Don't Sound Like Siri With Your Marketing Pitch
Good content sounds natural, not robotic. Learn how to create readable content.
This article resonates well with my LinkedIn article This One Reason Why Contents Fail to Connect.
Raise your hand if you have an iPhone! (Few raises) Now, raise your hand if you know Siri and her iconic pause-filled voice! (More hand raises) I have brought up Siri here for one purpose: To show that most of us have this kind of tone when it comes to our content.
We know that our content pitches should sound like your friend talking to you about the weather or your mom telling you to eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner on time. But with marketers force-feeding their website traffic with “organic” contents that doesn’t sound organic at all, the meaning and the credibility of contents diminishes as time goes by.
To give you a more “first person” experience and description, I want you to read the following words. Just read it with your normal tone of voice as if you are talking to your friend, "Hey Jack! How was your day?" Now, imagine that you are Siri (or any other computer generated voice) and read the sentence again, "Hey Jack! How was your day?"
As hurtful as it can be, most of the content today sounds robotic, like the second time that you read the above sentence.
Why is that? It is simply because some marketers are pretending that they could write contents that can balance SEO generating traffic and their audience’s interests while in reality, they’re just turning their readers off.
Here are some of the usual things that marketers thought could make their contents sound “natural”:
- Content that start with the word “Hi”
First of all, thinking that you can start your contents with “Hi” just like having a conversation in real life would make your content more humane is completely insane. Your contents should sound like you are conversing and not exactly look like you are conversing.
- Filling out their contents with data, statistics and figures
Do you really want your guaranteed traffic to see you as a reliable data junky? Well, if that’s the case, you are doing it wrong. Sounding like a walking calculator does not help you sound humanistic at all. Don’t pour too much information on your contents as it will lessen your “natural” tone.
- Carelessly adding pictures to your contents for the sake of “having pictures”
It really irritates me when some marketers add irrelevant images on their contents. Sometimes, they would simply add images (such as memes) which are used incorrectly. This will not only ruin your reputation as a content creator, but it will also hurt your brand in the future. And no, it won’t give you consistent traffic.
- Creating contents like a SEO specialist and not as a writer
Last but not the least, some content marketers are so engrossed with SEO that they are the ones causing an imbalance on the scale. Remember, you originally write for your readers and not for your site’s SEO. If your viewers love your contents, everything will follow.
Please, stop with the robotic pitch. Be the change that we need in our content marketing strategies. Don’t be a Siri when it comes to connection. Just be yourself and your website traffic will do the rest for you.
Read More About Content on Digital Doughnut.