the content mint archive

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.

As I stated in ​yesterday’s message​, people generally don’t like to be sold to. If you have any kind of ad-blocker installed on your browser, or if you have declined a site cookies popup, or paid for Spotify, you’re probably one of those people.

But . . . people do like to go shopping. And when you’re shopping you are naturally taking in a lot of sales messages at once, comparing them, and making value judgements between them. On purpose.

So what’s the difference?

The difference is who is in control of the experience.

Selling to non-shoppers can potentially be a ​waste of time​ for both parties, but if we have our content and messaging organized, ​clarified​, and easily accessible to a shopper already prepared to spend money, we won’t need to do much selling in the first place.

Marketing is not a verb. At least not anymore.

There was a day, under the old regime of one-way legacy media, when audiences were captive to marketers who “targeted” them—like fauna grazing in the wild forests of content—in order to collect them like trophies in bundles called “market share.”

But in the internet age of continual two-way communication, community, and choices, those old methods of selling seem cruel and unusual. (If you need proof, just visit the YouTube page of pretty much any major global brand and notice how alien and disconnected from reality the content seems, even when they try to be “authentic.”)

While megacorps may be able to afford to create billions of dollars worth of weird advertisements designed to brainwash entire swaths of culture, not everyone has that luxury. The good news is that people hate to be sold to anyway, what people want is to be talked to, and that’s what the internet does best.

Ultimately, marketing ought to be the natural outcome of communication.

Put another way, marketing is what happens when you effectively communicate something of value.

As a small business, you are more personally connected with your audience than the megacorps will ever be. You already speak their language and you know what they need to hear, all you have to do is speak up.

There are two ways that any piece of content can create value: intrinsically and extrinsically.

Extrinsic value is like a treasure map. It is not very valuable in itself, but rather it points you to where something of value can be found.

For example, an advertisement letting you know about a deal at a restaurant, or a customer testimonial that gives you more confidence that a particular business can deliver on their claims.

Intrinsic value is like the treasure chest. It contains something valuable within itself.

Think of an informative how-to video that helps you solve a problem or learn a skill, or a film which gives you a sense of nostalgia or changes your perspective in some way.

When it comes to your business, the more intrinsic value your customers or prospects feel that they have gained from your content, the more they already feel a debt of gratitude when it comes to their purchasing decisions.

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P.S. These forms of value are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And, since value is subjective, it’s also possible for a piece of content to contain neither form of value for a particular person.

But we want to avoid that as much as possible, because that’s wasting time.

When people look at your content, what do you want the effect to be?

Should they learn something new? Can they use that new information? Can they use it right away?

Maybe you want them to feel differently than they did before? Will they feel differently towards you? Towards themselves? Toward something else?

Think about how you can modify the context or form of your content to match your desired effect. In other words, how can you control the ambience?

It might be as simple as adding a picture to a blog post to create a little bit of emotional attachment.

Or removing a picture from a blog post to make an important piece of information easier to find and understand.

Which of those is the right answer will depend on how you answered the first question, “what do you want the effect to be?”

But if you never answer that question, then there is no right answer.

Clarity is about getting out of your own way when it comes to messaging. Only saying what’s necessary to be understood.

Take a look at your current messaging across various platforms and mediums. Where is there unnecessary repetition? Or, more importantly, where is there inconsistent repetition?

Obviously repetition is an important part of branding, but inconsistencies or overuse can create confusion and weaken the overall perception.

Ideally, your messaging should be repeated as much as is necessary to be effective, but as little as possible.

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P.S. There may be a few strategic exceptions where repetition can in fact improve clarity, but that’s a topic for a different day.

In the next few days I want to consider some practical ways to apply the principles of ​good acoustics​ that will hopefully give you some ideas that you can use to start curating your current content.

First up: ​reduce the noise​.

Consider all the places where you have content posted.

Now consider what other content surrounds yours. Is it a social media feed with a mix of individuals and businesses posting? A video platform with suggestions in the sidebar? A community bulletin board?

How many external voices or otherwise irrelevant messages are competing for yours?

What can you do to reduce the noise?

One final note related to last week’s discussion about good acoustics.

Notice that none of the qualities of acoustics (reduced noise, increased clarity, and controlled ambience) has anything to do with loudness.

Loudness, how far a sound is able to reach, is an inherent quality of the sound itself as it is produced by the source (speaker, instrument, etc). Loudness can only be increased by changing the intensity of sound as it is produced from the source directly, or through amplification, i.e. artificial signal boosting.

But here’s the rub: ultimately, amplification will always work against each of the principles of good acoustics.

When pushed to a certain limit, amplification results in increased noise, decreased clarity (known as “clipping”), and unintended repetitive sound (i.e. a feedback loop).

This principle, too, can be quite helpful when thinking about content marketing.

If you’re artificially maximizing content volume for the sole purpose of extended reach, you just might be degrading the quality of your message at the same time.

Our final element of good acoustic engineering is ambience.

Ambience has to do with how much reverberated sound is desired within a space to create a specific effect.

For example, in a concert hall, reverberation after the music has finished is considered “resonance” and is often desirable for creating mood.

On the other hand, in a theater, where the clarity of spoken words is the most important thing, reverberation becomes an obstacle to intelligibility and is typically suppressed as much as possible.

This battle between clarity of expression and creation of mood creates a tug-of-war which can only be determined by deciding the ultimate goal or purpose of the space and the sound to be presented in it.

So what’s the point?

The next time you go to post something online, ask yourself:

“Am I trying to convey information, or emotion?”

Most likely, the more you succeed at one, the less you will succeed at the other.