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Marketers, Put Analogies, Similes, and Metaphors to Work for You

What’s the difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies? Not a lot, unless you’re a word nerd like me.

Short answer: Metaphors describe an idea; similes do the same, but use “like” or “as.” Analogies are that mystery comparison that we all pretend to know what it means, but we really think it’s a simile.

Ann Handley recently wrote in her Total Annarchy newsletter about the importance of analogies.

In Marketing, analogies pack a lot in a tiny overhead bin space.

They can help us explain convoluted ideas or applications more simply. They can help our audiences understand what we do or what we sell.

And (important!) analogies can help us be more memorable.

When it comes to writing, there are three types of analogies we can use. And they’re so similar, they’re easy to get confused. Hell, I wrote this article, and I’m still not entirely clear on what they mean!

Metaphors:

A metaphor compares two things, one to the other, but doesn’t use the words “like” or “as.” They’re more powerful and almost make a strong commitment to the comparison.

As George Savile once said, “Men’s words are bullets that their enemies take up and make use of against them.”

Or William Shakespeare in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

Did you see it? Men’s words are bullets. They’re not like bullets, they ARE bullets. And all the men and women (are) merely players. Not like, are.

Metaphors tend to be more poetic and you can create greater imagery with them.

They’re also morally superior to similes. (More on that in a minute.)

Similes:

The weasel word of the comparison game! I’m not a fan of similes because they are weaker than metaphors. The big difference between a simile and a metaphor is the words “like” or “as.”

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” Forrest Gump famously said. He didn’t want to commit to the image, so he said it’s only like a box of chocolates.

Weasel!

Similes compare two unlike items in order to create meaning at a deeper level. “My love is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June,” said Robert Burns.

If I were Mrs. Burns (Jean Armour), I’d be worried about that relationship: He can’t commit to a metaphor, but he’s going to commit to you?

(Burns was also a noted philanderer, so this should have been a clue to Armour.)

Other similes include “as blind as a bat,” “as clumsy as an ox,” and “like watching paint dry.”

Analogies:

Part metaphor, part simile, all argument. That is, an analogy is a type of argument or explanation that compares two items but in relation to each other as a way to explain one of the items.

“Our latest company reorganization is about as useful as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” or “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” (E.B. White)

But They All Look the Same.

Of course, when you really look at it, it’s hard to make a distinction between analogies and similes. Are similes the shorter aphorisms? “As blind as a bat” and “clumsy as an ox?” And are phrases like “Watching the play was like watching paint dry” analogies because they’re longer?

As I was researching this piece, I found article after article that mixed up the use of these three terms. But I found one explanation that seemed to explain the difference. As Robert Lee Brewer, senior editor of Writer’s Digest, said,

A metaphor is something, a simile is like something, and an analogy explains how one thing being like another helps explain them both.

See? Clear as mud.

Basically, the three terms can be used almost interchangeably and you could argue for days about whether “Life is like a box of chocolates” is a simile or an analogy.

<One of my favorite albums of all time is Tom Waits’ Nighthawks At The Diner, and I especially love the song, “Putnam County”. In it, Waits says the following verse.

And the impending squint of first light
And it lurked behind a weepin’ marquee in downtown Putnam
Yeah, and it’d be pullin’ up any minute now
Just like a bastard amber Velveeta yellow cab on a rainy corner
And be blowin’ its horn in every window in town

There, Waits uses a combination of metaphors and similes as a way to describe the morning sunlight banging on your windows after a hard night’s drinking. And you can see how he uses the devices for a most-powerful effect.

Regardless, the easy thing to remember is that similes (and analogies) use “like” or “as” and metaphors do not.

That makes metaphors more powerful and morally superior, but we’ll argue about that later.

Photo credit: CarbonNYC (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article and Five Good Ways

As a content writer, I cringe and writhe in pain when I see some content marketers’ openings — ledes, in journalism parlance — of their blog posts and journal articles. They’re cheap, amateurish, and they say absolutely nothing. They’re terrible ways to start a blog article, and they can wreck what might have been an otherwise good piece.

They’re so overused and hackneyed, I’m just embarrassed for them.

It’s one thing if they tried this lede in college and got a warm, squishy feeling about it, but the problem is no one told them not to do it again, and so they stuck with it.

Wait, wait! What’s a “lede?”

Lede (pronounced “leed”) is the intentional spelling of the word lead. However, you don’t always know how “lead” is pronounced until you know its context.

According to newspaper legend, reporters — whose stories were cast in lead (“led”) type — wanted to avoid confusion with the opening lines to their stories. And so people wouldn’t get confused and say lead instead of lead. Since they wrote a lead that was cast in lead, they needed to signify the difference. So they started using “lede” to mean the opening paragraph (“graf”) and “lead” to mean the soft metal.

But that’s not what you came here for.

The Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article

1. Let’s face it.
I hate this one because it feels forced and we have to reluctantly accept what life has done to us. Like you and I have been going around and around trying to find our way out of a Locked Room game, and we don’t have the first clue to get out.

I’ll almost buy using this phrase near the end of an article, but not at the beginning.

2. Unless you’ve been under a rock.
I overheard someone use this on an anime podcast recently, talking about an anime movie that I had never even heard of. Basically, unless I had been living under a rock, I would know about this whole big kerfuffle surrounding this movie I’d never heard of.

This lede is actually rude because it insinuates your reader is a moron.

“Only a true moron wouldn’t know about this thing I’m about to tell you.”

My response to these is rude and vulgar, so I won’t repeat it.

3. The recipe lede.
“Take three part X, two parts Y, and one part Z, mix them together and you’ve got [insert story theme].” Blurg!

This one is hackneyed and overused. It works in nearly every situation, which means it’s not good for any of them. Gag me with a mixing spoon.

4. The high school research paper.
This is the one that gets directly to the point in the most boring way possible, usually as a way to shoehorn keywords into the opening paragraph.

“Most businesses need an accounting and bookkeeping system. Keeping track of your finances is the most important job for any business, and accounting software will help you do this.”

Sure, it’s factual, it’s to the point, and it’s so dull, it couldn’t cut through water.

A better lede might start with, “Entrepreneurs, do you remember when you started your business and all your invoices were done in Word and you hammered together some kind of balance sheet on Excel?” See the difference?

5. Statistics.
“There are 7 million blog articles published every day.”

You could lump this one with the high school paper lede. It’s informative, but it’s not exciting. I might appreciate that fact (which is true), but it doesn’t pull me into the story with any emotion. If you want me to care, tell me about one of those bloggers, not all 7 million of them.

Also, clicking that link takes you a real stinker of a lede — it’s written only for SEO purposes, and if I wasn’t promised a raft full of blogging stats, I wouldn’t read a word more of it:

“This article will reveal the most interesting blogging stats, facts, and trends. And answer the most common questions.”

Blurg!

The Five Good Ways to Start a Blog Article

So how should you start a blog article if you want it to be effective and interesting?

1. The Hard News Lede This actually is a boring way to start a story, but it’s soooo much better than any of the ones I mentioned above. Go look at a newspaper’s website and read some of the articles in their News section. They’ll all start with the hard news lede.

In this kind of lede, you answer the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, what, where, when, why, and how. (Sometimes called the 6 W’s, where the how is replaced with “what significance.”)

Here’s an example:

“John Smith was shot as he tried to stop a hold-up attempt at KFC at 1234 Main Street at 12:38 pm. He was taken to Polk Memorial Hospital and listed in stable condition.”

You’ve got all 5 W’s and the H in that first sentence. (I just threw in the second sentence so you’d know John was OK. He appreciates your well-wishes.)

It’s not exciting, but it’s informative and well-done.

2. The “Features” Lede
The news lede is boring, but the features lede is much more interesting. In fact, features stories tend to be much more interesting than hard news stories.

“All John Smith wanted was a bucket of chicken. What he got was a trip to the hospital and a bullet wound to the thigh.”

They look at the Why of most news stories in general — this is where you find the interesting details about a news story. Investigative reporting happens here. Sports features happen here. Human interest. Historical stories. Social/community stories.

For a look at a great lede in a Pulitzer-winning story, check out the Tampa Bay Tribune’s Insane. Invisible. In Danger. stories, written by Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier, and Michael Braga.

3. Telling a story.
I don’t mean a long, meandering, 4-volume epic about Memaw’s Potato Salad preceding the actual recipe. But a nice 100-word story that builds tension or sets the stage for the information you’re about to impart.

Content marketers like to call themselves “storytellers,” yet they fail to tell a single story in all of their writing. I don’t mean just tell a story like, “That time I got lost in a foreign city with my dad.” You can tell brief stories to set the stage to a bigger idea. Story #3 in the Tampa Bay “Insane. Invisible. In Danger.” series does that in just seven grafs. Surely you can do that!

4. Look, stupid!
Now, let me stress that I do not recommend that you actually start a blog article with this phrase.

Rather, this is a great way to kick off an article when you’re stuck for a starting point. I’ve used this to kick off many how-to and informative articles. I could have started this article with:

“Look, stupid!

“Writing the opening of a blog article isn’t that hard, but that doesn’t mean you can be lazy about it. You need to grab your reader from the very first words, which means you can’t just phone in the lede.”

I write “Look, stupid!” then write the lede, and then go back and delete those first two words. The opening gets me exasperated with the reader and I can adopt an “I-love-you-but-you’re-killing-me-Smalls” tone. The lede is forceful, direct, and gets straight to the point.

5. The mystery.
Build a mystery with your opening and promise to solve it for the reader sometime before the end. Make sure the mystery is enticing — you can help that along by telling a story — and that the payoff is worth it.

“I remember going on a road trip with a friend in college. We drove 1,000 miles west with no real destination in mind and no idea what we would find. We just knew we wanted to leave Indiana for a week. What we found — and who we picked up on the way — changed our lives and sent us careening off the carefully-laid plans our parents had made for us.”

Isn’t that exciting? Don’t you want to know where we went, what we found, and who we picked up? I’ll bet that if I started a blog post that way, you’d gobble up the entire article trying to find out all the answers to the questions.

Unfortunately, it’s here at the end of the piece, and I’ve run out of time, so I guess you’ll never know.

(Just kidding. I made that stuff up.)

There are already 7 million blog articles being published each day, so there’s no point in trying to match the same level of boring mediocrity as everyone else. Stop using those bad ledes to start a blog article, because they’re just making your work sound terrible. A good blog post starts with a good lede and builds from there.

Write great ledes and the rest will follow.

Photo credit: Creative_Tomek (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Understand Your Content Marketing ROI

I was asked recently about content marketing ROI, specifically around blogging and email marketing. I’m a big believer in the importance of content marketing over other forms of marketing (since I’m a professional content marketer), and I like to sing the praises of business blogging services and email marketing.

When I was trying to explain content marketing ROI, I only had a couple personal case studies to draw on, but they’re outliers. (More on them in a minute.) Instead, I pulled up statistics from several other content marketing and digital marketing sources.

  • Blog posts are statistically the most effective tool for building brand awareness, with 31% of B2B companies listing short articles as the highest-performing content in this respect (Content Marketing Institute)
  • B2B companies who blog consistently receive 67% more monthly leads than companies who don’t blog regularly (Demand Metric)
  • 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months (Hubspot)
  • 47% of B2B buyers consumed 3-5 pieces of content from a company before engaging with one of their sales reps (Demand Gen Report)
  • 95% of the B2B service and product buyers admit that they view content as a trustworthy marker when evaluating a business (Demand Gen Report)
  • 71% in the B2B industry review an organization’s blog during their buyer’s journey (Demand Gen Report)
  • On average, a company’s blog produces 67% more leads per month. (Demand Metric)
  • Costs 62% less than traditional marketing, generates 3x more leads (Demand Metric)
  • The return on investment for email marketing in 2018 stood at $42, which is an increase of $10 from the DMA’s previous report. (Direct Marketing Association UK)
  • The ROI for manufacturing can reach 1,372% (FrontPageSage’s own customer research)

“What’s YOUR Content Marketing ROI?”

I’m sometimes asked about my own content marketing ROI. That’s a little harder since I’m an outsourced vendor, and most companies won’t share their internal sales data with me. But I have a couple.

“Do you at least have a range or an estimate?” they’ll ask. I tell them this:

“In the early days of this agency, we worked with a construction equipment manufacturer that made $200 million per year in gross revenue. He was Internet-savvy and tracked the hell out of everything. He found that he got a 6% bump in his total sales as a direct result of our blogging services. That worked out to another $1 million per month in increased revenue.

“About the same time, we worked with a mystery shopping agency with two full-time employees and two part-timers. Their total sales were roughly $750,000 per year. After three years of writing 8 blog articles per month, they had tripled their business three times and grew to 27 full-time employees. They also landed a million-dollar contract for a national wireless company during our first year with them.

“So, our range of improvement can be anywhere from 6% to 900%.”

Of course, this is a bit frustrating since it’s a broad range, but I use it as an example to illustrate a few important points:

  • Your content marketing ROI is only as good as your actual content.
  • Quality rules over quantity, but you should still blog at least once a week. Don’t forsake consistency either.
  • There are a high number of variables that affect your content marketing ROI, anything from your field, your content, your competition, and how much Google updates its algorithms.
  • High-quality written content will always outperform mediocre content. Always.
  • A variety of content formats will outperform a single format. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • On the other hand, don’t rely solely on video. At this point of SEO development, videos help SEO, but not in the same way that written content does. Google still relies heavily on written content.

What about email marketing?

Email marketing has a number of different benefits — too many for me to go into here, but I can say this. Email marketing is a great marketing method because it’s the only one where potential customers have said, “Yes, I’d like to hear from you later. Here’s how you can reach me.”

  • The problem is, most email marketers abuse it by sharing poorly-written and created content. If you want high engagement, send out interesting stuff.
  • Some email marketers send too many messages. (I just unsubscribed from a new newsletter after getting four emails in four days. I don’t have time for that!)
  • This is the place to customize content. Segment your subscribers into different groups and offer them different content options. Bookriot.com has almost a couple dozen email newsletters each about different book genres, giveaways, and contests. This way, you’re not given one single email that appeals to everyone. I get only one email per week about the books I would want, and nothing about the books I don’t.
  • Your email list is all yours. If they wanted to, Twitter and Facebook could wipe out all your followers and fans. You can’t export that list or use it somewhere else. You can’t switch social networks and take all those followers and fans with you. But your email list is worth its weight in Bitcoin!

Your content marketing ROI is going to be a lot higher and easier to measure and manage than traditional marketing or even social media marketing. It can also give online advertising a run for its money because content marketing reaches people when they have a question or an interest. They’re thinking about buying, so they do a Google search to start their buying journey. If your blog content shows up on the Google search, then you’re in the hunt!

But if not, then you may have a problem.

Photo credit: 12571684 (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Pick ONLY One: Creative, Analytics, or Strategy

A friend recently posted a survey on LinkedIn that asked which of these three factors were most important to succeed in modern marketing: Data Analysis, Creative, or Strategy.

Or as I framed it for someone, take your marketing budget and divide it into four equal parts. Each of the first three areas gets 25% of the budget, but only one of them gets the remaining 25%. Which one do you pick?

Being a creative professional, I said the Creative was the most important. The analysts said Data Analysis, and the strategists said that was dumb and that I was correct.

Just kidding, the strategists said Strategy was the most important.

And of course, there were those predictable few who thought all worked hand-in-hand and they were equally important, and no parent should ever have a favorite child and blah blah blah.

A quick aside

Some people are bad at thought exercises. When you’re presented with one, the goal is to make you weigh the options, consider each one, and then pick the answer you believe is correct. You’re not committed to anything, and no one is going to judge you for your choice.

In a thought exercise, you don’t have the option of whining, “Oh, but they’re all equally important!” And you don’t get to come up with some other option. That’s weasel thinking by someone who couldn’t make a firm commitment if their life depended on it. If it were a real-life decision, I could see the importance of trying to find an equitable solution. But this isn’t that.

The point of a thought exercise is to think and make a choice, and then defend your choice. Ruminate on the results. Consider what would happen because of the choice you made. Try to predict the future based on what you chose.

Don’t be so wishy-washy about your decision. It won’t kill you to commit to an idea for two minutes.

Back to the article

My logic was this:

The Creative element is the most important in the marketing department because if you create mediocre content, a great strategy will only ensure that more people see your polished turd. And data analysis will tell you how many people actually saw it.

Bad or mediocre content won’t convert, it won’t create fans, it won’t move people down the sales funnel. They won’t sign up for your newsletter, they won’t follow you on Twitter and Instagram, and they won’t remember you when it comes time to make a purchase.

So do you really want to improve the number of people who see your content by putting all your money into the strategy element? And do you really want to know, down to the last decimal place, how many people thought your content was awful? Because data analysis has never sold anything, it only tells you what worked and what didn’t. It never tells you what will work, it only tells you what already worked, and then you can infer from the data that you should do it again.

I’ve told the story elsewhere of the data analyst who once got annoyed with me because I wrote about putting vehicle wraps on tournament fishing boats for a client. The client was known for doing vehicle wraps, as well as other commercial signage, and the boat wraps were something one of their franchisees was doing.

The analyst said, “No one has ever come to the website looking for boat wraps! Why would you waste the energy to make that?”

I said, “How much content do we have on boat wraps now?”

“Well, none.”

“That’s why no one has ever come looking for it.”

The following month, our boat wrap article was the second-most visited article on the entire blog, only behind the front page.

During our next meeting, I said, “Did you see this month’s numbers?”

The analyst said, “Yes, I did.”

“Did you see where the boat wraps article ranked?”

*angry silence*

I wrote another boat wrap article the following month and it stayed in the top 10 for a few months. I know, because I asked the analyst about it at each monthly meeting.

The big lesson I learned was that analytics should never, ever drive content, it should only measure what was done. Being a data-driven marketer means you’re a reactive marketer, not proactive. You’ll never try something new because the data hasn’t told you to try it.

For that reason alone, analytics has to be dropped from consideration for the extra 25% of our budget.

Choosing between creative and strategic elements of marketing

This is a tougher choice, and if I made a wishy-washy weasel choice, I would split the remaining 25% of my budget between these two areas. But that’s not possible, so I have to make a choice.

And yes, I will admit that I’m biased as a creative professional myself.

But I also believe that well-done content leads to more engagement than mediocre content. So if I have to choose between getting my work in front of 10,000 people with a 20% engagement or 50,000 people with a 2% engagement, I’ll take the smaller audience with the bigger engagement every time.

I see this a lot with self-published book authors on Twitter. These are the Twitter cheaters who grow their follower count to low six-figures, and then blast out message after message about “Buy my books! Buy my books!”

They don’t engage, they don’t have conversations, they don’t ask or answer questions. They just follow a bunch of people, get them to follow back, and then bombard them with nothing but advertisements.

They do all this work in gaining an audience, and then put out nothing of value or interest. If they at least put in some time and energy and created some interactive content, they’d probably have a lot more customers.

Instead, they focused completely on strategy and didn’t do anything at all for the Creative. Are their books any good? Who knows? Their ads were so bad, I didn’t want to find out. If anything, their content and strategy turned me off of their books.

They got a low six-figure audience, which is a great strategy, but couldn’t do anything with it. It’s like getting a high-powered car and then letting it sit in your driveway because you didn’t put any fuel into it.

So Strategy doesn’t get the remaining 25% either.

Which means Creative is the most important part of your marketing, and it gets the remainder of the budget. Which is what happens when Creative people are in charge of writing their own stories.

Bottom line

Two lessons: First, don’t be afraid of a thought exercise. It’s a survey that no one (except me) is going to remember in 24 hours, and no one will lambast you because of your choice. (Unless you gave a Kumbaya, “Why Can’t We All Get Along” answer, in which case you should be roundly mocked.)

Second, good creative work will do more for your successful marketing than the strategy or analytics ever could.

Put more of your marketing budget into getting good creative work. Come up with the best strategy you can for the money you have. And then look at your analytics and see what’s performing the best. If you’re a small business or have a limited product line, it’s not like you need a Ph.D. data scientist anyway, so don’t spend more than you have to.

What do you think? Where would you put the remaining 25% of your marketing budget? Make a choice, defend your answer, and don’t give me any of this “they’re all equally important” nonsense. Commit and defend!

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Writers Don’t Need Special Fancy Writing Apps

I’m a bit jealous of all the cool apps that other creative professionals get to use to do their job. Graphic designers get Photoshop and InDesign, or they can go low budget and use GIMP and Sketch.

Photographers get to use all this cool technology to take great pictures. Even podcasters and music producers can have these great big studios, digital recorders, soundboards, and editing software.

All I get is a word processor program on my laptop.

To be fair, all those other pieces of technology that the designers, photographers, and producers use are pretty expensive.

My photographer friends need a pricey camera, expensive lenses, and all kinds of lighting. My graphic designer friends need a beefed-up computer and a monthly software subscription. Meanwhile, I can do my job with a golf pencil and the back of an envelope.

But at the same time, all I get is a lousy word processor? Why don’t I get any cool tools?

It’s not like I can upgrade as I get better, switching to a better word processor. A beginning writer can sit down with a copy of Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice, or they can even go online and use Google Docs. And the pros use the exact same programs.

I started writing with Apple’s MacWrite program, sticking with it as it spun off to ClarisWorks, and stayed with it when it became AppleWorks. Then Apple switched to Pages, and I went right along with it. So I’m vastly familiar with Apple’s offerings for word processing. I can tell you that not much has changed over the years. There are new functions and capabilities, but at its heart, it’s still just a writing program — the new functions don’t help people write better.

I sometimes wish we had cool writing apps that made the same technological leaps and bounds as Photoshop and Illustrator, but the ability to create written words hasn’t really progressed much beyond a keyboard and a screen. That’s a major change from a typewriter and paper, but other than that, we don’t get the cool tools.

Of course, we don’t need them. I see plenty of “distraction-free writing apps” that promise to elevate our writing and help us create a better writing environment. Except we don’t need it.

Yes, a simplified word processor would be nice, but if that’s all you really needed, just use the Text program that came free with your Mac or Windows’ free Notepad program.

You don’t need some fancy app that makes writing sound like a mysterious, mystical process that can only be improved with the right kind of technology.

That’s like saying I’ll be a better writer if I just switched pens. Or that Agatha Christie could have been a better writer if she had switched from her Remington Home Portable No. 2 typewriter.

Writing apps do not improve writing skills.

Writing tools do not improve writing skills.

There are only two things that improve writing: Reading and writing.

If you want to be a better writer, then write. Practice your writing skills every day, even when you’re just writing an email. Work to make it the best email you can. Don’t just poke around and half-ass that email — that’s your practice right there, and if you don’t practice like you want to perform, you won’t be able to perform when it counts.

And when you’re not writing, you should be reading books. But don’t read blog articles and don’t read business books. Read widely and from a variety of authors and a variety of subjects.

An app won’t make you better. It may simplify the screen you’re looking at, it may cut out your distractions, but you’re still using the one skill that isn’t affected by the tools.

That’s why writers are different from other creative professionals. If someone wanted to be a professional graphic designer, their tools will make a big difference. A powerful computer makes a bigger difference to a robust graphic design program; a little Chromebook won’t cut it.

But a writer can use a Chromebook and Google Docs and function just fine. They can produce the same quality work as a $7,000 Mac Pro and 4K 40″ curved monitor. It won’t make a difference to your work, not in the same way it will to a graphic designer.

And it won’t be any better than what you can do with a $1.29 Pilot G2 pen and a Moleskine notebook.

So don’t get sucked into the hype of needing special writing apps to improve your work. Just focus on reading and the quality of your writing, even during regular work time.

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The Future of Content Marketing Will Not Be Different

What is the future of content marketing?

I’m often asked, what will content marketing look like in the future?

People are surprised with my answer: Just like it does now.

It’s not going to be different, we’re not going to see some major new way of “consuming content” (I really loathe that phrase!), and there’s not going to be some new method of content delivery that we’re going to have to learn.

Because when you look at content at its barest essence, it’s just words, images, and sounds. That’s what it has always been, that’s what it will always be.

It was words, images, and sounds when cave dwellers drew on cave walls and grunted their delight. It was words, images, and sounds when the Ancient Greeks passed down knowledge with stories or told stories with plays. It was words, images, and sounds — well, not so much sound — when the first ever movie of a galloping horse was made or the world’s oldest surviving film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was made.

It was words, images, and sounds when newspapers, radio, and television all had their heyday and when they were replaced by blogs, videos, and podcasts.

Content marketing is no different from any other form of communication in our history. We’ve used words, images, and sounds to communicate the entire time. But the only thing that has changed has been the medium we use — the way the content gets consumed read, watched, or heard.

Content creation tools don’t matter

Eighty years ago, we had newspapers, radio shows, and movie newsreels. Television became popular 70 years ago, launching the Golden Age of Television.

And now, everything you could ever want — including samples of old newspapers, radio shows, newsreels, and TV shows — are all available on your laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

You can read about how those media were made eighty years ago, or you can make and share a 21st-century version of it for other people to read, watch, or hear.

Because it’s still the same old words, images, and sounds.

And it won’t matter one bit how those are made. The secret to doing well at content marketing is to be able to do words, images, and sounds well.

You have to write well. You have to sound good. You have to know how to frame a photo or a video. You have to create things that are interesting. You have to know how to tell a story. You have to know how to capture your audience at the very moment they click your link.

The tools don’t matter.

I’ll say it again: THE TOOLS DON’T MATTER!

Years ago, I used to argue with people who claimed: “there’s no such thing as social media experts because the tools are too new.”

My response then is the same as it is now: I don’t have to be a tools expert, I have to be a communication expert. I have to be good at conveying a message in my chosen medium. The tools can change from week to week, and it won’t affect me one bit because I don’t have to master the tool, I just have to master the craft.

Think of it another way. A carpenter that has spent his entire life swinging a hammer isn’t less effective just because you gave him a pneumatic nailer. A chef doesn’t forget how to cook because you switch out her gas stove to an electric one. And writers aren’t suddenly reduced to creating doggerel just because they switched pens.

So when people think you need specific Mailchimp or Constant Contact experience to be an effective email marketer, that’s wrong.

When people think you need to know how to use Hubspot or WordPress to be an effective blogger, that’s completely wrong.

It’s like saying a photographer is not a good photographer because she uses Nikon and not Canon. Or that a writer is not a good writer because they use Apple Pages and not Microsoft Word.

The tool does not create quality content. WordPress and Hubspot don’t make you write well. Constant Contact doesn’t make you a good email marketer. The latest video camera doesn’t make you a good videographer any more than a great camera makes you a good photographer.

The tools do not make the artist. A good artist can make good art with crappy tools, but a bad artist cannot make good art with good tools.

So it doesn’t matter what happens to the tools: WordPress may go away. Hubspot may fall into the sea. YouTube could be eaten by a pack of hyenas.

None of that will change how content creators make their art.

If WordPress were to go away, bloggers aren’t going to be thrown for a loop or cast out on the scrap heap. We’ll just shrug our shoulders and continue to tell good stories on the new distribution method. And blogging itself won’t go away, it will just be called something else.

Podcasting won’t go away because there will be other ways to deliver episodic information and entertainment via audio distribution.

Videos won’t go away because — well, video’s just never going to go away. In fact, it just surpassed blogging and infographics as the most commonly used form of content marketing. (I’m still a little salty about it, thank you very much.)

The artists and creators will still have a way to make and distribute their work, even if the tools for that distribution go away, change, or die completely.

Remind me how is this about the future of content marketing again

My point is, when you ask about the future of content marketing, just remember, the core elements of content marketing — words, images, and sounds — are never going to change. We’re still going to read, we’re still going to watch videos and look at pictures, and we’re still going to listen to music and information.

The channels will change, the methods of production will change, and even the popularity of the content formats will change. (Freakin’ video!) But the need for quality content will never change. That’s the one constant you can count on.

So if you’re in the content creation business, just focus on improving your craft. Become the best creator you can. Learn your art so you can be one of the best creators around. Worry less about the technology, because that won’t affect whether you’re good at your job. And when the method changes, you’ll already know what you need to do.

Photo credit: Steve Shook (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)