Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
It’s time for my (usually) once-a-month edition of Bredemarket’s LinkedIn newsletter, “The Wildebeest Speaks.”
And I revisited a topic that I originally visited in December 2023, but hopefully with a new perspective.
Go to LinkedIn and read the latest edition of my newsletter, “Who Are Your Hungry People?” It is at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-your-hungry-people-bredemarket-xiafc/
(Imagen 3 AI-generated picture)
Bredemarket promotes itself in all sorts of places. My LinkedIn newsletter is an example, but there are other places where Bredemarket speaks, including the Bredemarket blog and a number of social channels.
The channels that Bredemarket uses have varied over time. While wise minds such as Jay Clouse have recommended to not spread yourself thin, I ignored his advice and found myself expanding from LinkedIn to TikTok. (TikTok is a Chinese-owned social media platform. You may have heard of it.)
Then in May 2024 I contracted my online presence, announcing that I was retreating from some social channels “that have no subscribers, exhibit no interest, or yield no responses.” After I had shed some channels, I ended up on a basic list of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads.
You can guess what happened next.
Over the months I started posting on some of the paused social channels one by one. Eventually I was posting on all the channels I was using in July 2023—yes, I’ve even restarted the podcast—plus some other platforms such as Bluesky.
Now I may contract again, and I may expand again, but for now I want to touch upon the reasons why a business should post or not post on multiple social channels, and how the business can generate content for all those channels.
There is no right or wrong answer for every business, and there are some businesses that should only post on a single social channel.
Not all businesses satisfy all the criteria above. For one, your “hungry people” (target audience) may be dispersed among several social channels. From my personal experience, I know that some people only read Bredemarket content in my blog, some only read my content on LinkedIn, some only read my content on Facebook (yes, it’s true; one of Bredemarket’s long-term champions primarily engages with me on Facebook), some only on Instagram, and so forth.
What would happen if I decided to can most of my social channels and only post TikTok videos? I’d lose a lot of engagement and business.
Even if I concentrated on LinkedIn only, which seems like a logical tactic for a B2B service provider, I would lose out. Do you know how many people on Threads NEVER read LinkedIn? I don’t want to lose those people.
So that’s where I ended up. And if you know my system, the question after the “why” question is the “how” question…
Repurposing…intelligently.
You don’t have to create completely unique content for every platform. You can adapt content for each platform, when it makes sense.
So now I’m going to eat my own wildebeest food and see where I can repurpose this text, which was originally a LinkedIn article. Yes, even on TikTok. I may not come up with a whopping 31 pieces of content like I did in a 2023 test, but I can certainly get this message out to people who hate LinkedIn. Perhaps maybe even to my mailing list, for people who have subscribed to the Bredemarket mailing list.
I haven’t figured out what I’ll do in this particular instance, but here are some general guidelines on content repurposing:
So there you have it. Posting on multiple social channels helps you reach people you may not otherwise reach, as long as you don’t spread yourself too thin or get discouraged. And you can repurpose content to fit within the expectations of each of these social channels, allowing you to re-use your content multiple times.
If you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. (Plus the usual Bredemarket services: I onboarded a new client yesterday and hope to onboard another one this week.)
Which reminds me. If you need help generating content for your company’s blog and social channels, follow this link to learn about Bredemarket’s “CPA” (content-proposal-analysis) offerings.
(Takeru Kobayashi Image CC BY-SA 2.0)
B2B companies want to do business with certain companies, but not with others.
Using Bredemarket as an example:
How can B2B companies—mine, or yours—find niche prospects that are “hungry” to do business with them—your target audience?
By marketing their products in ways that attract their hungry people and filter out the others.
For example, my recent long (3:40) Bredemarket “CPA” talkie video included prices for three of my services, starting at $500 (as of January 2025) for my Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service.
If you continued to watch the video after the pricing discussion, you may be among Bredemarket’s niche hungry people.
If you stopped watching the video and searched for a 2¢/word writer on Fiverr, you’re definitely NOT among my hungry people.
Another way to find your hungry people is to discuss things that interest them.
For example, I shared the following LinkedIn post on Saturday:
“Betcha IPVM isn’t inconvenienced by the TikTok ban…”
If you slightly smiled when you read that, you may be among Bredemarket’s niche hungry people.
Most people are NOT hungry for Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.
My IPVM-TikTok LinkedIn post will never get the 20,000+ impressions and nearly 400 engagements that I’ve received on my Private Equity Talent Hunt LinkedIn post.
But since I don’t bait and switch jobseekers by offering 17x resume writing services, that’s a good thing.
If your humor has evolved to a point where the very idea of an IPVM account on TikTok amuses you—and if my use of the word “evolved” amuses you further—then perhaps Bredemarket offers the background and experience to help you convey your
product/service information.
Hungry for more? Check out my “CPA” page and book some time to talk to me.
And by the way, my long-term hungry people knew this was coming…
Now that I’ve formally scheduled the release of my talkie—it’s even an “event” on Facebook—I may as well provide a description of what my talkie contains.
Well, that’s that. Come back Monday at 8:00 am Pacific Standard Time / 1600 GMT.
My current two categories for go-to-market collateral, “external” and “internal,” are not sufficient. I want to fix that, but I’m still thinking through things, such as what to call the third category. As of this moment, my best option is “intrinsic,” based upon my conversations with my good buddy Gemini.
Based upon go-to-market efforts that stretch back a decade (even before I formally became a Product Marketing Manager), I have traditionally divided go-to-market output into two categories.
Simple and straightforward, right?
But during a current go-to-market effort for a client, I realized that these two categories are insufficient, since both the client and I are creating content that will never been seen by either the external clients or the internal clients.
I’ll give you two heavily redacted and anonymized examples for a #fakefakefake machine.
Bob and Judy (names from this song) are NEVER going to show that document or that picture to the customers, or even to the company’s own account managers.
So why create it?
Because they will be the initial guides as the go-to-market team creates all the other external and internal collateral for the effort.
These foundation documents are a critical part of the go-to-market effort. Without them, the subsequent go-to-market collateral will be a contradictory mishmash of stuff, and you’ll need to undertake a lot of effort to align all the content after the fact.
…well, I don’t know what to call this third category yet.
Google Gemini, you’re my only hope.
My question:
If we call the first category “external” marketing content for customers, and we call the second category “internal” marketing content for employees, then what do we call the third category which is only for the people who create marketing content for customers and employees?
Gemini’s first batch of answers:
Internal Marketing Content for Marketing Teams
Marketing Team Communication
Marketing Team Resources
Internal Marketing Tools
Brevity is NOT a strength of generative AI. Even when I specifically instructed Gemini to provide single word responses, I got hyphenated words:
Intra-marketing (combining “intra” for within and “marketing”)
Meta-marketing (implying a higher-level perspective on marketing)
Team-marketing (emphasizing its focus on the marketing team)
The fatal flaw is that not all the people on a go-to-market team are marketers. (This is my fault because of the prompt I wrote.)
And if I lop off the last part of each compound phrase, two of my options are “team” (too generic) and “meta” (NO).
And “intra” is too close to “internal internal.” But perhaps it’s a start. So I asked Gemini for words similar to “intra-” and got this response:
The prefix “intra-” means “within,” “inside,” or “inner.” Here are 12 words that convey a similar meaning:
- Inward: Turning or moving toward the inside.
- Internal: Existing or occurring within something.
- Inner: Situated or located within.
- Intrinsic: Belonging to or inherent in the nature of something.
- Interior: The inside part of something.
- Intramural: Occurring within a school or institution.
- Intranet: A private computer network within an organization.
- Intravenous: Administered into a vein.
- Intracranial: Situated or occurring within the skull.
- Intracellular: Existing or occurring within a cell.
- Intralingual: Relating to or occurring within a language.
- Intrajugular: Situated or occurring within the jugular vein.
I kind of like “intrinsic,” but I’ll sleep on it.
In the meantime, what would YOU call the third category?
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…
For better or worse, I write my own content. If I’m going to write yours, then I should write mine.
So I’m always amused when I receive pitches to write for the Bredemarket blog. Invariably these pitches do NOT mention:
But a recent pitch excelled in its, um, genericism. Here’s the relevant part:
I run a white-label marketing company and am reaching out to ask if you need help with content creation? I work with several other marketing agencies on campaigns like Airbnb’s.
I’m not sure how Bredemarket relates to Airbnb, but it really doesn’t matter because they have worked on campaigns LIKE Airbnb. So I do not know what they’ve done. (Although ghostwriters have this problem.)
I recently sent out a mailing that was hopefully much more targeted. I knew my hungry people (target audience), so even though it was a mass mailing (OK, not “mass”), it was relevant.
If you didn’t receive the mailing, you can view the repurposed version here.
Contact Bredemarket if you need content that benefits from my 29+ years of identity/biometrics experience.
This week has been a busy week in Bredemarket-land, including work on some of the following client projects:
Plus I’ve been working on some non-Bredemarket deliverables and meetings with a significant time commitment.
But there’s one more Bredemarket deliverable that I haven’t mentioned—because I’m about to discuss it now.
Without going into detail, a client required me to repurpose a piece of third-party government-authored (i.e. non-copyrighted) text, originally written for a particular market.
The request was clear, and I’ve already completed the first draft of the text and am working on the second draft.
But I wanted to dive into the three steps above—not regarding this particular client writing project, but in a more general way.
When you’ve worked in a lot of different industries, you learn that each industry has its own language, including things you say—and things you don’t say.
I’ll give you an example that doesn’t reflect the particular project I was working on, but does reflect why rewriting is often necessary.
When I started in biometrics, the first two industries that I wrote about were law enforcement and benefits administration.
These two examples illustrate why something originally written for “market 1” must often be rewritten for “market 2.”
But sometimes a simple rewrite isn’t enough.
Now I don’t play in the B2C market in which crisp text is extremely necessary. But it’s needed in the various B2G and B2B markets also—some more than others.
If you are writing for more scientific markets, your readers are more accustomed to reading long, academic, “Sage”-like blocks of text.
But if you are writing for other markets, such as hospitality, your readers not only don’t want to read long blocks of text, but actively despise it.
You need to “get to the point.”
In my particular project, “market 1” was one of those markets that valued long-windedness, while “market 2” clearly didn’t. So I had to cut the text down significantly, using the same techniques that I use when rewriting my “draft 0.5” (which a client NEVER sees) to my “draft 1” (which I turn over to the client).
But sometimes a simple shorten isn’t enough.
If you know me, you know I’m not graphically inclined.
But I still pay attention to the presentation of my words.
Remember those long blocks of text that I mentioned earlier? One way to break them up is to use bullets.
So your reader will be very happy.
But as I was editing this particular piece of content, sometimes I ran into long lists of bullets, which weren’t really conducive to the reading experience.
| Question | Answer | What does this mean? |
| Why are long lists of bullets bad? | Because with enough repetition, they’re just as bad as long blocks of text. | Your readers will tune you out. |
| How can you format long lists of bullets into something easier to read? | One way is to convert the bullets into a table with separate entries. | Your readers will enjoy a more attractive presentation. |
| What do tables do for your reader? | They arrange the content in two dimensions rather than one. | The readers’ eyes move in two directions, rather than just one. |
| Hey, wait a minute… | Yeah, I just plugged my seven questions again by intentionally using the first three: why, how, and what. | You can go here to download the e-book “Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.” |
After I had moved through the three steps of rewriting, shortening, and simplifying the original content, I had a repurposed piece of content that was much more attractive to the “hungry people” (target audience) who were going to read it.
These people wouldn’t fall asleep while reading the content, and they wouldn’t be offended by some word that didn’t apply to them (such as “mugshot”).
So don’t be afraid to repurpose—even for a completely different market.
I do it all the time.
Look at two of my recent reels. Note the differences. But note the similarities.
So which of Bredemarket’s markets do you think will receive the “grapes” reel?
Stay tuned.
I’ve taken a very small break from my identity blog post writing business to help a biometric company with a proposal. I am, after all, the biometric proposal writing expert, so I’m at home working on identity proposals. After all, I’ve done it before.
Bredemarket’s services are grouped into two distinct and separate functions: content marketing (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and proposals (RFI responses, RFP responses, sole source letters, etc.).
My division of my services makes sense in the real world. After all, in some employment situations, content marketing and proposals employ distinct and separate sets of employees.
But other companies are different. In fact, I’ve seen employment ads seeking marketing/proposals managers. Sounds like a lot of work, unless the company submits few proposals or performs minimal marketing.
And in many companies there are NOT dedicated proposals specialists. Which is why Bredemarket makes its money by helping the salespeople at these firms get the documents out.
And if we’re truthful with ourselves, content marketing and proposals are pretty much the same thing.
I know this angers some people, who insist that they are content marketing professionals or proposal professionals, with all the proper certifications that a mere mortal could never attain. Or they did attain it, but it lapsed. Or is about to lapse unless I renew it in time.
But hear me out. I’m going to list four aspects of a particular document, and you tell me whether I’m talking about a piece of marketing content, or a proposal.
Guess what? From that description you CAN’T tell if it’s a piece of content or a proposal.
Yes, I know some of you thought item 4 was a dead giveaway because it sounded like an RFP requirement, but maybe some company’s brand guidelines dictate that the firm’s white papers must conform to that format. You never know.
And I know that when you get into the minutiae, there are certain things that proposal writers do that content marketers don’t have to worry about, and vice versa.
But at a high level, the content marketer already knows 90% of the things they need to know to write proposals. And vice versa.
Can we all get along?
Man, I’ve been negative lately.
I figure that it is time to become more positive.
I’m going to describe one example of how Bredemarket has helped its customers, based upon one of my client projects from several years ago.
I’ve told this story before, but I wanted to take a fresh look at the problem the firm had, and the solution Bredemarket provided. I’m not identifying the firm, but perhaps YOUR firm has a similar problem that I can solve for you. And your firm is the one that matters.
This happened several years ago, but was one of Bredemarket’s first successes.
I should preface this by noting that there are a lot of different biometric modalities, including some that aren’t even listed in the image above.
The firm that asked for my help is one that focuses on one particular biometric modality, and provides a high-end solution for biometric identification.
In addition, the firm’s solution has multiple applications, crime solving and disaster victim identification being two of them.
The firm needed a way to perform initial prospect outreach via budgetary quotations, targeted to the application that mattered to the prospect. A simple proposal problem to be solved…or so it seemed.
I had encountered similar problems while employed at Printrak and MorphoTrak and while consulting here at Bredemarket, so the solution was painfully obvious.
Have your proposal writers create relevant material in their proposal automation software that could target each of the audiences.
So when your salesperson wants to approach a medical examiner involved in disaster victim identification, the proposal writer could just run the proposal automation software, create the targeted budgetary quotation, populate it with the prospect’s contact information, and give the completed quotation to the salesperson.
Unfortuntely for the firm, the painfully obvious solution was truly painful, for two reasons:
In this case, the firm needed a way for the salespeople to generate the necessary budgetary quotations as easily as possible, WITHOUT relying on proposal automation software or proposal writers.
To solve the firm’s problem, I resorted to Stupid Word Tricks.
(Microsoft Word, not Cameo.)
I created two similar budgetary quotation templates: one for crime solving, and one for disaster victim identification. (Actually I created more than two.) That way the salesperson could simply choose the budgetary quotation they wanted.
The letters were similar in format, but had little tweaks depending upon the audience.
The Stupid Word Tricks came into play when I used Word document property features to allow the salesperson to enter the specific information for each prospect, which then rippled throughout the document, providing a customized budgetary quotation to the prospect.
The firms’ salespeople used Bredemarket’s templates to generate initial outreach budgetary quotations to their clients.
And the salespeople were happy.
I’ve used this testimonial quote before, but it doesn’t hurt to use it again.
“I just wanted to truly say thank you for putting these templates together. I worked on this…last week and it was extremely simple to use and I thought really provided a professional advantage and tool to give the customer….TRULY THANK YOU!”
Comment from one of the client’s employees who used the standard proposal text
While I actively consulted for the firm I maintained the templates, updating as needed as the firm achieved additional certifications.
I just want to remind people that Bredemarket doesn’t just write posts, articles, and other collateral. I can also create collateral such as these proposal templates that you can re-use.
So if you have a need that can’t be met by the painfully obvious solutions, talk to me. Perhaps we can develop our own solution.
Bredemarket