The recipe for delicious content includes voice, judgment, expertise, and care. Here’s how to make sure you’ve got the right ingredients.
When all of the smart people are saying essentially the same thing, it makes sense to listen. What are you hearing right now from the smartest people in your industry?
Here’s what I’m hearing:
- “Do a thing with care and people will respond.”
- “Be the person on your team who demands quality.”
- “AI can’t replace humans because humans have experiences.”
- “Humans should be at the center of marketing, because you’re marketing to humans.”
- “AI doesn’t have taste or judgment.”
I could keep going, but you get the point. Right now, the leaders in marketing are talking about being as human as possible in all of your work. Be quirky. Be original. Be messy.
Yet, most of us have been trained to sound like AI, which is exactly why AI sounds like it does. Most writers I know have railed against corporate-speak forever. We all know that using words like “leverage” or phrases like “quickly evolving landscape” make for boring reading. We all know that talking about specific experiences and writing for a specific person makes a piece more interesting and more effective.
So now, to stand out you have to have a clear and distinct voice that other folks recognize as being human. In some cases, especially in B2B and most especially in tech, companies are going to need to look closely at what they’ve been doing. Almost everything I wrote through agencies for big tech companies sounded like AI way before AI was available to write it (again: this is WHY AI sounds the way it does).
It’s easy to lose sight of what’s really happening when you start getting into all of the analytics and measurements and attribution and engagement and on and on. The goal, always, is to communicate. You may want whatever you’re communicating to convince, inform, or lead the person who is reading or watching or listening to take some action, but in the end, it’s about conveying a message to a person.
Rachel Bicha (https://rachelbicha.notion.site) sends out a physical newsletter each month, and the effort and care she puts into creating it is obvious. Look at this delightful reading game she included in the July edition:
Too many cooks in the kitchen result in unpalatable content
Another problem that has plagued corporate content marketing is having too many cooks in the kitchen. The editor makes sure the piece meets the style guide. The SEO makes sure the keywords are included properly. Anyone who is quoted gets to approve (or not), the team that requested the content has a say-so. Legal and/or compliance gets a pass.
Often, each of those entities waters down the content. An interesting story gets deleted because someone finds it not professional enough. The expert changes their quote so they sound smarter than they did off the cuff. Legal deletes a joke. Adding the keywords takes the snap out of the subheads.
The result is a piece that has no opinion and no voice. It meets all the demands of everyone and is interesting to no one
Rescue the recipe
One of the benefits of AI is that it’s causing many content teams to take a critical look at their existing content program and ask questions.
- How does our content connect to our business goals?
- Is there a clear through line?
- Who are we trying to communicate with?
- What is the goal of any given piece of content?
- What are we trying to say?
- What are our distribution channels? Why?
- Has our audience responded to content like this in the past?
- What has gotten a response from our audience?
- What kinds of content are our competitors producing? Does it work for them?
- Are our processes working well? Where are the bottlenecks?
- Is more better? What kind of cadence works best for our team and our audience?
- Where do we lose the color, voice, and story in our editing or publication process?
These are useful questions to ask on a regular basis, but they often get lost, or the answers get lost, in the rush to create more.
For years, I’ve said that stories are how we navigate the world. When you meet someone and they talk about an experience that you’ve had, you probably feel friendlier toward them right away. You understand.
When the stories get stripped out of your content marketing, the key ingredient is missing and that’s what all those smart people I mentioned in the introduction are saying. Bring care to your content marketing program and remember that it’s for humans and by humans.
