Other than long-distance bicycling and pancakes, there are few instances where flat is valued. Certainly, flatness is not a benefit when it comes to differentiating your business from competitors, attracting prospects, or hiring talent. When AI models produce content and copy that’s founded on all of the same published sources, your material risks sounding like that of every other player in your industry. As this New York Times article points out, AI-generated writing ends up in convergence where everyone is “saying” the same thing and there’s a lack of diversity.
The thing is, you’re not exactly like your competitors. You’ve worked hard to fine tune your solutions, products, and services to your strengths. When businesses talk in generalities, it’s hard to discern one from the other and you end up in the most risky of business positions: commoditization. And when the only differentiating factor is price, it’s a race to the bottom (and the slimmest margins).
How do you rise above flatness?
The answer, as our decades of copywriting experience shows, is to harness your superpowers: your subject matter experts (SMEs). These are the people across your organization and network who know your offering intimately, deeply understand your customers’ and prospects’ pain points and goals, and have stories that vividly illustrate your successes—and where others have gone head-first into major problems.
Of course, getting the most from your SMEs to inform content, whether it’s a blog post, whitepaper, infographic, video, or web copy depends on who is guiding the conversation.
At MarketSmiths, we’re former journalists, lifelong curiosity seekers, and passionate marketing professionals. We spend our days (and sometimes nights, hello Australia and New Zealand!) talking with professionals at some of the most well-known companies across the globe and some of the most promising start-ups. We know how to structure an interview and probe to get at the kernels of information that set companies apart and make them shine.
We then take these choice themes, threads, and nuggets of information and weave them into compelling copy and content that truly differentiates our clients and effectively informs their target audience.
Why be monochromatic when you can be vibrant?
Think of it this way: the design world has been enamored with monochromatic white interiors for years. When it was first introduced, it was fresh and intriguing. But after a while, it all blended together. How could you tell one project from the other? How could you differentiate one designer from another? Beautiful, yes, but it was all so…flat. That’s convergence. Today, there’s a resurgence in color and texture, which translates into a feeling of ownership and personality.
When it comes to writing for businesses, what does texture, depth, and that unique POV look like? Here are just a few examples from our files.
For a scaling tech company that’s a master in agile development, it means taking what was generic web copy (which commoditized their services) and transforming it into copy that gets to the heart of the agile process. It’s mining the company’s founders on what agile means to their clients both in the day-to-day and the full project development cycle—and how it results in better outcomes. In turn, their audience gains a clear understanding of what this approach means to them. For CIOs and VPs of IT, it’s understanding how agile can meet objectives and budget, while VPs of Engineering can feel assured of a quality software product. Net-net: it’s providing laser-sharp differentiation in a field where providers can easily coalesce into one indistinguishable lump.
For a global infrastructure procurement platform that wants to break into new markets, it means talking to industry leaders across private and public sectors about how the right technology lowers risk and supports high-value complex projects. It’s providing real world examples of successes—and failures that could have been avoided. It’s helping project owners think about the road ahead with valuable education that can only come from top echelon subject matter experts.
For one of the world’s largest commercial real estate investment managers, it means synthesizing panel discussions at an exclusive invite-only conference featuring leaders across media, academia, and development. It’s providing insight and conversation that not available in public forums about where opportunity lies and how the market is evolving. It’s planting a stake with premier investors and development partners on where the world will be two, five, and 10 years out by tapping into the best minds.
Your people give your brand its personality.
Of course, we have a lot more examples we can pull from. The important thing is that none of these pieces of content and copy could have been achieved by a bot.
You hire the best talent, you associate with the finest professionals. That is your company’s superpower. Let us help you create bespoke content that lets you stand apart and achieve amazing things.
