Nobody Cares — 3 Steps to Improve your Content Writing.

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

I’ve been doing Content Marketing for over 4 years now, I’ve scaled everything from personal projects to corporate campaigns, and in all that time, I’ve learned one universal rule —

Sales writing sucks!

Well, more accurately, it tends to suck more often than not. And not for the reasons you might be thinking. If you’re a content or sales writer wondering why you get little to no traction off anything you publish, odds are the problem isn’t with your platform…it’s your writing. And this article might be the breakthrough you need.

Now i’m not going to tell you how to anything about writing principles. That isn’t the problem. The real problem most sales writers face isn’t an inability to write or communicate. Even if you ask the best storytellers, gossip partners, and inspiring orators you know to sell a product, 9 times out of 10 the content comes out feeling rigid and stiff…it turns to mush.

The problem isn’t that you’re a bad storyteller (hopefully), the problem is the small mental switch that happens in your brain when it’s time to communicate corporately. It is the way you tune down your entire personality when it’s time to write. The way you go rigid in this face of customers. And unfortunately, this is a problem that began years before today.

When we were in school, we were taught how to write formal letters. How to structure job applications. This gave us a sense of how to process internal corporate communications. The problem we face today is that internal corporate comms. and external corporate comms. are NOT the same.

Here’s the thing about external/audience-centred comms…

You can’t approach customer-facing content thinking like a business, you have to approach it thinking like a customer.

And that means flipping back that mental switch to find the balance between an informal (not unprofessional) yet goal-driven writing approach.

Regular people don’t engage with brands. They engage with other people. And the easiest ways I know to bring back that human touch & engagement you need, is with 3 easy steps:

1. Write like no one else is in the room, but make sure you still get the job done. Write the copy you would like to read as a customer, without filter, then go back and edit your piece to make sure it’s in line with your brand voice and what you hope to achieve. This gives you a more natural starting point.
2. Try user generated content. Think of your business less as a bulletin board and more as a space that connects people under a specific goal. Talk to your customers in real-time, share their content. This scores you points with said customers while showing others a more human face to your organisation.
3. Most importantly — Understand that Nobody Cares. Understand that audiences do not truly care about your brand, business, or service. They only care about what it does FOR THEM. And anyone who wants to hold their attention has to first approach content from the angle of the problems and goals of that audience.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for you to try, if your good friend desperately needs the solution your brand offers, how would you communicate that to them? That combination of a goal-driven yet human method of communication is the key blend that takes your sales writing up ten fold.

People don’t want to interact with brands, they want to interact with other people. Remember this, and everything changes!

…

Hi! 👋 I’m Dimeji. I make content to help you communicate in a way people want to listen to. Did you enjoy the read? Follow me on LinkedIn for daily posts on attracting and growing through content — right here!