Background insights on effective content: The purpose of content marketing is not to just produce any type of article or written asset. The final deliverables must be effective for both humans and search engines. People are interested in content that best answers their questions. The material you provide must reflect an accurate and deep understanding of your core subject matter. On top of this, they would want to see unique, helpful and memorable insights, as well as tie-ins to current topics of interest can be developed. If you don't have the time to write the content yourself, this is where writers come in. But there is a learning curve to master.
First, it is important to consider what your target audience wants and how you can meet their wants and needs, while communicating the key message points of your business. When this is done well, readers will come away with:
a good understanding of what your brand is all about and what you offer
a clear awareness of the value provided by your product or serve
how your offerings would have a positive impact on their lives
In order for audience members to grasp these crucial areas, the writer must posses a clear understanding to begin with.
Each and every content piece needs to be unique with fresh angles and topics, on top of the main selling points.
To convey your credibility, articles as well as other forms of content must provide answers to the questions, why and how.
In essence, writers must be trained to have a multi-faceted and conceptual understanding of the core information, not memorized verbatim. Otherwise, the flow of ideas in the final piece will not make sense in the end.
Content Essentials For Highly Original Paradigms, Products and Service Offerings
The Dr.U brand offers many procedures and products that are unique and not offered by other providers. For example,other hair transplant practitioners offer more standardized graft harvesting practices, (i.e. using head hair alone). The Dr.U Clinic, on the other hand specializes in the extraction of both head and body hair to serve a wider range of patient needs.
Content written must explain how the brand's proprietary technology achieves successful results for patients, especially in cases that would otherwise considered impossible. Without this explanation, statements would only amount to surface claims.
Businesses must assume that their customers are intelligent and will ask deeper questions. As discussed earlier, providing explanations on how and why establishes credibility. And credibility leads to trust. When it comes to highly original and novel innovations, just making their way into the market, like the Dr.UGraft surgical system, establishing these qualities is absolutely essential.
Learn more about the Dr.U Clinic in this slideshow.
Readers must be able to understand a clear logic in getting from point A (the initial problem or challenge) to point B, the final outcome (the change and result). Without this continuity, there would only be surface statements and claims which, in worst case scenarios, could discredit the brand.
A Writer's Training Course For Deeper, Conceptual Learning
The original approach for training new writers at the Dr.U Clinic was to provide them with a list clinic's articles which covered subjects they were expected to learn. However, by merely taking a passive approach to reading this material, writers would only achieve a basic mental understanding. This level of comprehension would not necessarily mean that they could convey necessary information in a fluent manner.
With just surface facts, and an absence of deeper understanding, articles would lack the following important components:
accurate presentation of insights and facts
a logical and cohesive structure and flow
Not having these elements in place would require a significant amount of editing.
The Need for a Writer's Training Course
As the editor of the clinic, I decided it was necessary to equip new writers with more than just a set of articles.
I divided the topics into specific modules and designed teaching materials that engaged different areas of information processing.
Visual Conceptual Learning
Based on my prior experience editing articles, I discovered how important it was for writers to have a basic grounded understanding of how procedures are performed in order to produce results that are desirable for patients.
Instead of attempting to memorize this information, I wanted them to have a visual understanding. Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardener developed a theory of seven multiple intelligences. Different people have different ways of processing information. And learning can be optimized by engaging multiple areas of intelligence. So based on these ideas, instead of just passively reading articles, it would be better for individuals to also draw out concepts and also get practice when it came to proactively explaining and sharing what they had learned.
When I designed my course, I created required sections for the writers to practice creating visual representations for important processes and important schemas to understand.
I then created a set of questions for them to use in order to effectively distill the main takeaways from the reading material. On their own, I had them draw out the answers to these questions as well as provide verbal explanations for these drawings.
In the final phase, I met with each of them to ask them these questions so that they could feel comfortable explaining their responses.
The main objective was not so much to test them, but to establish a stronger sense of ease when it came to explaining the different concepts they were expected to learn.
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