As a marketer, the need to crank out content as fast as macro influencers tell you to seems impossible. 50 pieces of content a day? Who freaking has time for that? I get it. It’s so much that it feels impossible to even begin. And what if you aren’t getting the engagement you hoped for? Is it even worth it if no one is paying attention?
Blair Enns stresses the importance of writing in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto:
Writing gets us found. Writing helps to cement our position as experts. Most important of all, writing about what we do is the fastest way to deepen our knowledge. Writing at length on our expertise drives us into the deep crevices of our territory. As focused experts, we benefit from repeated observation of the same challenges. Writing is the tool that helps us formalize our thinking on these observations. It forces us to tighten our arguments and therefore our understanding. Writing might not come naturally to us, it might be painful at times, but the rewards are significant and the exercise is mandatory. If we are to be experts we must write.
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Let’s consider what content is and come up with a few ideas that can get us over the content writer’s block and start forming the habits that will lead to better content written in your natural voice, that people actually care about.
Here are a few things to consider first. One, your perspective is unique and that means it matters. The world needs diverse opinion. Otherwise, everyone starts to think the same way about everything and they don’t challenge the way things are. So just start writing. Comments, posts, articles, ebooks, actually books. It all counts. Two, habitually writing produces better writing overtime, even if to start, the quality and the engagement is low. Just keep producing. Five years later you’ll be an overnight success. 🙄
When I get stuck, I do a few things. First, I consume content. If I feel out of ideas, that means my mind doesn’t have any fuel. To gas it up, I read. Second, I create an outline like the one below to help me guide my writing.
Each of the following headings I wrote out at the beginning of this article. Then I just answered each question.
1. Who are you talking to?
Too many marketers don’t know who they are talking to but figuring that out is part of the process. You do need to explore different audiences until you find your people and more specifically, a people you can help.
You may decide to bounce around a few different categories until you find people that you even like. I’ve done this. When I changed careers a year ago, my whole network changed and it’s been a struggle to find my people again. But I’ve used the opportunity to shape my social networks by platform around different communities with specific messages. On LinkedIn, it’s taken a while, but now I speak to web agencies. I tried a lot of different audiences as you can track in past articles. On Facebook, I speak mostly to trades and architectural small businesses having come from that industry but that could change over time and that’s fine.
Settling into the audience you want to reach takes a little bit of trial and error. But once you dial it in and find a focus, you can start to uncover and know intimately the challenges that come from that category and you can equip yourself with the knowledge and experience to solve for those specific issues.
2. What problems do they care about?
Every business has problems. It would be foolish to assume that just because they are huge or they have so many years of experience that they aren’t without an Achilles heal. Every business has problems, and in fact, those same problems when you’re small only become bigger problems when you’re big. They don’t really go away completely, in fact, usually the problems just get delegated and put on someone else’s shoulders. The same problems are always there as perennial sprouts of chaos.
What people want and what they need are often different things. In fact, people will search for the solutions they want thinking that will solve their problem, but because they lack the expertise they are often starting their search in the wrong place.
This is why building problem awareness through written content is so important. When you raise awareness to a specific problem that your audience is thinking about, that sends a signal out that calls their attention. Introducing conflict is what makes stories so powerful so we should do it in our writing and even in the titles of our articles.
Once you’ve captured their attention it’s important to know what to do with it. Many content producers have found that problem awareness captures attention, but without this next piece, it’s easy to come off as overly negative and snarky. Sometimes, I read problem awareness content and I’m left thinking, “ok, but what?”
You can’t just talk about problems without providing a resolution and the next piece of that is empathizing with the problem.
3. Can you empathize with their pain?
Here is where you transition from being a snarky punk and you actually become human. Empathy is one of the most important characteristics of a healthy society. When we can empathize with each other, we can help each other.
There are days when it seems like the world has no empathy left. We see this in polarizing political divides over life and death situations in the news. How does it seem possible to not understand that people‘s lives are at stake everyday they walk out the door just because of who they are? Before I finish this thought, let’s do a choose your own adventure. I could finish this thought as a conservative or I could finish it as a progressive.
If you are conservative read this next paragraph and if you are progressive skip to the following paragraph.
…because of who they are? Our brave men and women put on that badge everyday to protect us and you don’t know what they go through and what they see. They are just trying to come back home alive.
…because of who they are? Black people, since the beginning of our nation have been vilified and abused. From slavery, to the black codes, to Jim Crow, and the drug war, laws have been created specifically to make being black in this country a capital offense. They are just trying to come back home alive.
The same premise, and viewed through two completely different lenses. But what would happen if we were able to empathize with each other? What would happen if you could feel the pain of someone who doesn’t experience the world as you do? You would build a connection and actually talk so you can find a way to collaborate on a shared problem, rather than contending on who has the bigger problem.
Solving business problems is no different and it’s less polarizing. When a person has a problem, don’t just linger on it. Add some empathy so that they know you are willing to hear them.
People need to felt seen and heard. They respond to people who can provide safety and belonging. Empathy does that more than any other emotional tool in your EQ arsenal.
But we don’t want to just leave it at empathy. There’s a little more that needs to be done and it actually means going back to the problem.
4. Can you agitate it and define what’s at stake?
I mentioned that in a former career I was in the building trades. Doing drywall repair was a common aspect of my service. When I would train my apprentices on drywall repair, I would tell them you have to make it worse before you can make it better.
When you encountered damaged wall, you usually had to scrape out more of the wall and loose material so that you could have solid pieces left to work with. That’s when you can begin to repair.
As a writing device, this metaphor carries a lot of wisdom. Once you uncover the problem, you have to agitate it and define the stakes.
If you don’t do this, it’s kind of like that repair. What if the root cause of the wall damage is water damage and underneath the surface could be black mold. Without agitating it further you could be risking the health of the people in the home.
Same with writing about your audience’s problem. It could be worse than they think. Sure, from where they stand, it could feel like an inconvenience. But what are they losing? What are the missing out on? What are they sacrificing?
If you fail to engage people with your writing, they won’t pay attention to you and you will have wasted a lot of time writing and producing content that no one cares about. You won’t get site traffic and you won’t get bookings. So agitate the problem and define the stakes.
5. What is your plan to solve it?
Next you provide a plan. Do provide a plan. There is nothing worse than an unresolved problem loop. If you open the problem up, you have to close it to make it a loop. The plan helps the reader gain confidence that they will be able to solve their problems.
Be really generous with your plan. Lay it out. Give them all the head knowledge they would need to do it on their own. Let them bargain with themselves as to whether they want to do it on their own or whether they want to buy their time back. Those are the options. You lay out the plan and they can either pay for it with their time or their money.
Your plan is a set of steps to follow. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. You can borrow from a handful of books and modify it to suit. Part of your genius is being able to curate the genius of others.
The important part of the plan is that it ends in success. People need to know outcomes.
6. What is the magic wand scenario?
Everyone has a magic wand scenario of what their life would look like if their problems were solved. Helping them see that vision makes you a collaborator in their view of how to get it done.
In Daniel Pink’s MasterClass, he asserts that inviting others into a collaboration rather than inviting them to transact is actually what moves the transaction needle and the data supports it.
We can also learn from B2C. When my sister graduated high school she got a job at the mall in an H&M store. They had just produced a line of makeup and she was put on the schedule to cover the makeup section. She pretty quickly became the number one makeup sales clerk in all of H&M which was pretty incredible given that she was only a freshman in college.
I asked her what her secret was. In the most college freshman way imaginable she said, “Um, I don’t know. I am usually wearing it and I just tell them that I’m wearing it and then they ask me how I’m doing it so I show them?”
That’s a magic wand scenario. “If you wear this make up, you can look like this.”
This is where knowing your customer is vital and knowing what they want can be a vital part of your messaging. The college girls at H&M wanted to look beautiful. Because they saw my sister, who is practically a model, they saw a magic wand in the makeup. But think about this a little more. Why are they at H&M? It’s a clothing store. They went shopping for clothes because they want to look beautiful but what the ended up “needing” was this makeup.
What does your customer want? And what do they need (your product) to magically get what they want?
I recently saw an example of this on Neil Patel’s website. He keyed in on “what people want” with copy that said “Show how my team [can] get you massive amounts of traffic.” The magic wand scenario is that they start getting massive amounts of traffic. But Neil Patel’s offer is SEO tools and training. SEO is not the only way to get massive amounts of traffic and it certainly isn’t the fastest or easiest way to get massive amounts of traffic. Further more, massive amounts of traffic doesn’t guarantee sales. But, SEO is a way to get more traffic and traffic is a way to facilitate sales. The message is effective regardless. People want massive amounts of traffic, therefore they need SEO tools and services.
So think about the magic wand scenario. This will help your readers envision a world where they are enacting your solution and when they struggle to implement on their own they will call you because you gave them the idea.
7. What do they need to do next?
This is the key to converting awareness content into real buyer intent. You have to call the reader to action.
I am a big believer in interpersonal interaction. In other words, talking to a real person. The challenge with talking to real people is that it takes time, you usually aren’t paid for intro calls, and it’s difficult to scale. But it’s not impossible to counteract any of the above challenges.
You can save time and scale by utilizing video conferencing to an audience. You can also offer micro offers such as workshops or workbooks that do cost money but aren’t a major commitment like taking you up on your big offer.
It’s all about the invitation for the next step. You want to be direct yet make it frictionless to taking that next step. Your customers are having an internal debate with themselves about a purchase decision and they know that an “ask” is coming. Your job is to figure out what an appropriate ask is, depending on the pace of the customer.
At this point, an appropriate ask for me would be to ask you to clap, comment, and follow. While I would love for you to book an appointment with me to accelerate our future relationship, in this format, a follow and comment is just fine because I actually engage with the people who comment and I know that eventually our paths will cross and we’ll be able to collaborate on a future concept. You have to be patient. Written content in awareness channels is strictly about creating awareness and building affinity. Those who read will decide if they need your services so long as they are aware of what they are.
Torlando Hakes, is the author of the book Sprint and host of such podcasts as The CTA Podcast, The PaintED Show, and No Trade Secrets. Torlando is open to meeting new friends and building a community of like-minded peers. You can jump on his calendar for a 1 — 1 anytime for advice, to share networks, for podcast interviews, and for help getting more bookings.
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