Success Stories

Business professionals just love sharing their knowledge, and that’s one reason I love working with them. But there’s sharing … and there’s over-sharing. Sometimes, business professionals prepare content that is not of interest to the people they want as clients, although it is of interest to their competitors.

That can be what happens in the case of the “how-to” kind of content, which is an established journalistic archetype, telling how to do something. It could be a series of steps, or a list of success factors.

Many business professional firms gravitate naturally to case studies, about projects they’ve worked on, when it comes to generating content. I find that in many cases, these articles do not achieve their goal of demonstrating expertise in a way that reaches potential clients.

The reason is simple – clients don’t care about how your firm does its work. If they did care, they’d have that work retained in-house. So, a case study about a project won’t be of much interest to them. That is, unless there is information they can use. That’s what I strive for in the articles I prepare for my clients.

I find that case studies are most informative, and most credible, if they are jointly authored by the business professional who did the work, and their client.

While “newsjacking” articles cover hard news and sudden changes, your clients also can be affected by slow, gradual changes that they don’t notice. That’s until one morning they discover that a threshold has been crossed that affects their business.

The kind of articles I call “Trendspotting” cover these slow-moving issues. They help reassure your clients that your firm understands the big picture that affects them, and is able to develop solutions to help their client either avoid a problem resulting from the trend, or gain a benefit.

Your firm’s clients depend on your firm to keep them informed about sudden changes that may affect them – new laws, new regulations, new disruptive technologies and other new developments. One of the best ways to generate content they’ll find valuable is through analyzing what that news means for them. In content marketing, this is called “newsjacking.”

And these do not have to be big changes that would grab headlines in major media like CNN, the BBC or the New York Times. Your firm’s clients value knowing about narrowly-focused news that will affect them – news they might otherwise be unaware of, because the mainstream media doesn’t cover it. We call this “narrowcast newsjacking.”

Here’s an example, about an article on a narrow news topic.