18 Jul Fighting Crap Content – One Story At A Time

Why remembering your favourite bedtime story will make you a better business and content-marketing writer.

Written by Daniela Cavalletti

3 min read

Telling stories rather than mere facts connects people – your potential and existing customers, as well as your staff and suppliers – with you and your brand on an emotional level rather than simply intellectually. It gives them an opportunity to deeply relate and engage with you.

Besides, lazy writing is an insult to your reader. And life’s too damn short to spend it reading rubbish.

Yet, we live an environment where we are bombarded with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ that are trying to bamboozle us. Hollow click-bait, misleading pretentious headlines and cookie-cutter writing are trying to reel us in and win our scarce attention and time as readers. And that might, at first, work – but just to leave us generally deeply disappointed or divided.

Not wiser, happier, or more engaged or informed.

Let Me Hear + Feel Your Story

Instead, try telling a damn fine story. It’s your way of leaving your competition behind at the starting line, while you’re sprinting ahead in the race for a finite pool of clients.

Do you remember your favourite book as a child?

Go on, take a moment and travel back in time … Visualise yourself all tucked up in bed, excited because someone you love is about to read that story to you. Or perhaps you can see yourself back under the covers with a torchlight, well after bedtime, devouring your favourite book or comic. This is not just any but your most-treasured story. Take yourself back to that moment and experience that anticipation and involvement in the story, that thrill and excitement …

Now that is the kind of feeling that your business writing and content marketing should evoke.

Yes, seriously.

Authenticity is King in Content Marketing

Business and marketing writing do not have to be factual-dry or the old shout-sell to be noticed. In fact, while the latter might work here and there, it doesn’t build trust, lasting relationships or raving fans that keep coming back or will recommend you: it mostly attracts a nibble and dribble of opportunists.

One major key to delivering compelling content marketing is being genuine and transparent.

We need to strip away some of our supposedly ‘professional’ layers, and let go of the fear of being different or in some way exposed. I often hear new clients say they want a certain piece of marketing collateral because “all of my competitors are doing it!”. While the fears of standing out and being left behind is human, it’s completely misguided here.

If all, or most, of your competitors have already done that local-paper advertisement or letterbox drop ad nauseam: what cut-through do you think you’ll get? Exactly: nil to bugger all, most likely. So what to do instead?

Tell a different story than they do; stand out.

Good writing is clear, well thought-through.

And successful content marketing that gets engagement is unique, authentic, relevant – and memorable.

Show Vulnerability in Your Content Marketing

So here then is the catch to successful marketing communication: you need to be prepared to make yourself vulnerable. Get rid of the mask of your business persona (e.g. being the same as anyone else) and show your readers the real you.

It might be confronting at first, but soon you’ll find it not only liberating, but the rewards will follow. If you need a bit of a leg up, Brené Brown’s excellent TED Talk on the power of vulnerability is extremely insightful and useful. I never tire of re-watching it.

So here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Capture your readers’ imagination with well-written pieces that tell your story. Be original, be truthful, be transparent. Fill your marketing collateral – your website copy, your capability statement, your blog; everything – with unique content, substance, purpose and meaning. Let out your personality, show us what you’re made of, be real. Warts, victories, and all.

To make your marketing and business writing captivating and successful, strip away any pretence. The urge to conform in order to compete or keep up.

Simply allow yourself to be … you.

Now that’s worth fighting for, isn’t it?