Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word….Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra — they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but in the world of non-fiction, writers MUST hear at least some members of the orchestra. To comment on the world around us, we need to know what is happening in the world around us. We can’t make up our own Narnia and write to it, because our audience lives in the real world.
The first step in learning how to maximize your personality’s pros and minimize its cons is to figure out your basic personality type. One simple approach is that of the “four temperaments” approach (popularized by Tim LaHaye, among others), in which human personalities are narrowed down into four basic categories: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic.
And by the most amazing coincidence, I know a content marketing firm that exhibits all of these “temperamental” capabilities.
My own firm, Bredemarket, that serves identity/biometric, technology, and local (California’s Inland Empire) firms that need blog posts, white papers, and other types of written content.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
I just took a look over the last few calls to action that Bredemarket has published.
Whatever you need, talk to me. And be prepared for me to ask you six (or more) questions.
And if you’re reading this post in Janury 2025, thank you. If you want to talk to me about content creation, some of these links may still work!
Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.
If I can help your firm:
From various Bredemarket blog posts.
All of my most recent calls to action were variations on “Contact me.”
And all the CTAs werre kinda so-so and yawn-inducing.
Since I was open to other ideas, I viewed @yourfavcontentcreator_’s recent Instagram reel with four suggestions. Two of them didn’t make sense for Bredemarket’s business, but the first and fourth resonated with me.
I’ve reproduced those two below.
👉 “Get started on your journey to [desired outcome] today.” 👉 “Ready to see real results? Explore our [product/service] now.”
At first I thought I’d simply incorporate “journey” into my CTA…
Don’t stop believin’ in your content!
…but then I decided that “results” would be better.
At the same time, the CTA has to be Brede-distinctive, captivate prospects better than “contact me,” and ideally appeal to all of Bredemarket’s target audiences (identity/biometrics, technology, local).
So, identity/biometric and technology firms, will the paragraph below the logo make you MORE likely to engage with Bredemarket for marketing and writing services? If not, I’ll continue to tweak it in an agile fashion.
Back in 2002, this news WAS really “scary,” since it suggested that you could access a fingerprint reader-protected site with something that wasn’t a finger. Gelatin. A piece of metal. A photograph.
Except that the fingerprint reader world didn’t stand still after 2002, and the industry developed ways to detect spoofed fingers.
After I slept on my “trust funnel” post, I decided that it was too long and took the entire “go-to-market” section out. But I saved it and am sharing it with you here.
If you are creating content as part of the formal launch of a product or service, you are creating SOME type of go-to-market (GTM) plan.
Perhaps it’s a well-defined plan.
Perhaps it’s a simple document.
Maybe it’s a haphazard dictate to “go to market in three days.”
About the “three days” thing
(C, I told you I was going to write this.)
Oh, and by the way, you can’t go to market in three days, even if someone says you can. You can’t. Or if you do, there will be significant gaps or inaccuracies.
In her LinkedIn Learning course, Deirdre Breakenridge prefers to define a four-month go-to-market plan, with specific deliverables for every one of the months in the plan. Of course, she admits that this is ideal, and sometimes you can’t take a full four months to bring a product or service to market. Whether you take four months or six months or even two months, GTM execution for any robust product or service needs a significant amount of time to get all the pieces together.
One of the reasons that it takes months to execute a GTM plan is because a GTM plan requires inputs from several departments, including
product,
marketing,
product marketing (if it is separate from the first two departments),
engineering,
customer success/customer service,
finance,
sales, and
legal.
You won’t get all of THEM to produce inputs, or even agree what the inputs should be, in three days. It takes time.
But there ARE teeny tiny GTM efforts
One exception to the four-month guidance: if your “product” or “service” is VERY small (like a single blog post), you can obviously go-to-market much more quickly.
From the private Bredemarket Asana Content Calendar, back in the days when Twitter (TW) was still Twitter.
Sometimes. At other times I skip Asana altogether and just take pictures and post stuff, like what I did with my “Coldest Beer in Town” and “Classy by Definition” posts from earlier today. Variety is good.
Back to normal GTM
But when your product or service is more complex, then you need to plan your GTM campaign and make sure that it answers all questions about your product or service.
There are all sorts of GTM guidelines out there, and I was part of a team who collaboratively created three different flavors of GTM guidelines over the course of several months, starting with the complex and ending with the ridiculously simple. And the team STILL couldn’t get the other teams to agree on the parameters of the guidelines.
I’m not going to dictate MY ideas on GTM guidelines, but I will say that whatever guidelines you create, make sure that by the time a GTM effort created under these guidelines is finished, both your prospects and your employees will gain the appropriate understanding of your product or service, and the GTM content will answer all of their questions.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
If you don’t know what questions to ask, my six questions (why, how, what goal, benefits, target audience) can be adapted for GTM purposes.
What about your GTM content?
Are you executing a go-to-market plan and need to create some content?
Do you need customer-facing external content (blog posts, white papers, whatever)?
Do you need employee-facing internal content (FAQs, battlecards, whatever)?
Regardless of the content you need, Bredemarket can help you. Here’s a list of the types of content I’ve created over the years:
Articles • Battlecards (80+) • Blog Posts (400+) • Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets • Case Studies (12+) • Competitive Analyses • Email Newsletters (200+) • Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts • FAQs • Plans • Playbooks • Presentations • Proposal Templates • Proposals (100+) • Quality Improvement Documents • Requirements • Scientific Book Chapters • Smartphone Application Content • Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter) • Strategic Analyses • Web Page Content • White Papers and E-Books
Whatever you need, talk to me. And be prepared for me to ask you six (or more) questions.
Kasey Jones alerted me to the phrase “trust funnel,” and I’ve been thinking about it and its relationship to content marketing. Here are my thoughts.
The sales funnel
Many of us are familiar with the concept of sales funnels. The idea is that there are a bunch of people at the top of the funnel, and people move through the sales process.
As people move down, the funnel gets narrower and narrower as some people exit the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, there is a very small hole that represents the customers who have converted, or who have actually purchased something.
In a rare instance of my championing simplicity, I like to use an easy three-step sales funnel model with awareness, consideration, and conversion.
From Venn Marketing, “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion: A 4 Minute Intro To Marketing 101.” (Link)
You may use a more complex sales funnel, but the exact number of steps in the funnel really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that your content marketers create content that addresses each step in your funnel.
In early steps of the funnel, the content goal is to ensure that prospects know that you’re out there and you have a solution that benefits the prospects.
In later steps of the funnel, the content goal is to move prospects to the point where they will purchase something from you, rather than purchasing it from one of your competitors or not purchasing anything at all.
Some of the approaches to sales funnel-based content marketing are based upon the faulty assumption that people progress through the funnel in a logical and predictable manner. In the logical model, you present an awareness piece of content, then follow that with a consideration piece of content, then finally present content to convert the prospect into a customer.
It’s about time we redefine the classic marketing funnel. It describes the user journey as a rather linear path, while the reality is a lot more messy, complex, and unpredictable.
Let’s scrap the dated marketing funnel and try to map out the real user journey.
It starts with a trigger, and then it goes into an almost infinite loop between exploration and evaluation – over and over again. And finally, the user exits the loop by making a decision or a purchase.
Oh, and in addition to assuming logic, standard content creation methods assume that your firm knows where every buyer is on their journey. This assumption is essential so that your firm can detect a prospect in the awareness phase and take the necessary steps to move them downward into the funnel (or toward the endless loop pictured above).
Kasey Jones and the trust funnel
I mentioned Kasey Jones at the beginning of this blog post, based upon something she shared on LinkedIn. She started with an inconvenient truth that blew the second assumption out of the water.
Your buyers will probably never like or comment on your posts.
So much for all of those fancy tools that identify the sources of interaction with your content. They don’t work if people don’t interact with your content.
Yet Jones notes that these people are still buying. Three of them reached out to her in the last two weeks.
Each mentioned my content as why they wanted to work with me.
But they have never, not once, engaged with anything I’ve done on here.
Still, they were in my trust funnel, just the same.
It’s different from the sales funnel that we are laboriously tracking in our customer relationship management (CRM) tool. For content marketers, these things literally pop up out of the blue from a “trust funnel” that we know nothing about, even though we’re building it with our content.
If I wished, I could name multiple examples of people reaching out to me because of my content or Bredemarket’s content.
Jones’ point in all this was to emphasize that you need to keep on creating “scroll-stopping content” to attract DREAM (her capitalization) clients.
Even though you don’t know who you are attracting.
You’re not a sausage grinder making sausages. You’re a flower attracting bees.
By The original uploader was Y6y6y6 at English Wikipedia. – Original image located at PDPhoto.org. Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Drilnoth using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7365698
Now I could end this discussion right here with Kasey Jones’ comments, but I thought I’d perform a LinkedIn search to see who else was talking about the trust funnel.
And I found Kevin Schmitz.
Kevin Schmitz and the trust funnel
Schmitz approached the topic from a different perspective in his post from earlier this week. He focused on a particular piece of content: a person’s LinkedIn profile and activity.
Schmitz asserted that if someone approaches you with a meeting request, and the person’s LinkedIn presence is (his words) “bare bones,” you’re less likely to take the meeting. But if a meeting requester posts engaging, relevant content, perhaps you’ll take that call.
Schmitz went on to say:
Your presence on LinkedIn is not a “lead funnel”.
It’s a “trust funnel”.
We work so damn hard to establish trust in the meeting.
Yet, most of us are person 1 (the “bare bones” person) with an uphill battle each and every meeting.
Kevin Schmitz LinkedIn post, 8/22/2023 ot 8/23/2023. (Link)
If you’re interested, Schmitz’s post goes on to suggest ways to make your LinkedIn presence more engaging.
The meaning for content marketing
So what does the idea of “creating content that resonates with your invisible trust funnel” mean for content marketing?
Most people realize (or I hope they realize) that organic content often does not have an immediate payoff, especially for complex B2B sales. Even if I write the most amazing automated biometric identification system (ABIS) content for a Bredemarket client, the client won’t get orders within the first three days of posting the content. (I’ll have more to say about “three days” in a future post discussing go-to-market efforts.) Even if I am the biometric content marketing expert. (I’ve been working on promoting THAT piece of content for a while now.)
It takes longer than three days for content marketing to yield results. One source estimates four to five months. Another source says six to twelve months. Joe Pulizzi (quoted by Neil Patel) estimates 15 to 17 months. And all the sources say that their estimates may not apply to your particular case.
But Bredemarket (and I in my personal communications) will continue to cater to that invisible trust funnel and see what happen.
And if you’re reading this post in Janury 2025, thank you. If you want to talk to me about content creation, some of these links may still work!
Illogical marketing slogans like “coldest beer in town” are fascinating.
If you take a moment to think about it, every mini mart and liquor store in town has to chill beer to the exact same temperature before it freezes, so no store will have colder beer than any other store. (For the specifics, including the effect of ABV on alcohol freezing temperature, see Oxbow Tavern’s blog post.)
But liquor store marketers know that we DON’T take a moment to think about it. When it’s hot and we want beer, we want the “coldest beer in town.”
Well, while it was hot this morning, and while the HK Food Store was open (unlike the C & M Classy Mart a couple of miles northwest), I opted NOT to get the coldest beer in town. I wasn’t carrying a beer bottle opener, and I didn’t feel like breaking the law by walking down Grove Avenue with a beer bottle hidden in a paper bag.
Yes, I’m stealing the Biometric Update practice of combining multiple items into a single post, but this lets me take a brief break from identity (mostly) and examine three general technology stories:
Advances in speech neuroprosthesis (the Pat Bennett / Stanford University story).
The benefits of Dynamic Media for Adobe Enterprise Manager users, as described by KBWEB Consult.
The benefits of graph databases for Identity and Access Management (IAM) implementations, as described by IndyKite.
Neuroprosthetics “is a discipline related to neuroscience and biomedical engineering concerned with developing neural prostheses, artificial devices to replace or improve the function of an impaired nervous system.
Various news sources highlighted the story of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient Pat Bennett and her somewhat-enhanced ability to formulate words, resulting from research at Stanford University.
Because I was curious, I sought the Nature article that discussed the research in detail, “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis.” The article describes a proof of concept of a speech brain-computer interface (BCI).
Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than the previous state-of-the-art speech BCI2) and a 23.8% word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary (the first successful demonstration, to our knowledge, of large-vocabulary decoding). Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record8 and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute9).
For Bennett, the (ALS) deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her brain stem. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes — or units of sound, such as sh — that are the building blocks of speech….
After four months, Bennett’s attempted utterances were being converted into words on a computer screen at 62 words per minute — more than three times as fast as the previous record for BCI-assisted communication.
Now let’s shift to companies that need to produce marketing collateral. Bredemarket produces collateral, but not to the scale that big companies need to produce. A single company may have to produce millions of pieces of collateral, each of which is specific to a particular product, in a particular region, for a particular audience/persona. Even Bredemarket could potentially produce all sorts of content, if it weren’t so difficult to do so:
An Instagram carousel post about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to voice sales executives in the identity industry.
A TikTok reel about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to marketing executives in the AI industry.
All of this specialized content, using all of these different image and video formats? I’m not gonna create all that.
But as KBWEB Consult (a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Enterprise Cloud technologies) points out in its article “Implementing Rapid Omnichannel Messaging with AEM Dynamic Media,” Adobe Experience Manager has tools to speed up this process and create correctly-messaged content in ALL the formats for ALL the audiences.
One of those tools is Dynamic Media.
AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity.
A graph database, also referred to as a semantic database, is a software application designed to store, query and modify network graphs. A network graph is a visual construct that consists of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity (such as a person) and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes.
Graph databases have been around in some variation for along time. For example, a family tree is a very simple graph database….
Graph databases are well-suited for analyzing interconnections…
To see how this applies to identity and access management (IAM), I’ll turn to IndyKite, whose Lasse Andersen recently presented on graph database use in IAM (in a webinar sponsored by Strativ Group). IndyKite describes its solution as follows (in part):
A knowledge graph that holistically captures the identities of customers and IoT devices along with the rich relationships between them
A dynamic and real-time data model that unifies disconnected identity data and business metadata into one contextualized layer
Yes, I know that every identity company (with one exception) uses the word “trust,” and they all use the word “seamless.”
But this particular technology benefits banking customers (at least the honest ones) by using the available interconnections to provide all the essential information about the customer and the customer’s devices, in a way that does not inconvenience the customer. IndyKite claims “greater privacy and security,” along with flexibility for future expansion.
In other words, it increases velocity.
What is your technology story?
I hope you provided this quick overview of these three technology advances.
But do you have a technology story that YOU want to tell?
Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.
MCLEAN, Va., May 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The West Virginia University Research Corporation (WVURC) and Pangiam, a leading trade a travel technology company, announced a new partnership to conduct research and develop new, cutting-edge artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision technologies for commercial and government applications.
Pangiam and WVURC will work together to launch Pangiam Bridge, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence driven solution for customs authorities worldwide. Pangiam Bridge will allow customs officials to automate portions of the customs inspection process for baggage and cargo. Jim McLaughlin, Pangiam Chief Technology Officer, said, “we are excited to grow Pangiam’s artificial intelligence work in partnership with West Virginia University and continued development of Pangiam Bridge for customs authorities.”
Pangiam Bridge is obviously not ready for prime time yet; it’s not even mentioned on Pangiam’s Products and Services page, nor is it mentioned anywhere else on Pangiam’s website. The only mention of Pangiam Bridge is in this press release, which isn’t surprising considering that this is a research effort. But if the research holds out, then many of the manual processes used by customs agents may be significantly reduced or eliminated entirely.
Project DARTMOUTH is the collaboration between Pangiam and Google Cloud, named after the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Project DARTMOUTH utilizes AI and pattern analysis technologies to digest and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time and identify potential prohibited items in carry-on baggage, checked baggage, airline cargo and shipments.
Companies always strive to obtain some sort of recognition. I tried to do the same for Bredemarket, but my effort got derailed into a common local Inland Empire joke.
Aware’s biometric blog recognition
So what recognition did I want to receive? The same recognition that noted biometric company Aware received in 2020.
The Best Biometrics Blogs from thousands of Biometrics blogs on the web using search and social metrics. Subscribe to these websites because they are actively working to educate, inspire, and empower their readers with frequent updates and high-quality information.
Not that I necessarily consider myself equal to Aware or some of the other noted companies on the current list, but as the self-acknowledged identity/biometric blog expert, with hundreds of identity posts over the last three years, I figured I had a shot of making the list. The benefit to me, of course, is that if I made the list, I had a better chance of securing identity blog post writing clients and other clients.
So far I haven’t made the biometric blogs list.
But I did make another list.
Which is somewhat problematic.
Ontario blogs? True.
You see, earlier this morning I received an email that stated the following.
I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog Bredemarket Blog has been selected by our panelist as one of the Top 45 Ontario Bloggers on the web.
I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 45 Ontario Bloggers on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!
We’d be grateful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning about the Top 45 Ontario Bloggers list in any of your upcoming post.
Yup. The people who created the feed think that I’m in CANADA.
But if you think my listing is messed up, take a look at the number 1 listing, for the official news site for the Government of Ontario. This IS a Canadian website, as evidenced by its URL of https://news.ontario.ca/newsroom/en, and the fact that it discusses people like Doug Ford. But take a real close look at the logo at the left of the listing.
And our websites down here don’t offer French as one of the two main languages.
If you live in Canada, don’t read this section
But at least the Bredemarket blog is listed SOMEWHERE, because I help a lot of U.S. companies (sorry, no Canadian companies) create the words they need to drive awareness and eventually revenue. Services such as the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service let Bredemarket collaborate with you to create the text your firm needs.
Bredemarket 