How to Get Inside Someone's Mind and Stay There: The business owner's guide to content marketing and confident copywriting

Listen to your customer. Listen to your colleagues, partners and associates. Listen to wider world changes, innovations and trends. Take notes. Think about it. Write about it.

People are telling us what they want all the time, all around us. It’s well worth talking less and listening more. And originality? That is yours; your voice and message to inform, sell and inspire others; enough for them to wonder where you get all your good ideas from.

Edit checks

1. Does it make sense? Information and comment following in the right order?

2. Does it do the job? Check in with your wider marketing/content strategy and AIDEA, check back with Chapter 12 for a recap.

3. Could ease of reading be helped by shorter sentences, sub headings and/or more paragraphs?

4. Weed out repetition and unnecessary words and phrases.

5. Have you got the tone and style right for your key customer?

6. Proofread for errors of grammar, typos and spelling mistakes.

7. Is the title compelling enough?

8. Is the call to action clear enough?

9. Use the Flesch Reading Ease stats to check readability. See Chapter 18 for a reminder on readability tools.

Don’t ever try to sell me on anything. Give me ALL the information and I’ll make my own decision.”

Thank you, Kanye.

Think like your customer. Change their behaviour with your content marketing and create a customer for life.

Making people feel special, intelligent and loved, giving them content offers:

Value – informative, opinion changing, useful
Currency – newsworthy, trending, influencing
Story – inspiration, vision, ideas, journey
Emotion – desire, joy, relief, envy, fear, humour

Your customer is the most important person, so make the content all about them.

What’s the story?

Remember what your core customer would be looking for – create a good title that will get their interest and craft copy that will keep it, using:

Value – informative, opinion-changing, useful
– how-to guides, top tips, expert
Currency – newsworthy, trending, influencing
– polls, stats, innovation
Story – inspiration, vision, ideas, journey
– personal, adversity, success
Emotion – desire, joy, fear, relief, envy
– get more/better, win a…, beware of

How do you ensure your release as is ‘usable’ as possible? In other words, how do you ensure that you give your release the best possible chance of publication? By making a journalist’s or editor’s job as easy as possible – they’re busy people; they’ll appreciate the help…

Here is my check list for a well-crafted press release:

Create a strong headline: it needs to get attention, whilst giving a clear idea of content.
Who, what, where, when and how: miss out any of these elements and you will frustrate your reader. Try and get them into the lead paragraph*.
Subsequent paragraphs should expand on the first paragraph and contain quotes.
Accuracy: if in doubt don’t use a piece of information or a quote – do your research properly or it could be embarrassing.
Don’t fall into the trap of using clichés or industry jargon.
Don’t waffle, 300 words to 600 words is a good length.
Ensure you remember all the relevant contact details and any notes to help editors on the background to the project/your organisation. They will need these if they want to contact you for further information or do their own research.
Include an appropriate picture to accompany the press release. You’ll stand a greater chance of being included if you have a great picture to illustrate what you’re doing. Even if it is not used it still plays a part in engaging the editor in the first place. And, if you send the picture via email, which is highly likely, do make sure that it is of a high enough resolution to print.
If you plan to submit your release online via an online press release service, such as PRWeb, they recommend you include a link to your business website within your lead paragraph. And, later in your release copy ensure you put in further links directly relating to your copy subject.
If you’re sending out a press release yourself, it’s worth getting the name of the relevant person at the publication, e.g. the business editor, and giving them a call to check they’ve received it – and prompt them to read it.
Last, always bear in mind lead times; some publications are planned months in advance.

The game-changer is ‘desire’. Your customers are attracted and interested but you have to change that emotion in to ‘want’. To do this you play on (let’s face it) their baser instincts:

Limit the supply – they could lose out if they don’t act quickly.
Create exclusivity – they are only one of a few people selected.
Peer pressure – get a head start on competitors, or mention others who are already benefiting.
Too good to miss – ‘early-bird’ offers of reduced price before a certain date.
Simplicity – it’s just so EASY to do.
Exclusive expertise – only you can offer them the service in the way they need it.

Attention – it’s all in the headline

As many as five times the amount of people will read a headline than read the main body copy, so to capture interest in what you have to say it really pays to get it right.

Benefits: Favourite by far are the headlines offering the reader a benefit to them: a warmer home; whiter teeth; greater savings; slimmer figure; faster car.

Free information: As with benefits, ‘How to’ headlines that offer help and information are read and remembered more often – why pass up some good free advice?

News: Headlines that include news – useful information worth passing on. Your product may not be new but there may be a new way to use it.

Keep it relevant: If you are looking for local clients and readers put the name of your town/area in the title – people are far more interested in learning about the place they live than somewhere that is unlikely to have an impact on their lives.

Long or short? There’s no hard and fast rule on this one. If it needs to be long, so be it; if it can be short ditto – but try and keep it to one line.

Don’t try to be clever: Puns and double meanings will fail when you are ompeting for the attention of a busy person scanning a paper, newsletter or website; you’re likely to lose the interest of far more readers than you’ll gain.

Flying blind: Similarly, try and avoid the temptation to write a headline that gives no clue to your content. These ‘blind’ headlines don’t perform well, again, who has the time?