Category: Making Content
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Be a better storyteller with Billy Joel and French philosophy
Too many marketers think of narratives or stories as sequences of events, recounting the facts of what happened. That’s a timeline or a news report. A story is something more.
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Write like everyone’s watching
I left my job as a senior producer of primetime TV to become a B2B copywriter (yes, really). Now I write corporate comms like I’m shooting a TV show. These are the tricks that I’ve stolen from documentary storytelling, and how you can use them to make your B2B writing unignorable and unforgettable.
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Your content doesn’t need schema. It needs the voice of your customer.
Every B2B brand striking oil these days gets their content marketing right by investing in buyer research so they can speak with and for customers, not to them.
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MECE and the tyranny of word count
How many of us—especially freelancers, or in-house folks assigning the work out to freelancers—start a project by determining the word count? And what would it take to loosen ourselves from its tyranny in content planning?
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The most frustrating briefs are all missing the same thing: frustration
A creative brief is only useful when it gives the team a trigger (a.k.a. something the audience already feels strongly about) and frustration is one of the richest, most reliable triggers there is, because it’s specific and it’s emotional.
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Two editors red-lined my copy for being “too negative.” Both were wrong.
The instinct to strip negativity out of content/copy comes from the fear that anything negative will rub off on the brand. The problem with that line of thinking is that it doesn’t factor in how our brains work. And how our brains work is the foundation of all strategic marketing.
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The Great Botoxification of Content (ft. the ARS Framework)
We’re living in the age of the great botoxification of content—everything nipped, tucked, and pulled to give you the illusion of perfection while remaining completely devoid of emotion. And that’s a big problem.
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For better content, throw away your question list and do this instead
In content marketing, like in journalism, getting the question right determines the fate of your final piece. That’s where the art comes in.
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The case for scrappy videos
Adaptability is one of the most important survival skills in this industry, and you don’t have to suddenly become a capital-C Creator to make videos that matter.
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What makes or breaks your B2B original research report often happens long before you start writing
Many marketers assume the success of a research report comes down to promotion, distribution, or budget. In reality, the reports that perform best are usually shaped by decisions made much earlier in the process.
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Most B2B research wouldn’t survive a peer review — and it’s costing us our credibility
Genuine research requires you to move beyond the brief, into your audience’s world. Nothing in the system rewards that move, at least for 90% of companies out there. But the 10% that prioritize this publish content that survives algorithmic changes and shapes perceptions for years to come.
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3 lessons on effective use of data from The Economist (+ fostering credibility without stats)
As B2B writers, we’ve accepted as gospel that a claim isn’t credible unless there’s a third-party claim to back it up. But I believe strongly that poorly used data is more detrimental to credibility than no data.