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Tag Archives: content marketing
Don’t Miss the Boat
Bredemarket helps identity/biometric firms.
- Finger, face, iris, voice, DNA, ID documents, geolocation, and even knowledge.
- Content-Proposal-Analysis. (Bredemarket’s “CPA.”)
Don’t miss the boat.
Augment your team with Bredemarket.
Friction is Bad
Some time ago I read a story (which may or may not have been true) about an employer who called multiple job applicants to the office for a morning interview. As time passed and the employer didn’t interview anyone, some of the applicants got tired of waiting and left. At the end of the day, only one applicant remained. That applicant got the job.
- The person who told the story thought that it demonstrated that perseverance pays off.
- Most of the readers thought that it demonstrated that the employer was a jerk and that the work environment was probably toxic.
If this were to happen in real life, the employer would paradoxically lose out on the BEST candidates who had better things to do than sit around an office all day.
Why?
Because people avoid friction. If job applicants can obtain jobs without playing silly games, they will.
Friction is bad.
The evolution of fingerprint capture
When I started in the biometric industry 30 years ago, many police agencies were capturing fingerprints by putting ink on a person’s fingers and rolling/slapping the prints on a card.
That was messy and time-consuming, so companies like Digital Biometrics and Identix developed “livescan” devices, which did not require ANY ink and which let police agencies capture fingerprints by rolling/slapping the prints on a glass platen. This process could require a minute or two for the livescan operator to capture all fourteen images.
That’s a long time.
As I’ve previously noted, it was TOO long for some people in the federal government, who began asking in 2004 if technology could capture a complete set of fingerprints in 15 seconds.
20 years later, we can capture fingerprints (at least 8 of them) in a couple of seconds.
How?
By avoiding friction. Rather than forcing people to place their fingerprints on a card or a platen, “contactless” technology lets the “wave” (or “fly”) their fingers over a capture device, or hold their fingerprints in front of a smartphone camera.
Friction is bad.
The sound of silence
Despite what lyricists say, silence is NOT your old friend.
When a prospect wants to find out about your biometric solution, how does silence help you?
Let’s say that a prospect hears that MegaCorp offers a biometric solution, but MegaCorp’s blog and social media haven’t posted anything lately.
What are the chances that the prospect will search far and wide to find out about MegaCorp’s biometric solution?
Actually, the chances are better that the prospect won’t search at all, and will turn to the competitors who are NOT silent.
Are you going to look for the information that is easily available, or the information that is hard to obtain?
Friction is bad.
Eating my own wildebeest food
I’m trying to reduce friction in Bredemarket’s own practices.
While I still use landing pages for some thing that require further explanation for some prospects, I’m trying to avoid them in some instances.
I’m working on a marketing campaign for a client, and my first “draft 0.5” of the campaign was loaded with friction.
- The prospect had to open an email.
- In the email, the prospect had to click on a landing page.
- On the landing page, the prospect had to fill out a form to book a meeting.
Huge numbers of people drop out of the process at every step. So why not eliminate a step, and let the prospect book a meeting in a form embedded in the email?
Friction is bad.
And I’m applying this same principle to this post.
If your identity/biometric firm is desperate for content to convert prospects into paying customers, why don’t you schedule a free 30-minute meeting with Bredemarket to discuss your needs and what I can offer?
Incidentally, while I often repurpose blog content on Bredemarket’s social media channels, this post WON’T be one of them. I can’t embed a Calendly form into an Instagram or LinkedIn post.
And I can’t embed YouTube videos either.
Important and not urgent, but how important?
Whether and how you delegate something depends upon its importance, especially if you recognize three levels of importance. Sometimes the very important and critically important items require a CPA, or Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional. (I know one.)
When importance is simple
Last October I spent some time talking about the Eisenhower Matrix and its critical flaw, focusing upon the “important but not urgent” quadrant:
When you have a single level of importance, then decisions are pretty simple. For urgent things, do it yourself if it’s important, delegate it if it’s not.
When “importance” is more granular
But what if, instead of “Not Important” and “Important,” we had three levels of importance instead of just one? In other words, “Not Important,” “Important,” “Very Important,” and “Critically Important”?
In that case, you not only consider whether to delegate something, but who should be delegated that thing. (Or, as you’ll see, WHAT should be delegated that thing.)
- If the need is not important, delegate it, but it doesn’t really matter to whom or what you delegate it. ChatGPT or Bard is “good enough,” even if the result is awful.
- If the need is important, delegate it to someone you trust to create very good content. Let them create the content, you approve it, and you’re done.
- If the need is very important, then you may delegate some of the work, but you don’t want to delegate all of it. You need to be involved in the content creation process from the initial meeting, through the review of every draft, and of course for the final approval. The goal is stellar content.
- If the need is critically important, then you probably don’t want to delegate the work and will want to do it yourself—unless you can find someone who is better than you in creating content.
As I noted in October, a more granular approach to importance increases the, um, importance of Bredemarket’s services.
- In the simple Eisenhower Matrix model, Bredemarket handles the Not Important stuff while you handle the Important stuff.
- In the “three levels of importance” model, Bredemarket handles the Very Important and Critically Important stuff. Because the merely Important stuff and the Not Important stuff doesn’t require my 30 years of technology, identity, and biometrics expertise.
Sometimes you need a CPA (but NOT a Certified Public Accountant)
But if your needs are critical, and you require the services of a CPA (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), then you need to learn what Bredemarket can do for you. Click on the image to learn more.
Bredemarket’s “CPA”
Is your firm losing business and leaving important items unfinished?
I, John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket, am a “CPA.” Not a Certified Public Accountant; a Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional:
- Content such as blog posts, case studies, data sheets, white papers, and more.
- Proposal submissions from identity/biometric and technology firms to governments and enterprises.
- Analysis of markets, companies and competitors, products, and websites and social media.
I offer over 30 years of technology experience—30 in identity/biometrics, where I am the biometric product marketing expert.
I ask questions first (why, how, what, and more) and collaborate later to ensure I deliver the right content to you.
I provide pre-packaged services or bill you at an hourly rate.
A (Non-Existent) Stake in the (Existent) Ground
For those who use the term…
What the heck IS a so-called “digital landscape?”
The word “landscape” suggests a physical environment, not a digital environment. Merriam-Webster specifically cites “natural inland scenery,” which even rules out the shoreline, much less a bunch of smartphone apps or SDKs jumbled together.
And how does a DIGITAL landscape evolve, rapidly or otherwise?
Now I’m not suggesting that you AVOID references to the “rapidly evolving digital landscape.” After all, if aspiring influencers and thought leaders use the term, your content needs to sound exactly like theirs. And this applies whether your thought leader is a person or an AI bot. Trust me on this.
Or perhaps you shouldn’t take my advice. Maybe the overuse of hack phrases is NOT a best-of-breed approach.
So why did I write this…
Because a particular respectable vendor began a Facebook post with the words “In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.”
And it shook me.
Was this a one-time slip up, or are readers EXPECTING companies to talk like this?
(Digital landscape image AI-generated by Google Gemini)
I Don’t Create Content in a Flash
I don’t create content THAT quickly.
But I do prioritize iterative action.
(Just don’t look at my draft 0.5.)
Original video on Instagram.
Always Remember…and Differentiate
I’ve railed against copying the competition with “me too” messaging…and this morning I ate my own wildebeest food and did something about it.
While Bredemarket usually doesn’t mark significant dates, I observed 9/11 on my social channels. While 9/11 is relevant worldwide, it is especially relevant to Bredemarket’s identity/biometrics customers because of its revolutionary impact on our industry.
But I didn’t use the tried-and-true messaging with an image of the former World Trade Center and the words “never forget.” After 23 years, we’ve seen that message thousands of times. It blends into the landscape, like a mention of the band the Dead Kennedys that no longer raises an eyebrow.
So instead I differentiated Bredemarket’s message and said “always remember” with an image of the destruction to the Pentagon. Perhaps that will wake people up to what happened that day.
Apologies to Shanksville. We will always remember you also.
WHY Ask Why?
LHC shared this bit of history from the advertising world.
If you don’t remember, “Why ask why? Try Bud Dry” was a short-lived advertising tagline from a short-lived Budweiser product from some short-lived part of the early 90s…
But “why ask why” is not just an old advertising slogan. It’s also an excellent question in its own right.
If you’ve read my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a lot of time on the questions why, how, and what.
Heck, I even wrote a book about those (and three other) questions. Then I rewrote the book when I came up with a seventh question.
But during the last few years I failed to realize one true power of these interrogative questions—and other interrogative questions such as who (an important question for identity folks).
The power, according to Camp Systems, is this:
In negotiating, if you start asking questions with these words, you’ll invite more thoughtful and thorough answers.
Now look at what happens when you start a question with a verb….These questions can be answered in a single word, and it’s usually yes, no, or maybe.
I won’t go into detail about why the Camp Systems devotees—the “start with no” people—despise “maybe” responses and REALLY despise “yes” responses.
For my present purpose I’ll simply say that you receive a lot more information from interrogative questions.
And if you want to maintain a customer focus, don’t you want information from the customer so you can understand them?
Whoops, let me rephrase that. What are the best types of questions to ask when you really want to understand a customer?
Practice, practice, practice…
AI Articles in Ten (Not Five) Minutes—But I Can’t Tell You Why
More on the “human vs. AI vs. both” debate on content generation, and another alternative—the Scalenut tool.
The five-minute turnaround
I’ve been concerned about my own obsolescence for over a year now.
I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of one aspect of #generativeai:
Its ability to write something in about a minute.
(OK, maybe five minutes if you try a few prompts,)
Now I consider myself capable of cranking out a draft relatively quickly, but even my fastest work takes a lot longer than five minutes to write.
“Who cares, John? No one is demanding a five minute turnaround.”
Not yet.
Because it was never possible before (unless you had proposal automation software, but even that couldn’t create NEW text).
What happens to us writers when a five-minute turnaround becomes the norm?
The five-minute requirement
I returned to the topic in January, with a comment on the quality of generative AI text.
Never mind that the resulting generative AI content was wordy, crappy, and possibly incorrect. For some people the fact that the content was THERE was good enough.
OK, Writer.com (with a private dataset) claims to do a better job, but much of the publicly-available free generative AI tools are substandard.
Then I noted that sometimes I will HAVE to get that content out without proper reflection. I outlined two measures to do this:
- Don’t sleep on the content.
- Let full-grown ideas spring out of your head.
But I still prefer to take my time brewing my content. I’ve spent way more than five minutes on this post alone, and I don’t even know how I’m going to end it yet. And I still haven’t selected the critically important image to accompany the post.
Am I a nut for doing things manually?
You’ve gone from idea to 2500+ word articles in 10 minutes.
Now that I’ve set the context, let’s see what Kieran MacRae (quoted above) has to say about Scalenut. But first, let’s see Kieran’s comments about the state of the industry:
Sure, once upon a time, AI writing tools would write about as well as a 4-year-old.
So what does Scalenut do?
With Scalenut, you will reduce your content creation time by 75% and become a content machine.
The content gets written in your tone of voice, and the only changes I made were adding personal anecdotes and a little Kieran charm.
But…why?
Why is Scalenut better?
Kieran doesn’t say.
And if Scalenut explains WHY its technology is so great, the description is hidden behind an array of features, benefits, and statistics.
Maybe it’s me, but Scalenut could improve its differentiation here, as outlined in my video.
What Scalenut does…and doesn’t do
I should clarify that copyrighting is but one part of Scalenut’s arsenal.
Scalenut is a one-stop-shop AI-powered SEO writing tool that will see you through keyword selection, research, and content production. Plus, you get full access to their copywriting tool, which can create more specific short-form content like product descriptions.
You optimize SEO content by adding NLP keywords, which are the words that Google uses to decide what an article is about.
MacRae cautions that it’s not for “individuals whose writing is their brand,” and Scalenut’s price point means that it’s not for people who only need a few pieces a month.
But if you need a lot of content, and you’re not Stephen King or Dave Barry or John Bredehoft (not in terms of popularity, but of distinctness), then perhaps Scalenut may help you.
I can’t tell you why, though.
(And an apology for those who watch the video; like “The Long Run” album itself, it takes forever to get to the song.)
Bredemarket 