Mind Readings: Effective Writing Techniques for Marketing

Marketers don't really write well. I mean, this is kind of a generally accepted thing, and there's a lot of variants, obviously. There's some marketers who are fantastic writers, who are novelists and poets, and they're using their skills in the marketing realm. But then there's a whole bunch of folks whose writing is not as helpful for convincing people that they need your product or service. And I got to thinking about this because I was reading some copy recently in uh a marketing promotion, going, uh that's not how I would say that.

Now, I don't know whether it worked or not, but I know from a writing perspective and an understanding perspective that what had been written was not great. And it got me thinking, there are some core critical writing skills in marketing. There's obviously the basic stuff like good grammar, spell check, and things like that. But a skill that I see a distinct absence of in marketing writing are the skills around things like analogies and metaphors and similes, because those tools help us take something that a prospective customer knows and converts it into something they don't know, right? And it allows them to understand something they don't know when it's written really well.

And it's a dramatically underused skill because I see it relatively rarely in marketing. And I wish I saw it more. For example, let's take a an arcane technique of science of some kind, right? And how would we explain this? So let's take something like uh gradient descent?

That's that's too much. Let's take something like basic attribution analysis, right? Attribution analysis where somebody gets credit for, you know, what gets credit for the last for the conversion. And we have first touch, which is doesn't really need an analogy, right? It's the first thing somebody did.

We have last touch, the last thing somebody did. Time decay, I think, is a useful example here. When you think of time decay as an attribution method, it means it's a half-life formula. It's it's essentially a decay formula that says every whatever period, cut the credit that something gets by half, and by half by half by half over time until the you know this is effectively effectively zero. Well, time decay is a scientific concept as a mathematical concept, and it's not something that the average person, particularly somebody who's not specializing in analytics, is going to have a lot of experience with.

You take out half. And then another week goes by and you take out another half of the remaining bricks. That's what happens after two weeks. And another week goes by and you take another half of the bricks out of this container you've got. And what we've got here is essentially a metaphor, right?

The box of bricks is the metaphor for how time decay works. And what's left after each week, that's all the credit you have left to assign to your marketing channels that week. And then another week goes by, take out half of the bricks and so on and so forth. And the further back in time you go, the fewer bricks there are in the box that you can give as credit. And helping somebody understand that means they will understand the attribution method and when time decay is an appropriate method for doing attribution analysis and when it isn't.

But if you don't have access to the mental tools of simile and metaphor and analogy, it's very challenging for somebody to understand it and adopt it into their mind frame. Let's say Clubhouse, for example. How would how would you describe Clubhouse to a marketer to who's not using social audio? I call it the world's longest least focused conference call. The moment you open this app, you know exactly what it's going to sound like.

You have a good sense of what how people are going to behave. And so there's no surprises. And then it's up to you, obviously, to make the base analogy more appealing. But once you understand that it's a conference call, you don't have to work very hard mentally to understand why you might or might not want to join it. Take something really comp technologically complicated like NFTs.

What is an NFT? The analogy, there's a couple of different analogies. One is uh it's like a software license, right? So every time you install a new piece of software, uh you get this license that says, you know, your your firstborn children belong to Microsoft or whatever. And you click okay, because you don't read any of it, just click okay.

But that's a license for you to use that software. It's not a certificate of ownership. You don't own Microsoft Word, you have a license to use it. Likewise, when someone issues an NFT, it is like a license to the underlying asset, you know, artwork, music, whatever. You have a license for it, but you don't own it.

And the second part is like a certificate of authenticity, right? If you ever bought a collectible, like a baseball or whatever, it was signed by somebody, it comes with a certificate of authenticity that says so-and-so actually signed this thing. And that gives it value because then if somebody else has one just like it, but they don't have that certificate, they can't prove that so-and-so actually signed it, even if it looks functionally identical because there's some really good forgers out there. An NFT is a combination of those two things. It's a software license and it's a certificate of authenticity.

It's a it's a license of authenticity. You buy it to say that you are a funder, almost like a venture capitalist. You're funding this artist, and they've in turn given you almost like a stock certificate in their piece of art. You don't own it, but you can trade it, you can sell it for more money later on, you can hold on to it, and an awful lot of the time its value will be zero, right? It was value will decline to zero.

So it's very much like stock. So again, analogy, a very powerful tool for describing a reality that people don't have yet in their heads. The challenge you'll run into is that there are some things that are atomic, meaning you can't transfer them and you can't break them down any further. A pomegranate. If you've never had a pomegranate, there is no amount of description I can give you that will tell you accurately how it tastes.

None. The taste is atomic, right? You either know it or you don't. And if you've tasted a pomegranate, just me saying that word evokes that memory, and nothing else needs to be said. Oh, it tastes like a pomegranate.

Oh, okay. If you if you have that, that those atomic concepts are things that are experiential that you can't write about effectively. You can either either the reader has knowledge or does not have knowledge. But if I could give marketers any one piece of advice, it would be improve those writing skills around metaphor and simile and analogy because it will dramatically improve your ability to communicate with an audience about the concepts that you need to get into their head, right? So give that some thought.