Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
On Love
Happy Valentine’s Day, if you’re celebrating. And if you’re not, that’s cool too.
Of all the widely celebrated dates on the calendar, Valentine’s can be one of the more divisive.
No one is quite sure when or where it started. There are at least a dozen or so Valentines on the saintly list. Valentinus—Latin for worthy and strong—was a popular name between the 2nd and 8th centuries CE, and was used by several martyrs during that period.
Some see the celebration as an unwelcome symbol of patriarchy, others as a marketing scam. For most people, it’s a harmless bit of fun that detractors need to calm down about.
Whichever point of view you take, hopefully we can agree that the world could use a bit more love and a little less vitriol at the moment.
Each time I open a news site or read an opinion piece on social media, I’m struck by how extreme—and frequently violent—the language has become. The writing is littered with combative and militaristic phrases, even when the subject matter is neither.
Everything is a battle—from cooking, to sports, to running a business—and life is about girding oneself for the fight.
I find myself falling into the same trap, telling my audience to “stick to its guns” and “fight for market share” and to use their content as “ammunition”.
Perhaps we can honor St. Valentine—whomever he might have been—by paying attention to this aspect of our writing in the coming days and replacing combative terms with something less confrontational.
On Logos
I was discussing logo design with a client this week and we found ourselves debating the merits of including a distinctive symbol (icon) alongside the company’s name (word mark).
There are times and places where their marketing team wants to use the icon alone, but they’re worried that it won’t be recognized because the company is relatively new and not yet well known to prospective customers.
Some marketing advisors recommend doing away with the icon altogether, so that prospects learn to associate the word mark (i.e., the company name) with the solutions it sells.
My gut tells me that they should persist with the icon + word mark logo, so that their audience learns to associate both with the solutions they sell. This will make the icon more recognizable over time, such that its use as a standalone brand image can gradually be ramped up.
What do you think? Are brand icons a distraction or a useful shortcut that can be embedded in the buyer’s brain?
On Laziness
Having mused on love and logos, my brain spent the rest of the week preoccupied with substandard content.
It started when a regular contributor to my LinkedIn feed opened a post with “Me and XXX will be at the XXX conference this week…”. Cringe.
Next, I saw an interesting headline about changes being made to the LinkedIn platform, only to find myself reading a blatantly AI-generated summary.
There are certain phrases that are uncommon in everyday writing but which, for reasons I cannot fathom, gen-AI insists on using repeatedly. When you read enough content, they stand out like sore thumbs.
(If you’re curious, here is a proper account of the upcoming LinkedIn changes.)
Injury turned to insult when the next post I stopped to read used energy industry jargon in a completely erroneous manner. It was a blatant attempt by someone unfamiliar with the sector at trying to sound like an insider.
What were all these people thinking?
From sloppy grammar to AI abdication to jargon junk, each of their errors made me see them as lazy, incompetent, and uncaring.
If I was in the market for their companies’ solutions, I might extrapolate those feelings to conclude that their product or service will be of similarly low quality and poorly supported by an uncaring team.
This is a risky game to play, especially when the fixes are straightforward and cheap to implement.
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, 7 Ways to Tell a B2B Buyer That You’re Lazy, I cover these issues and other common pitfalls that marketing teams fall into by not investing the time and effort needed to assure the quality of their content.
Hopefully reading the post will help you avoid making the same mistakes, ensuring that your content gets judged on its informational merits rather than the sloppiness with which it has been put together.
Operational Updates
This week saw us hit some significant milestones on the way to launching our online community. We’ve selected the host platform, completed the initial branding and setup, and begun beta testing the core functionality.
Assuming no major issues are discovered, we will be announcing the community and publishing a prospectus within the next two weeks. This will explain how the community will be structured, who it is for, and how it will deliver value to those who join.
Shortly after that, we will open the waitlist for applications. Since this will be a private community for qualified B2B professionals, our goal is to identify and engage about 100 founding members before going live. We want to ensure there is valuable activity taking place from day one.
While you’re waiting for the big reveal, remember to check out our weekly short video series on LinkedIn, Instagram, and our YouTube channel. Each segment explains a key content marketing concept in about two minutes. If there are particular topics you’d like to see us cover in future episodes, drop them into the comments below or send us a message.
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
Getting back to basics by focusing on customer insights
Creating a connected content strategy
A case study on keyword research for a very specific B2B audience
Using behavior-based criteria to identify leads matching your ICP
I love reading case histories—in part because we see so few of them in the B2B marketing realm—and the one Andy Chadwick has prepared for Search Engine Journal is a beauty. We regularly struggle to perform effective keyword research for clients targeting niche markets, where search volume is low and the terminology highly nuanced. Andy’s example shows how a deep understanding of the target audience can help break the impasse.
To round out this week’s edition, my One Step actionable tip revisits my earlier rant about unnecessarily combative language in your content. Which phrases are you prone to using, and how might you substitute for them?
Until next Wednesday…
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Feb 14, 2024 - 7 Ways to Tell a B2B Buyer That You’re Lazy
Feb 07, 2024 - Strategic Staffing for Content Success—When and Who to Hire for B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Stop Feeding the Broken B2B Machine: How to Make Insights Matter Again
There are some mic-drop sound bites in this provocative piece by Eoin Rodgers, CMO of Atomic, written for The Drum. He argues that B2B marketing needs to get back to basics and focus squarely on customer insights, rather than obsessing over marketing automation and driving the sales funnel. With "customer understanding" occupying a prominent position in our content marketing framework, we couldn't agree more.
Connected Content Strategy
In this detailed article for Forbes, Stephen Diorio, Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute, discusses eight reasons why marketing leaders fail to develop and implement effective content marketing strategies. He then explains the purpose and value of a connected content strategy, acting like middleware between strategy and execution, and how to go about developing one.
How to Do Keyword Research for Very Specific B2B Audiences (A Case Study)
We love a good case study, and this one focuses on a subject close to many of our clients' hearts: keyword research for niche audiences. Andy Chadwick explains for Search Engine Journal how his team tackled marketing to a savvy audience that's well-versed in industry jargon and seeking specific, detailed information. Not surprisingly, the secret sauce is a deep understanding of the target audience (and learning to handle some huge sets of data).
Redefining Leads in B2B: Why Data Enrichment is Key for Lead Gen
In today's data-rich world, not every interested party should qualify as a lead. So says Eric Dates, writing for MarTech, arguing that a true lead must demonstrate intent to discover or purchase your product. Today, this translates to specific, behavior-based criteria for qualification, moving beyond superficial metrics or simply someone who fits your ICP.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
Today’s One Step actionable tip returns to a theme I touched on in this week’s introduction: the excessive use of militaristic and combative language in our content.
We live in historically peaceful times—although you might not know it from the news headlines. In days of yore, the threat of war perpetually overshadowed whatever fragile peace neighboring tribes and nations had established. This likely accounts for why so many phrases with military origins litter our day-to-day vernacular.
There’s a more positive explanation, too. The military is, by-and-large, an efficient and well-organized machine. Some of its tenets and idioms are justifiably adopted by businesses in search of similar outcomes.
Nevertheless, the net effect of making every competitive situation—from sales meetings to our children’s sports games—sound like a pitched battle is the unnecessary amplification of hostility and an all-too-quick tendency to resort to fisticuffs.
Whether you live in an openly armed, fight-before-flight culture like the one pervading the United States, or a less Rambo-esque, more stoic place like the United Kingdom, it’s prudent to use such phrases sparingly.
Aside from their unintended, psycho-accumulative consequences, they lose their impact when bandied around like a movie script.
What are you supposed to do when you want to emphasize the (legitimately) confrontational nature of a business situation but all the war-like phrases have been neutered through constant over-use?
It behooves us to pay attention to how frequently we use combat-related language and to consider whether there are better alternatives. In this way, we become more self-aware of the phrases we choose and can develop a substitution list that broadens and deescalates our writing.
If you’re with me on this one, try following these three steps:
Review copy that you have written over the past six months (posts, webpages, articles, etc.) and look for phrases that have a military or combative origin.
Which ones are you most prone to injecting?
What alternative phrases might you use to help demilitarize your language?
Example phrases include: “On the front lines”, “in the trenches”, “battle against”, “fight for”, “under fire”, “launch an offensive”, “blitz”, “fight back”, “hold the fort”, “dig in”, “crossfire”, “boots on the ground”, “no man’s land”, “rally the troops”, “useful ammunition”, “arms race” (and many more).
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