‘Dear customer’ – a sure-fire way to defeat writer’s block

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

When you’re tasked with writing content for a business, one of your biggest challenges may be a fear of the blank page and the question, ‘Where do I start?’ 

My advice is to imagine someone has asked you a specific question and it’s your job to provide a detailed answer.

In a business marketing context, the best person to imagine asking the question is usually a customer or prospect.

Do you already have a list of questions that your customers typically ask about your product, service or industry? If not, do you know your customers well enough to imagine what they might ask?

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a financial adviser in a wealth firm. New clients or qualified prospects might ask questions such as:

• Why should I use a financial adviser?

• What’s the cost of financial advice?

• What does a financial adviser actually do?

• Can you quantify the real benefits of ongoing financial advice?

• Can a financial adviser lose me money?

• How can I find the best financial adviser for me?

If you write a detailed answer to each of these six questions, you’ll have six separate articles or blog posts.

Not only that, but each article will invariably spawn further content.

For instance, your article in response to the question, ‘What does a financial adviser actually do?’, may include a list of services that a financial adviser typically offers, such as:

• Creating a savings plan

• Designing a household budget

• Providing advice on investment options

• Managing investments

• Creating a debt management plan

• Assessing insurance needs

• Helping to determine how to optimise retirement income

• Assisting with estate planning needs.

That’s, potentially, another eight articles. If each of the original six articles has eight bullet points that can be turned into further articles, you’ll have 48 article ideas to begin with.

When you begin writing one of these articles, couch it as a direct response to a direct question from a customer or prospect. Imagine you’re in a café or bar with a prospect who asks you, point blank, ‘How can a financial adviser help me to create a savings plan?’

Write the first thing that comes into your head in response to this question. And keep writing until you’ve answered in some detail. Don’t worry about the quality at this stage. Just keep writing.

When you’ve written 500, 800 or perhaps even 1,000 words, put it away. Do something else and come back to your draft article a day or two later.

You might discover, then, that the quality of your writing is not great. That’s OK. It’s meant to be rough at this stage. That’s what editing is for.

You can now spend an hour or two fixing your structure, grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation. Take an hour or two to check whether you should add some third-party perspectives or insights from independent research. Then spend a final hour on your headline, making sure you’re pitching your content in a way that will attract the attention of the right audiences.

By imagining that your content is a verbal response to a question from a real person – a customer or prospect – you’ll not only write more quickly and freely than you might otherwise do, but the tone of voice in your content is likely to be more conversational and readable than it would otherwise be. 

That’s a good thing.

Want to find out more about improving your written content? Contact me to see how I can help.