Is Meaning Getting Lost in Your Content?

I was browsing the #contentmarketing stream on Twitter this afternoon and came across a Tweet by Marcus Schaller (@b2bforhumans) - love that Twitter handle, don't you?

Marcus Tweeted:

"Nobody is persuaded by data, they are persuaded by meaning. #b2b #contentmarketing"

There's a nugget of gold in that Tweet. So I decided to play out one version that occured to me.

How many times have you seen content that makes a statement like this:

Our solution will help your company increase productivity by 33%.

What does that mean? I don't have a clue, do you? First of all, what kind of productivity?

Our solution will help your company increase employee productivity by 33%.

Still not sure. In relation to what?

Unified communications and collaboration capabilities will help your company increase employee productivity by 33%.

Closer but not yet there. How?

Unified communications and collaboration capabilities will help you increase employee productivity by 33% by helping workers quickly find and connect with the people and information they need to do their jobs.

To make it meaningful, add interest and tighten up the focus:

Knowledge workers defy traditional automation but unified communications and collaboration tools can help them compress time to task completion by up to 33%.

Meaning is about sharing ideas your audience can relate to and work with, not vague statistics and solution statements. Give them something to visualize, chew on and share wtih others and persuasion will come easier.

*By the way, I made up that statistic for illustrative purposes - so don't go using it.

Comments

[Marcus Schaller]

Wow! It's all about writing for people, right? Glad to hear my little tweet inspired this.

[Jonathan Kidder]

You showed the power of a sentence!

[Advertising Directory]

I was going through some articles yesterday and I came to know that there are many people those are just focusing on promoting there articles instead of making the content relevant and informative. First and foremost, your content needs to offer information that relates to the needs, concerns and interests of the audience you are trying to communicate with.

[Matt Rhys-Davies]

Trying to persuade SEO-ers that content should be for people and not for bots is a battle I face daily.

If Google keeps up this progression of making sure good content is findable then within 5 years maybe SEO-ers will start changing their views to realise it's a fine balance between users and bots, but leaning far greater towards people.

Cheers,
Matt