The most important thing in marketing is authenticity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.
Marketers crave authenticity in their content. Then outsource the creation of the company – without any kind of briefing – to writers that have no familiarity with their company. This has got to stop.
If you were asked for a company portrait, you might think carefully about the clothes you choose for the shoot, take a bit of time on hair and makeup, have a view about which was your best side or how to draw attention away from that double chin (No! Just me?) But you wouldn’t substitute a photograph of a different person and insist on that being used instead. But copywriters are often asked to produce content with minimal input from the company in whose name it is being written. That’s no less crazy.
Can I write something from scratch entirely on my own? Of course. I once did a series of blogs for a CRM vendor in which I was given a series of target audiences and simply asked to ‘write something interesting’. It was a success – the CTR’s were ‘way above average’. But just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should.
The views in those blogs were mine alone. They didn’t reflect the particular views of the company concerned (although I was at pains to ensure that the two were aligned). They didn’t refer to anecdotes about customer interactions I didn’t have. They didn’t include insights that weren’t already being written about elsewhere and which I uncovered in my research. How could they?
The point is that people instinctively know whether a piece is written from the heart or simply to order. That’s why I insist on having some access to a subject-matter expert – even if it’s only twenty minutes or so – before I start a project. Whether it’s a turn of phrase, an opinion, an anecdote or a customer example, the expert will bring something to the conversation that is unique to that individual and that organisation. And that distinctiveness is at the heart of great content; and, to take issue with myself, it has an authenticity that cannot be faked.
I can always write something
As I said earlier, even without help from an expert, I can always write something. As per Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’, I can provide a well-crafted description of what a company does without much assistance. I can even take a stab at how they do it. But the reasons why they do what they do, which is the stuff that gets people engaged, lift a company above its peers, and powerfully communicates their purpose? Well, I can’t do that without input from the company itself.
One example that springs to mind was a project to write a company website. It was a full-time job for a couple of months, and I commuted into the office every day. The attitude of the marketing director that hired me was, “You’re a professional writer. I’m giving you money. Write something.” I was basically stuck in the corner of the office and left to get on with it. I struggled to get time with any senior members of the team and, after a couple of weeks (largely spent working on a product launch), I really hadn’t got very far with my main job of writing the website.
Eventually, after much pleading, I grabbed 45 minutes with the founder and CEO of the company. He talked passionately about where he’d come from, what was wrong with what he saw as business as usual, why he had created and built this company and how it was going to change the world.
That was what I needed. The tone and style of the website came from that single interview. And the bold, challenging statement that I put at the top of the home page is still there years later – entirely unaltered. That one conversation enabled me to capture something about the company’s DNA that resonated with them at the time – and still does. And I couldn’t have done that unaided.
A writer is not a jukebox, whereby money goes in and content comes out.
We all have a shared responsibility to put the distinctive character of our organization or client at the heart of all the content we produce. That means having the courage to enlist the help of those experts that can contribute to the process – and the patience to explain to them the value of doing so. You get out of content what you invest into it – and that requires a lot more than money.
This is an extract from “Five things every B2B marketer should know about content creation”. This provides muggles (i.e. non-copywriters) with practical tips that will improve their understanding of what great content looks like, and uplift their ability to contribute positively to its creation.
(1) With apologies to George Burns
To find out how Just Global can help you ensure that great writing is at the heart of your campaigns, get in touch at: [email protected]
