the content mint newsletter

A sale is never exclusively an emotional or an intellectual decision, it is a messy combination of both at a particular time in a particular circumstance.

We might think of the emotion and intellect as two ends of a scale, constantly fluctuating. The buyer usually doesn’t think too much about this scale during the buying process, but oftentimes once a sale has been made he or she will suddenly remember it when they are trying to justify the purchase to themselves (or potentially to someone else).

If at this point they see that one or the other side has had an outsized influence, they will work to retroactively balance the scale by either trying to gather more logical facts on the one hand, or to reinforce the abundance of facts that they already have with an emotional gut-check on the other hand.

Even if ​your personal method of communication​ favors either the side of emotional hype or that of intellectual nerdiness, it can be useful to have a healthy dose of each in your media because, chances are, if the customer is second guessing the decision to buy from you, it’s your content—not you directly—that they’re going to turn to when looking for extra weight to add on either side of the reassurance scale.

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P.S. I don’t think the scales have to be perfectly balanced (and since everyone’s value judgements are subjective, it is probably an impossible goal anyway). Mainly you want the customer to have at least something on each side of the scale that they are able to point to so that ultimately they can say: “Yeah, this purchase feels good and it makes sense.”

P.P.S. To read more about the symbiotic relationship of emotion and reason in our lives, check out Jonathan Haidt’s book ​The Happiness Hypothesis​ where he lays out his now well-known metaphor of the elephant and the rider.

The job of your content isn’t quite finished even once a sale has been completed.

There are at least three possible goals for content which may be consumed after a sale:

1. reassurance of the purchasing decision
2. support
3. restarting the sales cycle

Most likely there will be quite a lot of overlap between the content you create for the guided discovery phase and the post-purchase phase, the only difference will be when the customer comes across the content.

That being said, keeping in mind the multiple roles and goals that any one piece of content may be serving will help us as we consider the most worthwhile way to approach the creating of that content in the first place.

We’ll look at each of these three post-purchase goals a little closer in the next few days.

When it comes to making an actual investment decision, your content plays a very crucial, yet perhaps unexpected role: absence.

Whatever it is that you actually offer, it cannot be found in the content you provide. The ultimate goal of your content is to trace the outlines of this gap and indicate how it might be filled. (And yes, I think this is true even if content is your offering. Maybe we’ll work that out another time.)

However, the starker the contrast is between the description or depiction of the offering itself (via your content) and the understanding of the actual absence, the stronger the desire will be to take action or make an investment to fill the gap.

So, in what ways does your content point beyond itself to an unrealized need?

The second stage of ​the buying cycle​, which comes between the first impression and commitment, is the longest stage. This is where the customer is learning more about what it is that you have to offer which might address a specific need they have.

While your ​first impression​ content should be easy to stumble upon and generally applicable, this second-stage learning content should be something of a guided discovery process into areas of particular interest for the customer. This can look a lot of different ways, but most likely this will involve some kind of repository of content to be explored by the customer.

If we return to our idea of ​ambience​, i.e. controlling the amount of repetitive information desired for either clarity or resonance respectively, we can start to decide what shape that repository might take. It could be a gallery of photos of an event space being used in different ways (repetition to create an experiential desire), or a static list of specs about a specialized tool that is unique to your process (low repetition but high clarity of information).

Whatever it looks like, keep in mind that there are two goals of this phase that your content ought to help achieve:

1. build confidence to advance to the buying stage
2. turn away those who will never advance to the buying stage, which avoids wasting either their time or yours with an unnecessary introduction

The content which details your offering should make it clear who it is for, and just as importantly, who it is not for. If this is done well, it makes the critical commitment decision in the next stage that much easier.

The first stage of the buying cycle is where your content will most likely be doing a lot of heavy lifting to quickly give prospective customers an idea of whether or not they might want to do business with you. While it is still very important, this early content will probably provide more extrinsic than intrinsic value, pointing to value that can be found in the offering or content to be discovered later.

At this point you want to convey the basic sense of who you are and what you do (a.k.a. your positioning).

While those things may be easily stated in various ways, also consider what it is that your current customers value about working with or buying from you that goes beyond the actual offering itself. (Hopefully this is something more than just price…)

Is it how skilled and effective you are at what you do, or some other technical detail of your craft? Or maybe it’s a feeling of a friendly working relationship or a cozy retail environment.

Now consider how you can match the form of the content you present at this stage to match the desired effect of this first impression?

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P.S. Depending on what content you are providing for customers in the later stages of buying, it is entirely possible that some customers will completely skip this stage and jump in at a later stage. However it is still useful to have some content that addresses this stage for those who do come in cold, or for those who jump in later and need to back up and reinforce an incomplete first impression.

The content you create will most likely serve different purposes for your audience depending on what stage of the buying cycle they are in.

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Depending on what you offer, some of these stages will be taken care of by actual in-person communication, but in general there is usually room for content communication in each phase. In fact, in many cases it can speed up the buying process if that communication can happen on the buyer’s own time via content before they ever reach out or walk in your door.

Since the form and context of your content will probably look different at the different stages, we’ll take some time in the next few days to consider each one in more detail.

Beyond the intrinsic or extrinsic value that your content ought to provide to your customers in some way, there is a third dimension of content value which we might call meta-value. This is the value that you the creator get out of the act of creating the content itself.

Whether it’s learning a niche topic in your field better to write a blog post, or reconsidering the aesthetic appeal of your storefront before taking a photo, intentional content creation should mean improving yourself, your understanding of your offering, or your ability to deliver it in some way.

Being in the target-market of your own content is a good litmus test for the value you are generating. After all, if you have gained something by the creating of the content, chances are that someone else can benefit from it as well.

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P.S. Being in the target market for your own content still doesn’t guarantee that your content will provide value to someone else. So to avoid creating entirely self-serving content, it’s still important to either verify its value another way, or else give the audience the opportunity to opt out.

All media has a time-cost. Anything we create will take some amount of time to consume. But not all media has the same time-cost.

For example:

• an image has almost no required time-cost. It can typically be instantly observed in its entirety; any remaining time spent is at the sole discretion of the audience
• the time-cost of written text is almost completely subjective. It is dependent on the reading speed of the audience, but it can also be skimmed and stopped or started from any point the reader wishes
• recorded audio has a semi-fixed time-cost. It can be sped up or slowed down, but with varying levels of detriment to the effect of the message (i.e. speech can be sped up to any point that the hearer can comprehend, but music will lose most of its intended impact if not heard at its original tempo)
• video has the most rigid time-cost. It can also be sped up or slowed down, but it is least desirable to do this with video because of the effect it has on both the audio and the natural movement of the visuals and pacing of the edit, etc.

In order to avoid wasting our audience’s time, it is necessary to at least make a basic assessment of how much time we are asking them to spend in the first place.

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P.S. Taking advantage of the tools in our publication platforms such as video or podcast chapters or a table of contents for a blog post are also courtesies we can extend that give the audience more agency over their time-spend with our content.

The way you create and, more importantly, publish your content should be consistent with your business’ offering.

First of all, when I say “offering,” I mean that at a very fundamental level. This is usually one of a small list of things, e.g.:

• products
• information
• services
• experience
• or transformation

The second thing to consider about your offering is: where does it fall on the scale from luxury to necessity?

Once you have paired those two qualities of your offering, you can start thinking about how to build the acoustic environment for your content.

For example, if you offer a service that people will only need once, or very infrequently—maybe in an emergency situation—the way you publish information about it should probably be more or less static and well organized. Something like a searchable, categorized library which is easy to navigate even in an agitated state.

What would not be useful is a scrolling feed designed to be subscribed to. Subscribing is not necessary if your service is only needed once, and it means that relevant information probably has to be aimlessly dug out of a sea of click-bait headlines.

On the other hand, if you provide a transformation of some sort, such as coaching or education, then ongoing, subscription-style content which gives prospects encouragement or information on a regular basis might be just the thing.

Recently, I was on the website of a local small business and as I poked around I stumbled on the “About Us” page. What struck me as strange about this page is that it was written in the first person, but there was no face or name of the owner, or any staff, or any other way to connect the “I” in the writing to a person.

As a small business, you have a choice to make when you start communicating to your audience:

“Am I saying this, or is the organization saying this?”

There are of course pros and cons of each.

If you are going to be working directly with customers and need to establish credibility as an authority on a topic to give customers confidence in your ability to get the job done, then communicating as a person is probably the best way to go.

On the other hand, if you want to convey a feeling that puts the customer in the right frame of mind to desire your product/experience, associating that feeling with your brand or product may be more appropriate than attaching it to a person.

Whatever you choose, make it clear to the audience where the signal is coming from.