Your Bad Marketing Content is an Eye-Sore

At a point in The Accidental Life, writer and editor Terry McDonell compares bad marketing content to "joke taxidermy."

When it's bad, it's really bad.

Good content marketers are publishers.

By way of example, consider the blog post "Say 'So Long' to Silos" (from e-learning provider Cornerstone).

The post's author immediately lets readers (HR managers) know she's trustworthy, by acknowledging that, in truth, silos are natural, inevitable outgrowths of any organization. She goes on to list the costs silos impose (low productivity, high turnover, etc.), and offers tips for curbing those costs. She closes promising more tips in a follow-on post.

Good content marketers have learned to be publishers―a necessity in today's digital-first marketplace.

Bad content marketers are joke taxidermists.

Bad content marketers stuff their content with feature-talk, keywords and dubious links, barely departing from old-school advertising.

By way of example, consider the blog post "How to Organize Your Docebo LMS Users for More Targeted Learning" (from e-learning provider Docebo).

Without a beat, the post's author plunges into feature-talk. He tells readers they can build an organizational chart with his company's software, but not how; and devotes the rest of the post to a bulleted list of more features, linking every item to a page on his company's website. He closes by telling readers to "Start your free trial."

Bad content like this isn't only a throwback to interruption marketing; it's an eye-sore.

Corporate Cargo Cults

If you've spent any time inside an American corporation lately, you've seen the executives abusing their young employees.

I refer, of course, to the damage being done by hotshot leaders bent on manufacturing cool corporate cultures.

They're victimizing the youths they recruit, in the same way European colonizers did many natives in the South Pacific during the years before World War II.

Unprepared for their encounter with wealthy and powerful white men―just as many of today's college grads are―those natives took refuge in bizarre religious cults anthropologists later called "cargo cults."

Although differing in local details, these cults all advanced one central prophesy: the world is about to experience a terrible cataclysm, after which dead ancestors will reappear and usher in paradise, by giving all the survivors electrical appliances.

Today's executives aren't manufacturing corporate cultures, but corporate cargo cults.

The natives, given their pitiful wages, can only pray the appliances will arrive soon.

Ashley is Done with Your Stinking Personas

Human beings are too important to be treated
as mere symptoms of the past.

― Lytton Strachey

Persona-based marketing―marketing automation's linchpin―is kaput, says Ernan Roman in CMO.com.

In 2016 his research firm witnessed "a surge in the number of companies disappointed by the lack of a significant increase in response and engagement from their traditional persona-based segmentation."

Customers are knottier than marketers allow―which comes as no surprise.

Roman quotes a Fortune 1000 CMO: “We are using new CRM technology to automate old bad behaviors. The result is irritating and brand-damaging spray and pray.”

Persona-based marketing is flawed, Roman says, in large part because it ignores customers' opinions about competitors' offerings.

Marketers' crude attempts to apply personas to personalize communications irritate customers, waste marketing dollars, and tarnish brands.

It's time for them to nix their trite imaginings and "establish human partnerships and relationships" with customers, Roman says.

"Consumer relationships require authentic and relevant communications and interactions.”

Hard Rain

When words are used as words should be, they are tools of thought. When their proper usage is neglected, they tend to become the masters of thought.

— Harold N. Lee

I don't know about you, but I hate when the weatherman's "alternative facts" convince me to leave my umbrella home, and it pours.

Governing is no place for alternative facts or "truthful hyperbole.” Leave those to the copywriters.

The problem alternative facts pose for me is simple: I don't know where bluffing ends and bullying begins.

Lots of Americans are asking what to do about it.

I suggest you carry an umbrella.



Opinions are my own.

12 Hairy Hints for Better Blog Posts

Nearly 3 million blog posts are published every day. How can you assure yours will be noticed?

Take these 12 hints to heart:

1. Tackle an evergreen topic. (Readers never tire of fundamentals. Good to Great is 16 years old; How to Win Friends and Influence People, 81).
   
   
2. Seek to be of service to a target audience.
   
   
3. Write a brief, quirky headline that promises you'll solve a problem.
   
   
4. Write a short, informative lede that grabs readers' attention.
   
   
5. Use a simple style.
   
   
6. Use research to prove your points.
   
   
7. Use visuals to engage readers.
   
   
8. Include outbound links to authoritative content.
   
   
9. Seek to produce something better (more readable, current, accurate, in-depth, practical, original, targeted) than the million other posts on the topic.
   
   
10. Write a post that's no longer than it needs to be.
    
    
11. Proofread your post.
    
    
12. Above all, make readers feel good.
    

PS: Deep dive into better blogging by reading Nadya Khoja's remarkable post, Increase Blog Traffic And Boost Engagement With These 37 Proven Methods.