Tale of a 2-Inch Ruler

How to ban two-inch rulers from your content. Sometimes the form of content falls short, especially on storytelling. Here are five quick and easy tips to beef it up.

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Issue 7 | August 4, 2016

Tales of a 2-Inch Ruler

What on earth can you measure with a two-inch ruler?

Around the end of the school year, my daughter brought home a two-inch ruler from the “prize box.” We looked around for things to measure, but after sizing up her chubby pinky finger, the useless tool was cast aside.

I found myself weirdly perturbed by this shard of plastic. After all, a ruler is theoretically a nice little score for a four-year-old. Think of all the things to be measured! Yet, a good idea became worthless thanks to a fatal flaw: a form that, quite literally, fell short.

Sometimes an idea can start off strong – let’s give rulers to the preschoolers! – but falter because the form wasn’t sufficient.

The same thing happens to content – commentaries, PowerPoints, web copy, all of it – far too often. But there are a few easy tweaks that can power up the form of content, so that a great idea has a fighting chance of winning audience engagement.

The Top Three Qualities that Make Content (and Preschool Prizes) Effective
It all boils down to what makes content, and preschool prizes, effective. According to this B2B content marketing report, the top three things that make content more effective are easy to identify:

1. Audience relevance
2. Engaging & compelling storytelling
3. Triggers a response or reaction

In my experience, many investment firms actually do a decent job of #1 and #3. It’s the 2nd point – engaging and compelling storytelling – where they lose the plot.

“We can’t just turn our CIO market outlook into a chatty ghost-story campfire session,” you may be thinking. And that’s reasonable. But maybe engaging and compelling storytelling can be interpreted as a broader comment on engaging and sufficient form, which, for us human readers, includes storytelling, among other things. (For a preschooler’s ruler, of course, an engaging and sufficient form would be…longer than two inches.)

Here are five quick and easy ways to infuse thought leadership content with storytelling tools to make the form of content more engaging and sufficient:

1. Start with a story. Maybe the bulk of a piece can’t be told as a cohesive story. Yet, there’s usually an opportunity to start a piece with some small anecdote. TED talks, those ubiquitous and addictive quick-dives into every and any topic, often start with a short story, rather than a speaker bio or a “Molecular biology is a land of contrasts” intro.
2. Add more narrative throughout. Even tidbits that place an observation or trend in context can beef up the narrative quality of a piece.
3. Sneak in a sensory detail every now and then. Maybe it’s a comment about the clamor of oil rigs ratcheting up across the Middle East, or the tensing shoulders of investors everywhere as the Brexit news rolled in. Great content summons a sensory experience amidst the technical.
4. Let the human voices out. If there’s a bylined author, consider an occasional real-life anecdote. When we feel like we got a peek beneath the hood, even if it’s one sentence long, we feel a camaraderie with the author. “When I started on the mortgage desk in the ‘80s, risk management wasn’t even in the annual report. Today, it’s the first thing we talk about in our morning meeting…”
5. Acknowledge the reader on a shared journey. One of the most comfortable voices, for readers, is the one where humans appear directly. We like to read things that say “I” and “me” and “we” and “us,” as revered writing teacher William Zinsser points out. But using “we” as in “the firm” doesn’t achieve this voice. It’s more like “we” as in “humans generally.” For instance: “We tend to overreact to bad news and underreact to good news on account statements, behavioral researchers have found.” Creating the sense that the writer and reader are on a shared journey is the most engaging of voices.

By tweaking form with storytelling elements, we can better achieve that holy grail of financial content: audience engagement. It’s rarely the idea or the desired response that needs overhaul. Sometimes, it’s just the form that needs a few more inches.

Looking for a writer to help you create content? Reach out to learn more about how I can help you build your financial brand with engaging and human content.