“Satisfied. Neutral. Not Satisfied.” Create compelling content for customers and prospects through these unconventional techniques!

Tuesday: Write with the Pen of the Masters

As an independent professional, building your brand and establishing yourself as an expert in your field is crucial.

What you write helps define just how effective you will be in a particular project or assignment.

Which is why I’ve found these tips to be so applicable and worth sharing with you. They will help you produce content that’s compelling and powerful enough to help you get the ROI you’re searching for.

I guarantee that if you keep reading you’ll learn a time-tested tactic on developing the right call to action that will drive profitability for your business and help you achieve your goals.

I genuinely hope you find this week’s tip interesting and insightful as you and your team strategize the next piece of content for your clients.

Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

Write with the Pen of the Masters

Writing content for your personal brand can be challenging, especially if you think you’ve already exhausted every term or idea that you can use for marketing your value.

As a business person, you don’t write copy just for the sake of writing it.

You need to make sure that your content is unique, compelling, catchy, and worth the read. This is the first step to fulfilling your call-to-action (CTA).

That’s no easy feat, especially when writer’s block hits you. With deadlines fast approaching, what’s one quick way to get inspired to start writing?

Swiping Messages From Visitors and Customers.

This is one of the tips pointed out in Joanna Wiebe’s CopyHackers Book 1 titled, “Where Stellar Messages Come From.”

“Swiping” messages from your readers or customers could be very helpful for your business.

You can grab their thoughts and use those creatively as part of your marketing strategy to promote your brand’s products or services.

You can even use the information to form copy that addresses their needs and wants, resulting in more readers, online traffic, and even sales.

What are these messages?

Feedback!

Written or spoken reactions or responses to a specific product or service that’s used or availed.

How can you obtain feedback?

1. Interviews – Interviewing your existing customers regarding the use of a product they purchased from you or a service they availed from you can help you know how they have benefited from it.

You can do this in face-to-face sessions, through online video calls, or through phone calls.

Interviewing your customers is a great way to understand their needs and how you can address those needs—product or service improvements, new offerings to address current trends, better customer service, a different shopping experience, and more.

It is also an effective way of getting their genuine thoughts or opinions that you can use in your copy. Long-time customers know your offerings best, helping you gain deeper insights on what works and what doesn’t, as well as what keeps them loyal to your product or service.

2. Surveys – This is a method of gathering information from a specific number or group of people by composing a set of questions to reveal specific preferences, opinions, and behaviors. This can be done online or through a print out.

Unlike interviews, surveys don’t give you much room to expound on answers because participants are given only a specific set of questions.

Surveys work best in gathering information like statistics or more straightforward types of feedback. You can use these results to prove a point, explain a concept, or present an idea.

It’s always compelling and convincing to include credible market research and data in your content to promote your brand.

3. Social Media – Social Media is almost everywhere. With a lot of social media platforms today, this is undeniably one of the best sources for gathering feedback from your visitors or customers.

Different types of people with different purchasing patterns use different social media apps. By knowing which of the social media sites your target market or customers are at (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), you’d know how to best engage with your customers. The information you get from that would be more useful than simply being present and active in ALL sites.

You can ask followers of your pages or accounts to give their reviews on your products or services. They can also leave comments and reactions to your offerings on posts you make. The more engaged your customers are, the more valuable data you can get from them.

At Valens Research, President and CEO, Joel Litman conducts training and seminars as part of the company’s education and corporate events, as well as corporate social responsibility. In these programs, he always wants to know the attendees’ feedback.

He created a feedback form to distribute and collect after every event. It contained questions about the program, venue, presentation, and speaker. He also asked about things they think he can improve on and if there are other event topics they’d like to hear about.

Using their feedback, he’d be able to know what they like, dislike, need, or don’t need, and apply that in future events, content, offerings, marketing, and promotions.

As an example, he’s used testimonials and quotes of past attendees from the industry to include on his online event registration page. It gives new prospects an idea of what to expect and how others have found it valuable to attend.

Customer or attendee feedback is extremely valuable but asking for it is not always easy. It takes a lot of time and effort in order to conduct interviews, prepare surveys and questionnaires, ask for reviews, and sort through comments.

Putting in the effort to swipe messages as such will truly help you and your business gain engagement, increase conversion and leads, and more importantly, create more content for future marketing efforts.

Time to swipe messages!

Hope you found this week’s insights interesting and helpful.

Stay tuned for next Tuesday’s “Write with the Pen of the Masters!”