Uncommon Content

It is very easy to become so consumed by how you’re going to communicate your marketing message that you pay insufficient attention to the message itself.  [Just for perspective, consider that professional speakers usually spend over an hour of writing for every minute of their speech.]  Here is a checklist that may help you fine-tune the content of your marketing message:

1) Know what action you are trying to provoke.  How do you want your audience to react?  Does your content request and enable this reaction? [ie, if you ask them to call you, have you provided a phone number?]

2) Envision your audience.  Is your message sufficiently customized to them?  Are you using the kind of structure, words, and images they will understand and empathize with?  Are they capable of doing what you are asking of them? 

Even more important, are you communicating what you want to say, or what they need to hear?  [Hint: it should be the latter.]

3) Have you kept your ego out of the message?  Does it contain unnecessary company history, product facts, company mission statements, or other content that make you feel good, but mean nothing to your audience. 

4) Is your message consistent with your brand?  Are you using consistent selling points, language and imagery across all your messaging?

5) Are you talking generalities or specifics?  People respond more favorably to specifics.  Saying Krazy Glue was strong wouldn’t have impressed them nearly as much as the commercial where a dab on a hard hat allows someone to dangle by their head from a girder. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXZv2KZKCCo]

6) Have you passed your content through “beta readers”?  You may think your content is the most cogent, understandable, brilliantly creative thing ever created.  But no matter how little you want to hear criticism, you should run your content past other people before you publish it—preferably people who are as similar to your target audience as possible!  Your content will almost invariably improve as a result—and they might just catch the kind of mistake that could have you calling your lawyer down the road.