Dear ,
Happy April Fools!
But read on, you’ll find no pranks here.
I value your attention too much to waste it on humor that may fall flat.
Since I would only deceive myself to believe that you were a fool.
Many writers remain too engaged
with their own thoughts to consider their prospective reader. Even though writing depends on being read by another person for the words to come alive and have meaning,
I get the need to quickly commit your TFUD (or The First Ugly Draft as Ann Handley calls it) to paper, physical or digital, before the power of your ideas escape your grasp.
But writing requires editing and rewriting for the true power of your first thoughts to shine through.
Therefore, use the best words to convey your meaning, instead of the fanciest. Those $10 words reduce your audience’s ability to consume and understand your content.
I learned this lesson early in one of my high school English classes. A fellow student always sprinkled his papers with long, difficult-to-pronounce words. As a result, he always had to read his paper aloud because the teacher kept tripping over the complex
words.
He should have heeded Winston Churchill's advice:
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”
Verbal ornamentation hurts your content. It makes your writing unnecessarily difficult to consume. Further, it erodes reader trust.
Even worse, many media and book publishers neglect fact checking and copy editing their content.
Actionable Marketing Lesson:
- Help readers by using simple words and short sentences. Make use of online writing tools such as Grammerly and Hemingway.
- Treat your audience as your intelligent content partner. Without them, your information languishes unread. Even worse your time spent creating it was wasted.
As a fitting end to Women’s History Month, we saw Glenda Jackson in the title role of King Lear on Broadway at a a preview performance.
From a marketing perspective, this production of King Lear revealed how to add meaning to a story your audience knows. As a result, you increase the power of your message.
Further, this new staging of King Lear tapped into real life memes and knowledge to enhance the audience experience.
Use these tips from King
Lear in your live experiences:
-
Choose a diverse and inclusive cast. At 82 years old, Glenda
Jackson played King Lear as a man. #Inclusion #Diversity (BTW, beyond being an award winning actor, Jackson was also a British MP!)
-
Add music to enhance the experience. Philip Glass, who is also
82, composed contemporary classical music for the play. Further, the string quartet played on stage. This visualized the power of the music’s role.
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Use decoration and staging to underscore your message. Less than a mile from the President’s New York home, King Lear's gold patina set
decoration echoed his love of money. Further, most of the play’s male characters wore business suits.
Btw – Did I mention that King Lear is a very long play? The actual performance runs 3.5 hours and Jackson is on stage for most of it with multiple costume changes.
Actionable Marketing Tactics:
-
Lean into and celebrate the diversity of your audience. Acknowledge where your organization is tone deaf and out of line with the times. BUT avoid empty talk. Do
the hard work to make your business inclusive.
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Consider adding and enhancing your live events and content with different formats. While remaining true to your brand, reach a broader audience with visuals, audio and
video.
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Dress your content to be contextually relevant. Make it stand out but keep it consumable.
Beyond the marketing
lessons here, there’s an important life lesson for each of us, including me.
You have the choice to remain a vibrant member of your professional community throughout your lifetime.
You don’t become irrelevant at 40, 50, or 60 unless you choose to!
At 82, Jackson and Glass continue to show us how to live a full life and to celebrate the creativity within us.
They inspire me to continue to find new ways to contribute to my community.
What will you do?
Heidi Cohen,
Actionable Marketing Guide
Happy Marketing,
Heidi
By gathering input from influencers and your audience, you are curating content. By including people who have higher credibility than you
or your business you increase the content’s trustworthiness.
Content curation roundup posts become “go to resources” that gain traction over time.
Since conferences laser-focus industry attention, they create marketing meccas.
But even if you don’t have the resources to attend in real life ( I totally get it--conferences come with a big price tag!), you need to participate.
Here’s the inside scoop on how to do it.
Social media continues to evolve at the speed of our fingers tapping on our smartphones. As a result, it’s difficult to keep up with the latest trends and understand this special collection of marketing media.
To help you, we asked the smartest social media professionals we know to define social media for you.
Heidi Cohen Around The Internet
Wendy Marx of Marx Communications
named Heidi Cohen as one of the top B2B marketers influencers that you need to follow. I'm sending Wendy a big tip of my hat!
I was thrilled to be part of TopRank Marketing’s Top 50
Marketers in Social Media. Read this article to see how TopRank uses this format before the big marketing conferences. It’s easy-to-create content that gets highly shared.
Photos of Takashi Murakami artwork and Cort Theater Marquee by Heidi Cohen
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