want. From the blog and video topics chosen, to the content’s production style, every aspect of a brand’s content creation needs to be geared towards its audience. Some brands already know their voice. You, as a blogger, may already know yours. Even when your client provides keywords and example content, you still should visit their social media pages and website blog to get a feel for the content. Often, however, you’ll work with a client without a clear voice, and that’s where this article will focus. Whether you’re branding your own blog or helping a new client develop a clear voice before you begin any content creation, you need to know the audience you’re writing for....
From posting a photo of my "amazung view of the muntains" to sending an email prematurely, I know that feeling of regret all too well.
We're all trying to maintain control of our online footprint as best we can. But with so many opportunities to mess up on the web, it's easy to make silly tech mistakes from time to time.
Luckily for us, there are ways to correct some of these embarrassing slip-ups. I consulted my colleagues and scoured the web (hat tip to you, PureWow) to find the following tech hacks that are so simple and yet so life-changing, you won't believe you ever lived without them....
Considering the amount of content that marketers put out there and the investments that goes with it, how great is their ROI? I mean, how many of them generate more visitors to their site, as well as increase sales?
Persuasive copy that converts boils down to understanding how to trigger the right emotions that will induce a potential customer to want to buy from you.
In this article, I’ll show you how to use five proven copywriting strategies to drive both search traffic and rankings to the top....
Your headline is the first contact with your content, and must grab your target audiences’ attention. At this point you have no control – the reader does. They either click the link to your content or they don’t. The job of the content creator is to make sure that they choose the first option, and read and share your carefully crafted content.
How much time do you spend coming up with a killer title? Reading stats like this one by Copyblogger should make you sit up and take notice.“
On average 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 out of ten will read the rest of your content.”....
We all know it’s true: headlines are the most important part of our blog posts and articles. David Ogilvy said it himself that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
If your headline doesn’t have the necessary moxie, you can bet your colored pencils that no one will read the body copy. Here are 7 ways to kick it with headlines (plus examples from the pros)....
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Engineers and other technical experts take to the web to educate themselves on their options now more than ever before.
When sifting through online content, engineers and other experts in their fields want facts, not a hard sell. They’re conducting serious research.
In fact, according to a study by CEB in partnership with Google, 57 percent of the B2B purchasing process has been completed by the time someone contacts a salesperson.
So, as content marketers, we need to give them the information they need to make smart purchasing decisions. But engineers have already studied for years to accrue their subject matter expertise. Can marketers actually talk intelligently to them online?...
My father-in-law recently offered to take me to the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, but apart from that, I know next to nothing about the world’s largest country.
As such, you might be wondering why I’m spending so much time on Russian dolls. It’s a fair question, but truth be told, there’s a simple reason for it – content pillars.
Still scratching your head? That’s what I thought.
Trust me – the similarities between Russian dolls and content pillars are easily identifiable once you know what a content pillar is....
So you’ve heeded Google’s warning, you’ve got your website mobile friendly, but is your content optimised for mobile users too?
A paragraph of text on a large screen can seem like an essay on a mobile device. Take the time to break your content up into easy to follow slices in order to provide mobile visitors with the best possible user experience.
Vertical Leap share some great tips to help you achieve this in the infographic below....
I like to ask people when I meet them, “What’s your story?”
It’s more interesting to me than typical questions about education, major, city of origin, job title, or sports team. All of these things might play a part in their story, but story implies something much broader and more personal. It’s the narrative of your past, present, and expected future. It’s the drama of your own life as you see it playing out.
When I think of the most interesting and talented people I know, I think of their story. I don’t think of their status. “Oh, he’s a graduate student” is a status. So is, “Married, salesperson, lives in Ohio”, or, “Studying business at USC”. A status is a static snapshot of a handful of labels attached to a person based on some institutions or external standards. It conveys nothing really unique that gets to the core of the person, or the animating force behind their actions and ideas. There is no passion in it. No sense of direction and creativity....
Yes, content marketing is all about telling your existing and potential customers how your product or service can make a big difference in their lives without sounding like a desperate door to door salesman. It is not just about jotting down a few lines on how to use something or what it does but building strong relationships with your growing audience.
But what does it take to make content that really does click with people? Our industry fondly calls them ‘buzzwords’. Buzzwords are basically marketer fascinations that last for a couple of months; basically until they find another interesting way to sell their products and services. The most difficult thing to do here is keep a tab on what’s trending, the buzzspeak as well create a content strategy and execute it on a regular basis.
Yes, we understand running from pillar to post is what you’re being paid for but let’s make that a little easier for you so you can tread at your own speed.
Here are 10 buzzwords and content marketing definitions to watch out for this year....
Not everyone on your site has a PhD. In fact, some estimates suggest that 30% of internet users are low-literacy readers. That’s a lot. But regardless of the education level of visitors, word choice and readability should be simple. Here’s the proof…
When the NN Group rewrote a pharmaceutical website to bring the readability level down to an 8th-grade level, the success rate for low-literacy users went up. A lot. When the site was more readable, these visitors were 135% more likely to complete tasks.
But surprise, surprise! The success rate for high literacy users also went up. That’s right. All visitors prefer to read 8th-grade level writing...
Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: "Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development." In a similar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework assignment "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes," and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion, "Academia, here I come!"
No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the stereotype. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to celebrate "the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles," he had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights.
But the familiarity of bad academic writing raises a puzzle. Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?
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Clay Hausmann, CMO of Aktana, on using screenwriting techniques to create more engaging, compelling content marketing.