Messaging rarely gets credit or wins awards, but behind most top-performing B2B marketing programs is a messaging platform that was thoughtfully developed, carefully vetted and (probably) begrudgingly embraced. Still, many marketers see it as painful to develop, challenging to implement and difficult – if not impossible – to guarantee use and compliance. Read More…
If you can guess where content development ranks as a focus area among marketing strategists, you can probably guess why it means a lot more than simply communicating with your audience. Words mean more these days, and there’s a very simple but powerful reason why.
We talked about the guardrails of good content last month, so today we’ll address the architecture of buyer engagement.
I like to follow a proven ideal framework:
Objective: Which area of the buying cycle are we influencing?
Strategy: From which angle are we most likely to interest readers/viewers?
Structure: How do we tell the most compelling story?
Style: What is the appropriate voice and tone?
To understand what makes good content today, all we have to do is look back to the ’50s and ’60s—when it was called copy. Back then, advertising’s primary focus was copy. Copy, it turns out, sold—and sells—products.
And while it has evolved into this thing we now call content, the principles that drive its creation haven’t changed:
People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.
—Howard Luck Gossage, advertising icon