Blah, blah, blah.
That’s what a lot of marketing sounds like. Emails, blogs, and presentations that ramble on without saying anything. Don’t fall into that trap!
There’s one simple thing you can do to make sure your content is engaging and on target – use a controlling idea. Watch this week’s video to learn what a controlling idea is and how to use it for content people will want to read.
What other writing hacks do you use to create great content?
Full transcript below.
Full transcript
If you’re like me, you send a lot of emails, maybe you’re writing blog posts. You’re creating content, whether it’s for marketing or sales or for other things. Well, today I want to share one suggestion, one thing that you can do to consistently write better copy, better content, emails, articles, etc.
Hi, my name is Steve Phipps, and this is your weekly marketing tip from Wayfind Marketing.
So here’s the tip: Make sure you have a controlling idea for whatever you’re writing. So for instance, if you’re writing a marketing email or a blog post, your controlling idea, that’s the one thing you want to say. Think about it as one sentence that describes everything that you’re trying to say in all of the words that you’re writing. And so that becomes a north star for the content that you’re creating.
Now, when you start out, you may have a couple of ideas, but you want to narrow it down. What’s the one thing, if you could summarize everything in that one sentence, that’s your controlling idea and really good content is going to help solve a problem. It’s going to provide content that’s going to help somebody do something better. So that’s the goal, but that controlling idea is going to give you direction.
So next time you’re sitting down to write an email, write a blog post, you might have a lot of things that you want to say, and that’s fine. But think through all of those things: What is the thread that unifies it all that you can then summarize in a single sentence? And that is your controlling idea. And you might have some things that are really good things that you want to say or write or communicate. And that could be a different email. That could be different blog posts, but if it doesn’t line up, if it doesn’t support that controlling idea, you don’t want it. So figure out what that is. Use that as your north star, and you’re going to be creating much better content that people want to read and engage with.
