Letter #112: Content that sells

The one principle to stick with; come hell or high water 🎯

Last week, some $700 disappeared (!) from my personal finance app — leading to a week-long back and forth between me and the support team.

That’s when a rep suggested I comb through backend documents to identify where the missing money was.

And I found myself saying:

“Doing that is only going to add work to my plate. Why don’t you/your team just go through my transactions and explain where the lost money is?”

*Picture a fuming, frustrated me thumb punching my phone’s keypad*

See, as a business owner and content person, this has been my number 1 rule:

Make 👏 things 👏 easy 👏 for 👏 people 👏

Everyone’s got 1,001 items to cross off their to-do lists. And all of us are wading through a bloated pool of information online (notifications, marketing messages, ads, work emails, and whatnot!).

This is reason enough to be highly selective of the information you share in the content you create with the aim of selling.

As Daniel Pink advises in his book To Sell Is Human (an incredible read — I still can’t stop taking notes): be an information curator.

Daniel makes some solid points:

• Selling today is not “the white-collar equivalent of cleaning toilets — necessary perhaps, but unpleasant and even a bit unclean.” Selling, these days, is more about moving people — whether internal stakeholders or potential buyers.
  

• From buyers to problem-unaware folks, everyone has access to a shipload of information online. A few keystrokes and they can compare your software with alternative tools on the market to make their purchase decision.
  

• Your job then is to present the right amount of information at the right time — all while making it easy for folks to understand how you can help them.

In action, this looks like the following:

🌱  TO-THINK:

Noodle on what information to exclude

Having been a little too obsessed with skyscraper (read: comprehensive) content, we often focus on what additions would make the content complete/useful.

Given the info overloaded space today though, I’d recommend you much rather work on what to exclude than what to add.

It also means saving your content from feature bloat.  

That is:

In every piece of deeper-funnel content you plan, elaborate on no more than 2-3 product features per piece to save folks from information overload. 

🌱  TO-DO:

Specify exactly who your product is NOT for

Most want to cast a wide net.

But even if you succeed at bringing the most users to your tool, if they aren’t your ideal target buyers, they’ll eventually churn = loss down the line (plus risk of poor word of mouth).

Now I know all of this is hard to quantify and so, hard to get buy-in for.

But if you’re lucky enough to work with content-minded founders/colleagues, it’s worth floating this idea.

Keep in mind, this to-do is specifically useful for creating trust-building and sales-encouraging tool listicles and product comparison (‘us’ versus ‘xyz tool’) content. 

🌱  TO-NOTE:

Be transparent about how/when folks can reap the best results with your tool

For instance, you’ll find feature X most beneficial when you’re working with a distributed workforce. Or Y feature delivers the best results when you have an overloaded sales pipeline.

Recall that information is at buyers’ fingertips.

So go beyond listing the benefits of using your tool by specifying exactly how to materialize those benefits.

In doing so, you’ll grow readers’ confidence in the ROI they can see from using your tool.

That’s all for today’s letter folks — I can easily go on with more tips but if you’ve been reading my emails, you know I’m big on respecting your time by sharing content that takes you no longer than 2-3 minutes to go through.

See you next week 👊