Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
Money 20/20 is taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA from Sunday, October 22 to Wednesday October 25.
While I am not in Las Vegas, Bredemarket will monitor the goings-on and share relevant news on Facebook (Bredemarket Identity Firm Services group), Instagram (Bredemarket), LinkedIn (Bredemarket Identity Firm Services page), bredemarket.com, and elsewhere.
#biometric
#biometrics
#contentmarketing
#finance
#financialidentity
#fintech
#identity
#money2020
Does your technology firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?
Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?
How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?
Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your technology firm.
Click the image below.
#contentmarketing #technology
Does your Inland Empire firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?
Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?
How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?
Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your Inland Empire firm.
Click the image below.
#contentmarketing #inlandempire
I constantly preach that firms should not adopt “me too” messaging. Ideally, a firm’s messaging should not copy its competitors, but should instead state why the firm is better than all others, and why all the other firms are worthless in comparison.
But when a firm differentiates itself, there is always a danger that the firm will forget one important thing: how will the customers react to the firm’s differentiated messaging? Will the differentiation turn the customers off?
Trust me, it can happen.
Some time ago, I was working for a multinational firm that clearly differentiated itself from all of its competitors. This multinational had been around for some time and was known for its particular tone.
I’m not going to reveal the name of the particular multinational firm, or the tone it radiated.
But the tone used by that multinational was just as powerful as the tone IBM exuded in the mid-20th century.
In the 1950s and 1960s, “Big Blue” meant a particular style.
IBM acquired an image of an army of men (this was the mid-20th century, after all), all wearing blue suits and white shirts.
Even as late as the 1980s (and beyond), the men of IBM had the look:
The men of IBM didn’t wear facial hair and wore only white shirts….IBM wanted to make sure they did not offend a prospect or a customer. Research had shown them that some people don’t like facial hair…so no facial hair. Research had also shown that people assume a degree of professionalism with a white shirt that may not be assumed if a person wore a blue or yellow shirt. So white shirts it is!
From https://bulanetwork.com/4004-dont-be-offensive-ibms-white-shirt-strategy/
Let’s leave the theoretical example and return to the situation at my distinctive multinational.
Now the multinational that employed me long ago didn’t have a “blue suit-white shirt” dress code, but in other ways the multinational had a distinctive tone that radiated from the executive level down to the ranks of the worker bees like myself.
When my multinational sent its marketing collateral out to prospects who used a very different tone than that used by the multinational, the prospects hated it. The marketing department received multiple complaints from salespeople whose clients were repelled by the material.
One of my coworkers surveyed the negative campaign reaction with dismay. The coworker had joined the company after the marketing tone was adopted. My coworker asked a simple question: “What type of customer focus group testing was conducted before we used this tone on a marketing campaign?”
“We didn’t conduct any focus group testing,” my coworker was told. “We didn’t need any.”
In retrospect, I guess we did need to test the messaging before we delivered it.
If you’ve been reading recent Bredemarket blog posts, you’re probably not surprised that this is turning into yet another blog post about customer focus. But how do you balance a firm’s distinctive differentiators with a focus on its customers?
If you follow these and similar steps, then it (almost) doesn’t matter if your firm’s generic messaging is antithetical to the values of your prospects. Because your prospects won’t get generic messaging, but messaging that is focused for them.
Does your identity/biometric firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?
Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?
How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?
Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your identity/biometric firm.
Click the image below.
#biometric #contentmarketing #identity
Whenever I see these pieces that proclaim that the author can help you brainstorm x ideas for content, I ignore them. For better or worse, I have no problem coming up with content ideas.
And when I come up with the content ideas, I don’t just use them in one piece of content. I’ll use the idea in several pieces of content. Yes, I love repurposing.
I think I’ve set a new record for myself over the last few days by creating 31 pieces of content from a single idea.
This post talks about:
The post doesn’t aim to tell you how you should create and reshare your content, but perhaps while you’re reading the post you may get some fresh ideas that fit your own working practices.
Before you can share content in numerous places, you need numerous places to share your content. It’s obvious, but it’s true. After all, it would be repetitive to post the exact same content multiple times in the Bredemarket blog.
So since I started Bredemarket in 2020, I not only developed the Bredemarket blog, but I have also developed (or made use of) other social platforms.
But how many social platforms should you use? In July, I noted what the experts advise, and how I responded to that advice.
If you’re starting out in business, you’ve probably heard the advice that as your business branches out into social platforms, you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Instead you should make sure that your business offering is really solid on one platform before branching out into others.
Yes, I’ve been naughty again and didn’t listen to the expert advice.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/07/18/is-bredemarket-on-your-favorite-social-platform/
The July post lists all of the social platforms that publish Bredemarket content, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll just note a few of the platforms:
To the content marketing experts that say that I should just concentrate on LinkedIn and ignore everything else, note that I then have a 0% chance of reaching non-LinkedIn users. Who knows? Perhaps that TikTok video may result in a conversion that I couldn’t have made otherwise.
The idea that struck me last weekend was not original to me, and it’s been bouncing around in my head (and on these pages) for some time now. But I thought I’d reword it in a different way. After a few tweaks, I came up with the following statement:
Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product’s Technology
As you will see, I continued to tweak the statement, but that’s the one that I put in my Asana “Content Calendar” project.
As I would subsequently reflect, I thought that companies knew that you need to focus on the customer rather than focusing on yourself, but I see too many companies that are self-focused in their marketing. They emphasize the amazing technology features of their product.
I want to put a stop to that, and if necessary I will help companies create customer-focused marketing materials. For a fee, of course.
But enough about me. Let’s illustrate how that one idea can expand into multiple content pieces.
So now I had to write about how customers don’t care about your product’s technology.
The first step was to work on the content required for a blog post on the topic. By the time I was done, the post (now called “Your Prospects Don’t Care About Your Technology“) included:
Most importantly, the post included all the text that made my original point (“Do you know why your prospects are ignoring you? Because they don’t care about you. It’s all about them.”), along with my argument for customer focus, and my concluding call to action to find out how to “Create Technology Content That Converts.”
And “Create Technology Content That Converts” was the title of my landing page. Often I put the call to action on the same page as the original point, but sometimes (as in this case) I separate the call to action for a more focused presentation. Plus I have the option of having multiple blog posts point to the same landing page. This post points to the landing page, for example (click the GIF above or one of the other links).
The landing page dug more deeply into why and how Bredemarket can help you create a customer-focused message, talking about the questions I ask, the types of content I can create, and the process.
The landing page concluded with the call to action encouraging interested parties to schedule a meeting on my recently-improved Calendly page, email me, or use my contact form. (Or subscribe to my Mailchimp mailing list.)
Once all this was done, everything was set. People who read the blog post could (if so inclined) go to the landing page, and people who read the landing page could (if so inclined) contact me.
But only if they saw the blog post in the first place.
If they don’t find the post on Google or Bing, and if they’re not already subscribing to the blog, then how will they get to the blog post?
There are numerous themes that continuously pop up in the Bredemarket blog, and I have created “information pages” (pillars) that link to all of the content that I have written on these themes.
Now perhaps you won’t do all of this, but if there’s a place on your website where you should mention your new blog post, be sure and do it.
For example, if you wrote a blog post about Topic X in 2021, and you’re readdressing Topic X in a 2023 post, then go back and update the 2021 post to say that you have new thoughts on Topic X. Then the people who find your 2021 post can go to the new post and get the latest information.
My podcast is more accurately described as a mini-podcast, because each episode is usually only 1-2 minutes long. Perhaps someday I’ll create hour-long episodes, but not today.
And on Sunday I created a 2-minute episode with a new take. After noting (as I said above) that sometimes we know things that people don’t know, I declared:
Am I smarter than General Electric? Yes I am.
From https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bredemarket/episodes/Why-Should-I-Care-That-General-Electric-Uses-AI-e2aaenl
I then described a really bad General Electric press release that focused on GE technology and not on customer needs.
Then I plugged the blog post, which was linked in the episode description. And I resued the “technologist doing technology thinks” image from the blog post.
Now I only list this as one piece of content, but really it’s multiple pieces of content. Not only can you access the episode on Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor), but you can also access it on Spotify itself, Apple Podcasts, and numerous other podcast hosting services.
After this, I returned to the blog post itself and looked for other ways to share it.
Because the blog post explicitly mentioned “technology” in the title, the best fit for a reshare of the blog post was on the Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page (reshare here) and Facebook group (reshare here).
Why do I have a myriad of LinkedIn and Facebook outlets?
Because often people who are interested in technology don’t care about identity, and people who are interested in the Inland Empire don’t care about technology, and people who care about Bredemarket in general don’t care about every identity company reshare that I post.
And of course, some people who love LinkedIn hate Facebook, and some people who love Facebook hate LinkedIn.
So I could have just shared this to the technology outlets, but this particular post had a broader application. Inland Empire businesses, identity companies, and general marketers all have the problem of referring to self rather than the customer.
So I reshared the original technology shares to the other relevant groups.
You know how the Instagram experts say that you should post reels? Or you should post carousels? Or whatever?
I say that you should post a healthy balance of all sorts of things.
I wanted to reshare the blog post on Instagram, so I posted an Instagram carousel post using the two images from the blog post and the “money” image from the landing page.
Even though Instagram is a terrible platform to reshare content on other platforms, because the links aren’t clickable.
Unless you reshare the post as a story and use the “link” feature to embed a link.
Oh, and there are two other places where I reshared the link to the blog post:
So that encompassed the first set of content reshares. But before I go on…
All of the stuff listed above was stuff that I meticulously planned by listing subtasks to the original Asana task “Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product’s Technology.”
But I forgot that I deviated from Asana and also shared a link to the podcast in the Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page.
Some people are horrified that I deviated from Asana and didn’t record this important share. (And they’ll really be horrified later in this post when I create another piece of content and don’t log it in Asana.)
Others are horrified that I put all the other stuff in Asana in the first place.
As for me, well, I got the content out. Cool.
But the blog post wasn’t enough. I needed to convey the same message in a different way, for those who think words and stuff aren’t cool.
In the same way that I created an audio podcast that made the same points as the blog post (while linking to the blog post), I wanted to create a video vertical short that did the same thing.
So I headed out to the Southern California Edison Euclid Substation.
I then stood in front of some very technological stuff, and filmed 27 seconds of me talking about the prospect’s problems…and your problem…and how Bredemarket can solve your problem.
By the time I was finished, the video short was available on:
So now both WordPress and Instagram had two pieces of content that kinda sorta said the same thing. But this is good. Maybe some people like the video version, while others like the text version. I’ll catch them one way or ther other.
But before I actually shot the video at the SCE Euclid Substation…
…I was scouting out locations. (If you know the Talking Heads song “Found a Job” you’ll recognize the phrase.)
When I arrived at the SCE Euclid Substation, I walked around the south and west sides of the substation, looking for the best place to shoot my video.
And I was broadcasting on Instagram Live as I was doing this, offering my adoring fans a rare “behind the scenes” look at Bredmarket activities. And, incidentally, proving that Bredemarket behind the scenes is pretty boring.
But the Instagram Live session was recorded, and was posted as a reel a couple of days before my video short was posted.
I don’t know if it made a huge difference in the subsequent reception of the short, but one of my relatives liked the “behind the scenes” look so that’s good.
So those 26 pieces of content addressed Bredemarket’s views on customer focus and benefits.
But my life is not confined to Bredemarket. Time for one huge repurpose.
At the same time that I’m asking Bredemarket prospects to contract with me, I’m asking technology companies (including identity companies) to hire me as a Senior Product Marketing Manager.
And the same message can, with some adaptation, be delivered to hiring companies.
So I wrote a separate blog post on my jebredcal personal blog, “Do Your Prospects Ignore Your Company’s Message?” that addressed the latter target audience.
If you compare the jebredcal blog post with the original Bredemarket blog post, you can see some clear similarities…with some noticeable differences. For example, I don’t ask employers to use Bredemarket’s calendly, email, or web messaging channels. I use my personal email and my LinkedIn profile messaging capability instead.
Now that the blog post was written, I was ready to share it on LinkedIn where the employers are. (No Facebook. No TikTok.)
Correction: I was ALMOST ready to share a link to the post on LinkedIn. I had to complete one thing first.
I decided that on the day before I shared the post on LinkedIn, I’d create a personal video short that introduced the content.
But this one, rather than taking place in front of a cool electrical facility, would be a behind-the-scenes view of Bredemarket’s world headquarters. Since the city of Ontario restricts you from viewing this yourself (restriction 3), this is the only way that you will ever see Bredemarket’s world headquarters.
Exciting?
No, completely boring.
But I did it anyway, and posted the video on LinkedIn yesterday. (And if you look to the left, you can see Bredemarket’s business license as required by restriction 1.)
After a day’s wait, the jebredcal blog post was shared on LinkedIn. I haven’t been swamped with job offers yet, but content marketing doesn’t work like that.
Once I realized that I was going to write one blog post for Bredmarket prospects and one post for potential employers, I decided to write a third post that talked out how you create different content for different target audiences. As I noted above, the two pieces of content have significant similarities, but also significant differences.
But as I thought about it, I thought it would be more important to illustrate how you could take a single idea and repurpose it as 30 different pieces of content.
Well, 30 so far. I still have to figure out how and where to reshare THIS blog post…
Stop the presses!
And here’s another EXCITING behind-the-scenes look at how Bredemarket works!
By Tuesday afternoon (October 10, 2023), I had substantially completed writing this blog post on “How I Expanded 1 Idea Into 30 Pieces of Content.” But since there was no huge rush to publish the post—after all, I had just published 29 other pieces of content over the past few days—I figured I’d take advantage of the opportunity to “sleep on it” and look at the post one more time before publication.
Then something happened early Wednesday morning.
I received a “you have not been selected for this position” email from a potential employer. I had only applied for the position two days earlier, on Monday, right in the midst of all of this content creation.
Proving that I can create content out of ANYTHING, I authored a LinkedIn post that began as follows:
If you are one of the lucky talent acquisition professionals who is still employed, there is ONE CRITICAL THING that you MUST impress upon your employers.
Please tell your employers NOT to list positions as “remote/hybrid.”
That’s kind of like listing a food as “vegan/beef.” Is it vegan, or is it beef? It’s a mystery until you take a bite, and there’s a 50% chance you will be disappointed or horrified with what you find.
From LinkedIn.
You may ask what a LinkedIn post about “remote/hybrid” job listings has to do with incorrectly-focused product marketing messaging.
It’s all in the call to action. Those who read to the end of the post encountered these words.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far and are seeking an experienced identity/biometrics/technology Senior Product Marketing Manager for a #remote position (or a position within 25 miles of Ontario, California), please message me. The linked post below includes my contact information, as well as my philosophy on product marketing messaging.
From LinkedIn.
And then I linked to my personal jobseeking blog post “Do Your Prospects Ignore Your Company’s Message?”
I guess this 31st item is a special treat. Like ice cream.
Why does everyone think that “me too” is the stepping stone to success?
Let’s discuss:
Years ago I worked at my college’s 10 watt radio station, and therefore had access to a lot of records (yes, this was a long time ago).
And one of those records was so unmemorable that it was memorable.
The album, recorded in the early to mid 1960s, trumpeted the fact that the group that recorded the album was extremely versatile. You see, the record not only included surf songs, but also included car songs!
The only problem? The album was NOT by the Beach Boys.
Instead, the album was from some otherwise unknown band that was trying to achieve success by doing what the competition did. (In this case, the Beach Boys.)
I can’t remember the name of the band, and I bet no one else can either.
Sadly, this tactic of Xeroxing (or Mitaing) the competition is not confined to popular music. Have you noticed that so many recipes for marketing success involve copying what your competitors do?
And of course the tactic of slavishly copying competitors has been proven to work. For example, remember when Apple Computer adopted the slogan “Think The Same” as the company dressed in blue, ensured all its computers could run MS-DOS, and otherwise imitated everything that IBM did?
OK, maybe not.
“But John,” you are saying. “That’s unfair. Not everyone can be Apple.”
My point exactly. Everyone can’t be Apple because they’re so busy trying to imitate someone else—either a competitor or some other really popular company.
Personally, I’m waiting for some company to claim to be “the Bredemarket of satellite television. (Which would simply mean that the company would have a lot of shows about wildebeests.) But I’ll probably have to wait a while for some company to be the Bredemarket of anything.
(An aside: while talking with a friend, I compared the British phrase “eating your pudding” to the American phrase “eating your own dog food,” although I noted that “I like to say ‘eating your own wildebeest food‘ just to stand out.” Let’s see ChatGPT do THAT.)
Now I’ll tread into more dangerous territory.
Here’s an example from the identity/biometric world. Since I self-identity (heh) as the identity content marketing expert, I’m supremely qualified to cite this example.
I spent a year embedded in the identity verification industry, and got to see the messaging from my own company and by the competition.
After a while, I realized that most of the firms in the industry were saying the same thing. Here are a few examples. See if you can spot the one word that EVERY company is using:
Yes, these companies, and many others, prominently feature the t-word in their messaging.
Now perhaps some of you would argue that trust is essential to identity verification in the same way that water is essential to an ocean, and that therefore EVERYBODY HAS to use the t-word in their communications.
Don’t tell that to Black Ink Tech, who uses the trademark “Truth Over Trust.”
And no, they didn’t violate any law by using an unapproved word. Instead, they got attention by standing out from the crowd.
Here’s another example that I can’t discuss fully, but I’ll say what I can.
I was talking to a Bredemarket biometric content prospect (not one of the ones listed above), and as is my practice, I started by asking the “why” question.
After all, if I was going to create content for this prospect, we had to ensure that the content stood out from their competitors.
Without revealing confidential information, I can say that I asked the firm why they were better than every other firm out there, and why all the other firms sucked. And the firm provided me with a compelling answer to that question. I can’t reveal that answer, but you can probably guess that the word “trust” was not involved.
So let me ask you:
Why is YOUR firm better than every other firm out there, and why do all or YOUR competitors suck?
Your firm’s survival may depend upon communicating that answer.
Take care of yourself, and each other.
While I don’t use all the marketing tools at my disposal, I am certainly curious about them. After all, such tools provide marketers with powerful insights on their prospects and customers.
I became especially curious about one marketing tool when re-examining a phrase I use often.
Earlier this year, Reshu Rathi of Entropik wrote a blog post about facial coding. Rathi provided this definition.
We all know that our face conveys emotions through facial expressions; facial coding is the process of measuring those human emotions. With the help of computer vision, powered by AI and machine learning, emotions can be detected via webcam or mobile cam. The tech tracks every muscle movement on the face or all-action units (AU) based on the FACS (facial action coding system).
From https://www.entropik.io/blogs/facial-coding-what-why-and-how-to-use-facial-coding-in-marketing
Unlike the topics in which I usually dwell, facial coding:
As Rathi describes the practice, it preserves privacy by allowing people to opt-in, and to record the emotions anonymously.
So, the user’s permission is required to access their camera and all this data is captured with consent. And no video is shared. Only the emotion data of the users are captured through their facial expressions and shared in real-time. The emotions on a person’s face are captured as binary units (0 and 1). Hence no PII (Personally Identifiable Information) related to race, ethnicity, gender, or age is captured at any point in time.
From https://www.entropik.io/blogs/facial-coding-what-why-and-how-to-use-facial-coding-in-marketing
Of course, some of this is a matter of implementation, or in the way that Entropik uses the facial coding technique.
Examining facial expressions is not the only way to decipher what is happening in a person’s mind as they view content. But it’s powerful.
Well, maybe.
The underlying assumption behind emotion recognition is that you can identify emotions at a universal level. If content makes me happy, or if it makes a person halfway around the world happy, we will exhibit the same measurable facial characteristics.
Lisa Feldman Barrett disagrees.
Research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure muscle movement during an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety with the body and brain. You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without a change in the amygdala, the brain region tagged as the home of fear.
When scientists set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light. We find that emotions are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing.
From https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/mar/26/why-our-emotions-are-cultural-not-hardwired-at-birth
If Barrett is correct, then how reliable is facial coding, even within a particular region? After all, even Southern California does not have a single universal culture, but is made up of many cultures in which people react in many different ways. And if we preserve privacy by NOT collecting this cultural information, then we may not fully understand the codings that the cameras record.
And with that, I will retreat from the broader definition of biometrics to the narrower and more familiar one, as described here.
The term “Biometrics” has also been used to refer to the field of technology devoted to the identification of individuals using biological traits, such as those based on retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints, or face recognition. Neither the journal “Biometrics” nor the International Biometric Society is engaged in research, marketing, or reporting related to this technology.
From https://www.biometricsociety.org/about/what-is-biometry
My self-description as a biometric content marketing expert applies to this narrower definition only.
All too often, Bredemarket confines its writing discussions to the traditional ABCW (articles, blog posts, case studies, white papers) categories.
But what if your content needs are non-traditional and fall outside of the usual nice neat business writing categories?
If you are an Inland Empire business who needs words, but not in the traditional “ABCW” (articles, blog posts, case studies, white papers) business types, Bredemarket will help you with your non-traditional writing needs.
Take a look at the examples I’ve provided below, and if these spark interest within you, authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
Here’s what I’m going to talk about in this post.
Sometimes I’m guilty of traditional thinking. Too traditional.
I won’t say a lot about this because I’ve said it before, but I’ve defined 22 fairly traditional categories of content that I (and Bredemarket) have created and can create.
I won’t go into all 22 types again, especially since some of them are internal content rather than customer-facing content. But I’d like to highlight the “ABCW” four types that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, plus a couple of others.
I’m lumping articles and blog posts together, because while some “experts” try to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between the two, they’re pretty much the same thing.
Whether it’s a blog post on your website, a post or article on LinkedIn, or even some extended text associated with an Instagram picture or a TikTok video, what you’re creating is some text that entertains, persuades, inspires, or educates your reader, or perhaps all four. You set the goal for the article or blog post, then tailor the content to meet the goal. (I’ll talk more about goals later.)
Case studies show your readers how your solution was applied to someone else’s problem, and how your solution can benefit your prospects with similar problems.
Maybe your prospect is a city police agency that needs a tool to solve crimes, and your case study describes how your solution solved crimes in a similar city. Again, you set the goal for the case study, then tailor the content to meet the goal.
On the surface, white papers are informational, but when a company issues a white paper, the “information” that the white paper provides should gently guide the reader toward doing business with the company that issued the paper. Using the example above, you could write a white paper that outlines “Five Critical Elements for a Local Crime-Solving Solution.” By remarkable coincidence, your own solution happens to include all five of those critical elements. Again, you set the goal and tailor the content.
Perhaps you need to provide handouts to your prospects that describe your product or service.
Regardless of whether you call these handouts briefs, data, sheets, literature sheets, or something else, they should at a minimum contain both “educate” and “persuade” elements—educate your prospects on the benefits of your product or service, and persuade your prospects to move closer to a sale (conversion).
Again, you set the goal and tailor the content.
If your business has a web page, I hope that it has more words than “Under construction.” Whether you have imagery, video, audio, text, or all four on your web page, it needs to answer the questions that your prospects and customers have.
You know what I’m going to say here, but it’s still important. You set the goal and tailor the content.
But…what if your business needs content that doesn’t fall into these traditional business categories?
I went to a car show this weekend—specifically, this year’s Route 66 Cruisin’ Reunion in downtown Ontario, California. (Yes, I know that Route 66 actually passed three miles north of downtown Ontario, but work with me here.)
While some of the exhibitors were personal, some of them were businesses. As businesses, what was the major marketing collateral that they generated?
Not a blog post, or LinkedIn article, or any of the traditional business media collateral.
Their marketing tools were the cars themselves.
So perhaps you may assume that car show exhibitors don’t need textual content. Your assumption would be incorrect.
In addition to the car itself, this exhibitor included poster boards with words describing the car.
Another exhibitor did the same thing.
So while these car show exhibitors didn’t choose a traditional way to convey their words, they shared written text anyway.
Maybe you don’t have a classic car. Maybe you don’t have a car at all. Do you need to share words with your prospects and customers anyway?
Now I don’t know your business communication needs. You do. But I can guess a few things.
I know that this may seem like an unusual order to you. Why not start with what you do?
Because your customers don’t care about what you do. Your customers care about themselves.
If you keep the focus on your customers, the answer to the “why” question will induce your customers to care about you, because it shows how you can solve their problems.
Let’s illustrate this.
You may be asking why I create content in the first place. There are countless content creators, both human and non-human. Why turn to me when OpenAI and its bot buddies are a lot cheaper and faster?
The simple answer is that I am obsessed with writing, and in this era of self-description, I self-describe as a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type. (It used to be a typewriter, but let’s stick to this millennium.) And with my many years of personal and professional writing, I’ve honed my ability to take concepts and make them meaningful to readers.
Which brings me to how Bredemarket works.
Bredemarket’s process applies regardless of the specific content type, so I should be able to support whatever content you need, whether it’s traditional or non-traditional.
Can I help you?
And as an added bonus, here are some additional images from this weekend’s Cruisin’ Reunion. Enjoy.
(Updated blog post count 10/23/2023)
Always take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses.
This post describes an easy way to take advantage of your competitors. If they’re not blogging, make sure your firm is blogging. And the post provides hard numbers that demonstrate why your firm should be blogging.
According to an infographic using 2017 data, 50% of the top 200 Fortune 500 companies had a public corporate blog.
Which means that half of those companies don’t have a public corporate blog.
The same infographic also revealed the following:
So obviously some firms believe blogging is important, while others don’t.
What difference does this make for your firm?
In my view, the figures above are way too low. 100% of all Fortune 500 companies, 100% of B2B companies should be blogging, and 100% of social media marketers should incorporate blogging.
Why? Because blogging produces tangible results.
Blogging is an ideal way to promote awareness of your firm and its offerings. From the same infographic:
Awareness is nice, but does awareness convert into leads?
Getting leads from blogging is nice, but show me the money! What about conversions?
Take a look at those last two bullets related to conversion again. Blogging is correlated with positive ROI (I won’t claim causation, but anecdotally I believe it), and blogging helps firms acquire customers. So if your firm wants to make money, get blogging.
With numbers like this, shouldn’t all companies be blogging?
But don’t share these facts with your competitors. Keep them to yourself so that you gain a competitive advantage over them.
Now you just need to write those blog posts.
And if you need help with the actual writing, I, John E Bredehoft of Bredemarket, can help.
In most cases, I can provide your blog post via my standard package, the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service. I offer other packages and options if you have special needs.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
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