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.
Which means that half of those companies don’t have a public corporate blog.
The same infographic also revealed the following:
86% of B2B companies are blogging. (Or, 14% are not.)
68% of social media marketers use blogs in their social media strategy. (Or, 32% don’t.)
45% of marketers saying blogging is the #1 most important piece of their content strategy.
Small businesses under 10 employees allocate 42% of their marketing budget to content marketing.
So obviously some firms believe blogging is important, while others don’t.
What difference does this make for your firm?
What results do blogging companies receive?
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.
Getting leads from blogging is nice, but show me the money! What about conversions?
Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.
92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.
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.
What should YOUR company do?
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.
How can I help?
And if you need help with the actual writing, I, John E Bredehoft of Bredemarket, can help.
And if you’re not in the identity/biometric industry, my general content marketing expertise also applies to technology firms and general business firms.
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.
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.
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!
As content creators accelerate information generation and distribution, content consumers demand information NOW. Perhaps my prediction of five-minute content creation hasn’t occurred—yet—but firms need to distribute their messages as fast as possible.
This Bredemarket blog post discusses a rapid way for identity/biometric firms to communicate the benefits of their solutions and capture their prospects’ attention immediately.
Blogging provides the rapid content generation your identity/biometric firm needs.
Benefits are essential in your blog post to help convert your readers.
Bredemarket can generate a benefits-laced blog post for your identity/biometric firm…with no learning curve necessary, allowing you to distribute your message quickly.
Why blogging?
While my consultancy Bredemarket creates identity content in a variety of customer-facing formats, including white papers, case studies, and e-books, one of my favorite ways to write about identity is via blog posts.
Blog posts provide an immediate business impact. It’s easier to create a blog post than it is to create a downloadable document. If Bredemarket needs to generate content for its self-marketing, I can get a blog post out in two hours, if not sooner. For a breaking news story, your company’s blogged take may hit your prospects before they’ve even heard about the breaking news story in the first place.
Blog posts are easy to share. You can’t just post your blog content and let it sit there. While over 200 people subscribe to the Bredemarket blog, that means that almost 8 billion people will never see it. I increase my viewing odds (slightly) by resharing my blog posts to my hundreds of additional followers on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms.
Blog posts are easy to repurpose. Once people have read your blog post, your work is not done. It’s easy to repurpose blog content into other forms. For example, I created an e-book from a blog post.
Why benefits?
However, if your identity/biometric blog post merely consists of a list of features of your product or service, then you’re wasting your time.
If your post simply states that your new latent fingerprint station captures print evidence at 2000 pixels per inch, most of your prospects are going to say, “So what?”
On the other hand, if your post talks about how your latent fingerprint station’s high capture resolution benefits your prospects by helping experts to solve crimes more quickly and getting bad people off the street, then your prospects are going to care about your product/service—and will convertfrom prospects to paying customers.
Why Bredemarket?
That little tip about benefits vs. features is just one of numerous tips that I’ve picked up over my many years as an identity/biometric blog expert. And you can benefit from my ability to start writing immediately because I require no learning curve. My 29 years of identity/biometric expertise comes in handy when your firm requires identity blog post writing.
OK, perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say that I can start writing immediately. Before I type a single word, we need to ensure a common understanding of why we’re writing this blog post. If you want to know how we achieve this common understanding, read the e-book I mentioned earlier.
If you are ready to purchase my Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service to create a blog post (or other short content) describing the benefits of your identity/biometric product or service, then we should start talking sooner rather than later.
From Venn Marketing, “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion: A 4 Minute Intro To Marketing 101.” (Link)
The picture above shows a simple sales funnel example. The second of the three items in the funnel is the “consideration” phase.
In that phase, those people who are aware of you can then consider your products and services.
If they like what they see, they move on to conversion and hopefully buy your products and services.
But how do prospects in the funnel consideration phase evaluate your offering as opposed to competitor offerings? Is it truly a quantitative and logical process, or is it in reality qualitative and emotional?
Quantitative consideration
For purposes of this post, let’s assume that there are two competing companies, Bredemarket and Debamarket, who are fighting each other for business.
Second, let’s assume that Bredemarket and Debamarket offer similar services to their prospects and customers:
Blog posts
Case studies
White papers
Finally, let’s assume that a big government agency (the BGA) has issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for blog/case study/white paper services, and Bredemarket and Debamarket are the two companies competing for the award.
A pre-acquisition consultant will develop a Source Selection Plan (SSP). In competitive procurements such as the one in this example, the SSP will state exactly how proposals will be evaluated, and how the best proposal will be selected.
Here is the U.S. Government’s guidance on Source Selection Plans. (link)
SSPs can be very complex for certain opportunities, and not so complex for others. In all cases, the SSP dictates the evaluation criteria used to select the best vendor.
The weighted scoring approach breaks down your RFP evaluation criteria and assigns a value to each question or section. For example, your RFP criteria may consider questions of technical expertise, capabilities, data security, HR policies and diversity and sustainability. Weighted scoring prioritizes the criteria that are most important to your business by assigning them a point or percentage value. So your weighted scoring criteria may look like this:
Technical expertise – 25%
Capabilities – 40%
Data security – 10%
HR policies – 10%
Diversity and sustainability – 15%
RFP360, “A guide to RFP evaluation criteria: Basics, tips and examples.” (Link)
Individual question evaluation
In most cases the evaluator doesn’t look at the entire technical expertise section and give it a single score. In large RFPs, the technical expertise section may consist of 96 questions (or even 960 questions), each of which is evaluated and fed into the total technical expertise score.
For example, the RFP may include a question such as this one, and the responses from the bidders (Bredemarket and Debamarket) are evaluated.
Question
Bredemarket
Debamarket
96. The completed blog post shall include no references to 1960s songs.
Example evaluation of a proposal response to an individual RFP question.
Final quantitative recommendation for award
Now repeat this evaluation method for every RFP question in every RFP category and you end up with a report in which one of the vendors receives more points than the other and is clearly the preferred bidder. Here’s an example from a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposal source selection process. (And you can bet that a nuclear agency doesn’t use an evaluation method that is, um, haphazard.)
From U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “FINAL EVALUATION RECOMMENDATION REPORT FOR PROPOSALS SUBMITTED UNDER RFP NO. RQ-CIO-01-0290 ENTITLED, “INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES AND SUPPORT CONTRACT (ISSC).”” (link)
So what does this example show us? It shows that L-3 Communications/EER received a total score of 83.8, while its closest competitor Logicon only received a score of 80. So EER is the preferred bidder.
So in our example, BGA would evaluate Bredemarket and Debamarket, come up with a number for each bidder, and award the contract to the bidder with the highest evaluation score.
Quantitative recommendation for the little guys
Perhaps people who aren’t big government agencies don’t go to this level of detail, but many prospects who reach the consideration phase use some type of quantitative method.
For example, if the (non-weighted) pros for an item under consideration outnumber the cons, go for it.
Now of course the discussion above assumes that everyone is a logical being who solely evaluates based on objective criteria.
But even Sages such as myself may deviate from the objective norm. Here’s a story of one time when I did just that.
As I previously mentioned, I had never written a proposal response before I started consulting for Printrak. But I had written a Request for Proposal before I joined Printrak. For a prior employer (located in Monterey Park), I worked with an outside consultant to develop an RFP to help my employer select a vendor for a computer system. The questions posed to the bidders were not complex. Frankly, it was a simple checklist. Does your computer system perform function A? Does it perform function B?
The outside consultant and I sent the final RFP to several computer system providers, and received several proposals in response.
A few of the proposals checked every box, saying that they could do anything and everything. We threw those proposals out, because we knew that no one could meet every one of our demanding requirements. (“I can’t trust that response.”)
We focused on the proposals that included more realistic responses. (“That respondent really thought about the questions.”)
As you can see, we introduced a qualitative, emotional element into our consideration phase.
According to Kaye Putnam, this is not uncommon.
Qualitative consideration
Humans think that we are very logical when we consider alternatives, and that our consideration processes are logical and quantitative. Putnam has looked into this assertion and says that it’s hogwash. Take a look at this excerpt from Putnam’s first brand psychology secret:
Your brand has to meet people at that emotional level – if you want them to buy. (And I know you do!)
Findings from several studies support this, but one of the most seminal was outlined in Harvard professor Gerald Zellman’s 2003 book, The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer. Zellman’s research and learnings prompted him to come to the industry-rocking conclusion that, “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.”
From Kaye Putnam, “7 Brand Psychology Secrets – Revealed!” (link)
But how can the subconscious mind affect quantitative evaluations?
While logic still has to play SOME role in a purchase decision (as Putnam further explains in her first and second brand psychology secrets), a positive or negative predisposition toward a bidder can influence the quantitative scores.
Imagine if the evaluators got together and discussed the Bredmarket and Debamarket responses to question 96, above. The back and forth between the evaluators may sound like this:
“OK, we’re up to question 96. That’s a no brainer, because no one would ever put song references in a BGA blog post.”
“Yeah, but did you see Bredemarket’s own post that has multiple references to the song ‘Dead Man’s Curve’?”
“So what? Bredemarket would never do that when writing for a government agency. That piece was solely for Bredemarket.”
“How do you KNOW that Bredemarket would never slip a song reference into a BGA post? You know, I really don’t trust that guy. He wore two different colored shoes to the orals presentation, a brown one and a black one. Someone as slopy as that could do anything, with huge consequences for BGA communications. I’m deducting points from Bredemarket for question 96.”
“OK. I think you’re being ridiculous, but if you say so.”
And just like that, your quantitative logical consideration process is exposed as a bunch of subconscious emotional feelings.
How does qualitative consideration affect you?
As you develop your collateral for the consideration phase, you need to go beyond logic (even if you have a Sage predisposition) and speak to the needs and pain points of your prospects.
Spock is behaving illogically. Jayenkai, “Pain – Star Trek Remix.” (link)
Here’s a example from my law enforcement automated fingerprint identificaiton system (AFIS) days.
If your prospect is a police chief who is sick and tired of burglars ransacking homes and causing problems for the police department, don’t tell your prospect about your AFIS image detail or independent accuracy testing results. After all, 1000 ppi and 99.967 accuracy are only numbers.
Provide the police chief with customer-focusedbenefit statements about how quickly your AFIS will clean up the burglary problem in the town, giving residents peace of mind and the police department less stress.
If you can appeal to those emotions, that police chief will consider you more highly and move on to conversion (purchase).
Can I help?
If your messaging concentrates on things your prospects don’t care about, most of them will ignore you and not shower you with money. Using the wrong words with your customers impacts your livelihood, and may leave you poor and destitute with few possessions.
If you need a writer to work with you to ensure that your written content includes the right words that speak directly to your prospects, hire…Debamarket!
I’ve talked about the words “why,” “how,” and “what” and their relation to writing, but I haven’t talked about the word “which.”
Not in relation to sandwiches, but in relation to words.
If you are a marketing executive, you know that the words you use in your marketing content can make or break your success. When your company asks employees or consultants to write marketing content for you, which words should they use?
Here are four suggestions for you and your writers to follow.
Your writers should use the right words for your brand.
Your writers should use the right words for your industry.
Your writers should use words that get results.
Your writers should be succinct.
Your writers should use the right words for your brand
Your company has a tone of voice, and your writers should know what it is. If you can’t tell them what it is, they will figure it out themselves.
Your company has a particular writing style—hopefully one that engages your prospects and customers. Regardless of your writer’s personal style, they must create copy that aligns with your own style. In effect, they put on a “mask” that aligns the words they create with the words that your company needs.
Your writers should use the right words for your industry
Similarly, your company provides products and services in one or more industries, and your copy must align with the terms those industries use, and the way industry participants express themselves.
For example, a writer who is writing content for the biometric industry will use different terms than a writer who is writing content for art collectors because of the differences in the two target audiences.
Biometric readers (the people, not the devices) care about matching accuracy measurements, such as those compiled by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its Face Recognition Vendor Test, or as measured in agency-managed benchmarks. (Mike French’s example.) They often respond to quantitative things, although more high-level concepts like “keeping citizens safe from repeat offenders” (a public safety-related benefit) also resonate.
Art collectors care about more qualitative things, such as not being scared of handing over their dream to a commissioned artist whose work will inspire affection. (Well, unless the collector is an art investor and not an art lover; investors use different terminology than lovers.)
So make sure your writers get the words right. Otherwise, it’s as if someone is speaking Italian to a bunch of French speakers. (Kaye Putnam’s example.) Your prospects will tune you out if you use words they don’t understand.
Your writers should use words that get results
There is one important exception to my suggestions above. If your company’s current words don’t result in action, quit using your current words and use better ones that support your awareness, consideration, conversion, or other goals.
If you start talking about your solution without addressing your prospect’s pain points or problems, they won’t know why they should care about your solution.
For example, let’s say that the message you want to give to your prospects is that your company makes wireless headphones.
The prospect doesn’t care about wireless headphones per se. The prospect cares about the troubles they face with tangled cords, and how your company offers a solution to their problem of tangled cords.
Features are important to you. Benefits are important to your prospects. Since the prospects are the ones with the money, listen to them and talk about benefits that change their lives, not how great your features are.
Your writers should be succinct
I have struggled with succinctness for decades. I could give you countless examples of my long-windedness, but…that wouldn’t be appropriate.
So how do I battle this personally? By creating a draft 0.5 before I create my draft 1. I figure out what I’m going to say, say it, and then sleep on the text—sometimes literally. When I take a fresh look at the text, I usually ruthlessly chop a bunch of it out and focus on the beef.
Now there are times in which detail is appropriate, but there are also times in which a succinct message gets better results.
Selecting your content marketer
If your company needs employees or consultants to write marketing content for you, make sure they create the right content.
If your company’s views on content creation parallel my own, maybe I can help you.
If you need a full-time employee on your staff to drive revenue as your personal Senior Product Marketing Manager or Senior Content Marketing Manager, take a look at my 29 years of technology (identity/biometric) and marketing experience on my LinkedIn profile. If you like what you see, contact me via LinkedIn or at jebredcal@gmail.com.
If you need a marketing consultant for a single project, then you can reach me via my Bredemarket consultancy.
This post explains what “pillar pages” are, the pros and cons of Bredemarket’s pillar pages, what I’ve learned from the “Target Audience” pillar page that I created, and how this can help your business deliver effective, converting messages to your prospects.
What are pillar pages?
I’ve been working on “pillar pages” for the Bredemarket website for over a year now.
As I stated before in an April 2022 blog post, a “pillar page” is simply a central “cluster” page on your website that discusses an important topic, and which is linked to other pages that provide more detail on the topic.
Think of a wheel with a hub and spokes. The pillar page is the hub, and the related pages are the spokes.
Now these pillar pages aren’t as mature as I’d like them to be.
I haven’t really multi-layered my keywords that link to the pillar; currently things are fairly simplistic where benefit “spoke” blog posts link to the benefits “hub” pillar. I haven’t explicitly optimized the “hub and spokes” for people who search for, say, features.
Similarly, the organization of each pillar page is fairly simplistic. Each pillar starts with a brief discussion of the topic in question, and is then followed by excerpts from and links to blog posts that provide more detail on the topic. (And the blog posts themselves link back to the pillar, providing bidirectional…um, benefits.) It’s functional, but perhaps you’d be better served if the pillars grouped subtopics together, rather than listing all the blog posts in reverse chronological order.
But the pillars do their work in terms of navigation and search engine optimization. If you want to find out what Bredemarket says about a topic such as benefits, it’s fairly easy to find this.
What have I learned from the Bredemarket Target Audience pillar page?
This post delves into the fifth of my five pillar pages, the Target Audience page.
I’ve recently worked on beefing up this pillar page by linking to more Bredemarket blog posts that discuss target audiences. And in the process of making these additions, I’ve realized some things about target audiences that I wanted to summarize here. (Repurposing content refocuses the mind, I guess.)
In the process of improving my pillar page, I’ve gleaned five truths about target audiences:
You need to define at least one target audience.
It’s not illegal to have multiple target audiences.
Different target audiences get different messages.
You can create personas, or you can not create personas. Whatever floats your boat.
Target audience definition focuses your content.
I’ll discuss each of these truths and suggest how they can improve your firm’s content.
One: You Need to Define At Least One Target Audience.
The first and most important thing is that you need a target audience before you start writing.
If you have no target audience, who is receiving your message? How do you know what to say?
For example, the primary target audience for THIS blog post is anyone from any type of company who could use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services. It’s not limited to just the identity folks, or just the Inland Empire folks. If it were, I’d write it differently.
The content addressed two target audiences at the same time, although this post prioritized the companies looking for full-time employees.
As long as you know in advance what you’re going to do, you can define multiple target audiences. Just don’t define a dozen target audiences for a 288-character tweet.
Three: Different Target Audiences Get Different Messages.
Perhaps you are writing a single piece of content that must address multiple target audiences. A proposal is an example of this. For example, a proposal in response to a request for proposal (RFP) for an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) affects multiple target audiences.
Here’s an example of multiple target audiences for a theoretical Ontario, California ABIS proposal, taken from a May 2021 Bredemarket post:
Field investigators.
Examiners.
People who capture biometrics.
Information Technologies.
Purchasing.
The privacy advocate.
The mayor.
Others.
That’s a lot of target audiences, but if you’re submitting a 300 page proposal that answers hundreds of individual questions, you have the ability to customize each of the hundreds of responses to address the affected target audience(s).
For example, if the RFP asks about the maximum resolution of captured latent fingerprint images, your response will address the needs of the “examiner” target audience. Your response to that question won’t need to say anything about your compliance with city purchasing regulations. (Unless you have a really weird city, which is possible I guess.)
At the same time, if the RFP asks if you comply with E-Verify, this is NOT the time to brag about supporting 4,000 pixels per inch image capture.
Four: You Can Create Personas, Or You Can Not Create Personas. Whatever Floats Your Boat.
If you haven’t read the Bredemarket blog that much, you should know that I’m not very hung up on processes—unless my client (or my employer) insists on them. Then they’re the most important thing in the world.
If you find yourself trapped in a room (preferably padded) with a bunch of certified marketing professionals, they’ll probably toss around the word “persona” a lot. A persona helps you visualize your target audience by writing to someone with a particular set of attributes. Here’s an example from the October 2022 post I cited earlier:
Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit…
If I’m going to write a particular piece of content, this persona helps me focus my writing. As I write, I can picture Jane in my mind, fetching the giant cups for the soda dispenser, planning her next trip to the big city, and wondering if her customers would mind if she started blasting this song.
Not the Seldom Scene.
Having this persona in my mind can be an excellent writing support.
What would Jane think about a list of target audience truths?
What would Jane think if a Limp Bizkit song appeared in the middle of the list? (She’d like that.)
So you can create personas, either on the fly (take a LinkedIn profile of a real person and change a few facts so that the persona becomes Jim, a 35 year old product/content marketer who specializes in healthcare) or through an extensive and expensive persona research program.
But what if you escape from the padded room, run away from the marketing professionals, and swear up and down that you will never ever create a persona?
Will your marketing efforts die?
No they won’t.
You can still target your writing without inventing demographic information about the person reading your content.
It depends upon the effort you want to invest in the task.
Five: Target Audience Definition Focuses Your Content.
I kind of already said this, but I wanted to explicitly repeat it and emphasize it.
Regardless of whether your target audience is defined by an expensive research effort, a tweak of a real person’s LinkedIn profile, or the simple statement “we want to target latent fingerprint examiners,” the simple act of defining your target audience focuses your content.
Your text addresses the target audience, and doesn’t go off on tangents that bear no relation to your target audience.
This makes your message much more effective.
But is the message of this post resonating with companies needing content creators?
If you’re still reading, I guess it is.
Bredemarket can help you define your target audience for your content, and can help you define other things also that are necessary for effective content.
Would you like to talk to me about the content you want to create, and the message you want to deliver to your target audience?
Are you ready to take your firm to the next level with a compelling message that addresses your target audience(s) and increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue?
As some of you know, I’m applying for full-time employment. Every one of my cover letters has a variation on this sentence.
I am in Southern California, five miles from Ontario International Airport, and can easily travel throughout the United States or to other countries as needed.
You will note that I explicitly state that Ontario International Airport is in Southern California, not Canada. Although the phrase “Ontario CA” can be interpreted as referring to the city in the state of California, or the province in the country of Canada, depending upon how you look at it.
Not that anybody pays attention to my explicit California reference. When I was sharing pictures from the February 18 Ontario Art Walk, and labeling the pictures as originating from Ontario, California, I was still asked to promote one of the pictures on a Canadian Instagram page.
The curse that we endure in the town of the Chaffeys. I bet Mildura doesn’t have this problem.
While Ontario International Airport is not the only airport in the Inland Empire, it is (at present) the largest one, and thus has a dramatic effect on those of us who live here.
One impact? Well, in the same way that I can board a flight from ONT to my future employer in San Francisco or Austin or Paris or wherever, visitors can board flights to ONT.
And some of those visitors are business visitors. Years ago, I was one of them, flying from Portland, Oregon to some town I had never heard of before for a job interview. Not only did I fly into the airport (Terminal 1 in those days), but I also stayed at the Red Lion Inn and spent other money while I was in town for the interview.
Ontario International Airport Terminal 1 as of September 2021, 20 years after airport traffic changed forever.
Postscript: I got the job. And other jobs after that.
The economists assign a monetary impact to the activity attributable to the airport.
The impact of economic activity taking place at Ontario International Airport itself, including the activity of the airport authority, airlines and their suppliers, government workers, airport concessions, and logistics companies is estimated at $3.8 billion in 2022. This will support $2.2 billion in GDP and 27,800 jobs. The bulk of these impacts—71% of the GDP impacts and 76% of the jobs impacts— reflect the impact of visitor spending in the region.
But don’t forget the government, which gets its own goodies.
This $2.2 billion of local economic activity (GDP) will result in a total of $571 million in tax impact. This consists of $319 million in federal tax impacts and $253 million in state and local impacts. As with the GDP impacts, the majority (71%) of these tax impacts are driven by the spending of visitors to the region.
And this doesn’t count the impact of the Inland Empire’s logistics industry.
The total economic impact of the logistics activity in the eight zip codes adjacent to Ontario International Airport was $17.8 billion of economic output, $9.9 billion of GDP, and 122,200 jobs. This activity generated $2.3 billion in federal, state, and local taxes.
But what of non-monetary impacts? As the description of the Ontario International Airport – Inter Agency Collaborative (ONT-IAC) makes clear, some of those impacts are negative.
The ONT-IAC implements the policies and criteria of the Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan (ALUCP) to prevent future incompatible land uses surrounding ONT and minimizing the public’s exposure to excessivie noise and safety hazards.
There’s always a balancing act between positive and negative impacts. While I might appreciate the ability to board a flight to Dallas at 6:00 in the morning, someone who lives near the airport may not be as appreciative. And the referenced “incompatible land uses” restrict the types of businesses that can be located near the airport.
While the Amazon LGB3 warehouse in Eastvale, California is some distance from Ontario International Airport, the airport’s presence has a positive impact on the warehouse and its workers.
But the relatively large amount of open space near the airport (again, our beloved warehouses) has helped to ensure that ONT does not need to implement the severe flight restrictions found at John Wayne and our former airport overlord Los Angeles International Airport.
And for better or worse the airport will remain for some time. It’s not like it’s going to close down or anything.
Although 9/11, the 2008 recession, and COVID tried to close it.
And one more thing about your business…
Does your firm need to create content for Inland Empire residents, Inland Empire visitors, and others who use your firm’s services?
Are you ready to take your Ontario, Eastvale, or Inland Empire firm to the next level with a compelling message that increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue?
Are you an executive with a small or medium sized identity/biometrics firm?
If so, you want to share the story of your identity firm. But what are you going to say?
How will you figure out what makes your firm better than all the inferior identity firms that compete with you?
How will you get the word out about why your identity firm beats all the others?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions?
Are you ready for the answers?
Your identity firm differs from all others
Over the last 29 years, I (John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket) have worked for and with over a dozen identity firms, either as an employee or as a consultant.
You’d think that since I have worked for so many different identity firms, it’s an easy thing to start working with a new firm by simply slapping down the messaging that I’ve created for all the other identity firms.
The messaging that I created in my various roles at IDEMIA and its corporate predecessors was dramatically different than the messaging I created as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Incode Technologies, which was also very different from the messaging that I created for my previous Bredemarket clients.
IDEMIA benefits such as “servicing your needs anywhere in the world” and “applying our decades of identity experience to solve your problems” are not going to help with a U.S.-only firm that’s only a decade old.
Similarly, messaging for a company that develops its own facial recognition algorithms will necessarily differ from messaging for a company that chooses the best third-party facial recognition algorithms on the market.
So which messaging is right?
It depends on who is paying me.
How your differences affect your firm’s messaging
When creating messaging for your identity firm, one size does not fit all, for the reasons listed above.
The content of your messaging will differ, based upon your differentiators.
For example, if you were the U.S.-only firm established less than ten years ago, your messaging would emphasize the newness of your solution and approach, as opposed to the stodgy legacy companies that never updated their ideas.
And if your firm has certain types of end users, such as law enforcement users, your messaging would probably feature an abundance of U.S. flags.
In addition, the channels that you use for your messaging will differ.
Identity firms will not want to market on every single social media channel. They will only market on the channels where their most motivated buyers are present.
That may be your own website.
Or LinkedIn.
Or Facebook.
Or Twitter.
Or Instagram.
Or YouTube.
Or TikTok.
Or a private system only accessible to people with a Top Secret Clearance.
It may be more than one of these channels, but it probably won’t be all of them.
But before you work on your content or channels, you need to know what to say, and how to communicate it.
How to know and communicate your differentiators
As we’ve noted, your firm is different than all others.
How do you know the differences?
How do you know what you want to talk about?
How do you know what you DON’T want to talk about?
Here are three methods to get you started on knowing and communicating your differentiators in your content.
Method One: The time-tested SWOT analysis
If you talk to a marketer for more than two seconds about positioning a company, the marketer will probably throw the acronym “SWOT” back at you. I’ve mentioned the SWOT acronym before.
For those who don’t know the acronym, SWOT stands for
Strengths. These are internal attributes that benefit your firm. For example, your firm is winning a lot of business and growing in customer count and market share.
Weaknesses. These are also internal attributes, but in this case the attributes that detract from your firm. For example, you have very few customers.
Opportunities. These are external factors that enhance your firm. One example is a COVID or similar event that creates a surge in demand for contactless solutions.
Threats. The flip side is external factors that can harm your firm. One example is increasing privacy regulations that can slow or halt adoption of your product or service.
If you’re interested in more detail on the topic, there are a number of online sources that discuss SWOT analyses. Here’s TechTarget’s discussion of SWOT.
The common way to create the output from a SWOT analysis is to create four boxes and list each element (S, W, O, and T) within a box.
Once this is done, you’ll know that your messaging should emphasize the strengths and opportunities, and downplay or avoid the weaknesses and threats.
Or alternatively argue that the weaknesses and threats are really strengths and opportunities. (I’ve done this before.)
Method Two: Think before you create
Personally, I believe that a SWOT analysis is not enough. Before you use the SWOT findings to create content, there’s a little more work you have to do.
I recommend that before you create content, you should hold a kickoff of the content creation process and figure out what you want to do before you do it.
During that kickoff meeting, you should ask some questions to make sure you understand what needs to be done.
I’ve written about kickoffs and questions before, and I’m not going to repeat what I already said. If you want to know more:
Now that you’ve locked down the messaging, it’s time to actually create the content that differentiates your identity firm from all the inferior identity firms in the market. While some companies can proceed right to content creation, others may run into one of two problems.
The identity firm doesn’t have any knowledgeable writers on staff. To create the content, you need people who understand the identity industry, and who know how to write. Some firms lack people with this knowledge and capability.
The identity firm has knowledgeable writers on staff, but they’re busy. Some companies have too many things to do at once, and any knowledgeable writers that are on staff may be unavailable due to other priorities.
This is where you supplement you identity firm’s existing staff with one or more knowledgeable writers who can work with you to create the content that leaves your inferior competitors in the dust.
What is next?
So do you need a knowledgeable biometric content marketing expert to create your content?
One who has been in the biometric industry for 29 years?
One who has been writing short and long form content for more than 29 years?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions again?
Well then I’ll just tell you that Bredemarket is the answer to your identity/biometric content marketing needs.
Are you ready to take your identity firm to the next level with a compelling message that increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue? Let’s talk today!
If you want a content marketing expert to write for your business, do you just say “Write this, and make it viral”?
Not THAT viral. (Too soon?) By Alexey Solodovnikov (Idea, Producer, CG, Editor), Valeria Arkhipova (Scientific Сonsultant) – Own work. Scientific consultants:Nikitin N.A., Doctor of Biological Sciences, Department of Virology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University.Borisevich S.S. Candidate of Chemical Sciences, Specialist in Molecular Modeling of Viral Surface Proteins, Senior Researcher, Laboratory of Chemical Physics, Ufa Institute of Chemistry RASArkhipova V.I., specialization in Fundamental and Applied chemistry, senior engineer, RNA Chemistry Laboratory, Institute of chemical biology and fundamental medicine SB RAS, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104914011
Six words of instruction will not result in great content.
Even if you just say “Write this” and leave off the viral part, this will not work either.
You and your content creator have to have a shared understanding of what the content will be.
For example, as I indicated in a previous post, you and your content creator have to agree on the tone of voice to use in the content. The content creator could write something in a tone of voice that may not match your voice at all, which would mean that the content would sound horribly wrong to your audience.
Imagine a piece for financial executives written in the style of Crazy Eddie. Ouch.
And that’s just one thing that could go wrong when you and your content creator are not on the same…um, page.
Bredemarket’s content creation process includes six questions
When Bredemarket works with you to create content, I use a content creation process. I’ve revised my original content creation process severaltimes, and I’m sure I’ll revise it more as I work with more of you.
But as of today, Bredemarket’s kickoff meetings with clients begin with six high-level questions that set the scene for everything that follows.
Question One: Why?
As I noted in my Simon Sinek post, the “why?” question needs to be answered before any other question is asked.
Before you ask a content creator to write a case study about how your Magnificent Gizmo cures bad breath, you need to understand why you’re in the good breath business in the first place. Did you have an unpleasant childhood experience? Were you abandoned at the altar? WHY did you care enough to create the Magnificent Gizmo in the first place?
(As I write this post, I’m going to look at how each of these six questions can be answered for the post itself. After all, it’s fair to ask: Why does Bredemarket do what it does? Short answer: because I write. You can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. For the longer answer, read the “Who I Am” page on the Bredemarket website.)
Question Two: How?
You also need to make sure your content creator can explain how you do what you do. Have you created your own set of algorithms that make breath good? Do you conduct extensive testing with billions of people, with their consent? How is your way of doing things superior to that of your competitors?
Once these are clear in your mind, you’re ready to talk about the “what.” As Sinek notes, many people start with the “what” and then proceed to the “how,” and may or may not even answer the “why.” But when you ask the “why” first and the “how” second, your “what” description is much better.
(Again, you may be asking what Bredemarket does. I craft the words to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences. For additional clarification, read “What I Do,” which also notes what I don’t do. Sorry, finger/face/ID document vendors.)
Question Four: Goal?
Once the Golden Circle is defined, we’re ready to dig a little deeper into the specific piece of content you want. We’re not ready to talk about page count and fonts, yet, though. There’s a few other things we need to settle.
What is the goal of the content? Simple awareness of the product or service you provide? Or are you ready for consideration? Or is it time for conversion? The goal affects the content dramatically.
(In the case of this post, the goal is primarily awareness, but if you’re ready for conversion to become a paying customer, I won’t turn you away.)
Question Five: Benefits?
I’ve written ad nauseum on the difference between benefits and features, so for this question five about benefits I’ll just briefly say that written content works best when it communicates how the solution will help (benefit) the customer. A list of features will not make a difference to a customer who has specific needs. Do you meet those needs? Maintain a customer focus.
(Bredemarket’s primary benefit is focused content that meets your needs. There are others, depending upon your industry and the content you require.)
Question Six: Target Audience?
This one is simple to understand.
If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing for kids who buy lollipops in convenience stores, you’ll write one way.
If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing to the convenience stores who could carry your lollipops, you’ll write another way.
Now sometimes content creators get fancy and create personas and all that (Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit), but the essential thing is that you understand who you want to read your content.
(This particular piece is targeted for business owners, executives, directors, and managers, especially in California’s Inland Empire, who have a need to create focused content that speaks to their customers. The target audience not only affects how I am writing this post, but also how I will distribute it.)
What if you use a different content creator?
I am forced to admit that not everyone chooses Bredemarket to create their content.
Maybe you create your content yourself.
Maybe you already have access to content creators.
Or maybe you have a limited budget and can only pay a penny a word to your content creator. Let’s face it, a five dollar blog post does sound attractive.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use these six questions. I did publish them, after all, and they’re based on questions that others have asked.
If you create your own content, ask yourself these six questions before you begin. They will focus your mind and make your final content better.
If you have someone else create your content, make sure that you provide the answers for your content creator. For example, if you seek a content creator on Upwork or Fiverr, put the answers to these questions in your request for quotes. Experienced writers will appreciate that you’re explaining the why, how, what, goal, benefits, and target audience at the very beginning, and you’ll get better quotes that way. If someone knows your target audience is crime scene examiners, then you’ll (hopefully) see some quotes that describe the writer’s experience in writing for crime scene examiners.
And if you provide the answers to those six questions and your content creator says, “That doesn’t matter. I write the same for everyone,” run away.
Bredemarket 