Aristotle’s Guide to Better Content Marketing

We’re obsessed with the culture of the new, and rightly so. After all, we work on the bleeding edge of technology, of business innovation, and, in a certain sense, of thought. But one place we’re really not leading the pack in, one place that we’re (arguably) decades, centuries, or even millennia behind, is content creation.

It’s now pretty widely accepted that “all businesses must become publishers." And, a a result, millions of pieces of content are turned loose in the wild each year, and the majority of them stagnate, earning 3-4 clicks and a couple of social engagements, and disappearing as fast as they arrived.

Many of us blame our failures on major saturation of our content distribution channels--social media, blogs, dissemination tools like Outbrain, Revcontent, Disqus, Zemanta--but the truth is that we’re not nearly as good at writing as we are at marketing.

Which isn’t to say that we’re bad writers. It’s just to say that we don’t get writing for an audience.

Yes, we’re skilled in building audience personas, but when it comes to legitimately engaging an audience, talking to them in a way they find useful, meaningful, and shareworthy, we’re lost. But we don’t have to be. We just need to look to the father of rhetoric [read: persuasive, engaging writing], Aristotle, for guidance.

Aristotle’s Guide to Better Content Marketing

1. Great information is meaningless without background.For Aristotle (and hell, for any of the great persuasive writers that have come since 385 BCE), information is half the battle (or less). To get readers excited about your content, really fired up about what you’re saying, you have to do more than deliver a listicle with a joke in the beginning. Introductions, especially, are a place to bring your audience close to you, to make them feel the problem that you’re solving. That way, when you get to your solution, they need it.


2. Your particular audience should determine how you write, down to the comma. Different industries (and audiences) don’t just use different jargon; they talk to each other differently. In Aristotle’s formulation, there are 3 categories of things people are persuaded by: logic, emotion, and status. Knowing what mix of these is appropriate for your audience probably isn’t in your current buyer persona, but it’s something you absolutely need to be conscious of. The right information delivered in the wrong way may as well be wrong.


3. All writing is part of a larger conversation. I hate to break it to you, but there’s a 0.00001% chance that the content you’re creating is paradigm-shifting. Approaching your content like it’s the only piece on the block that really knows the secret to anything hurts your credibility and turns off readers who’ve found you in a slew of other pieces on the same topic. Remember that knowledge is incremental; your pieces are small, specific steps toward larger successes.


4. Know what the larger conversation is about . A piece on “Why you should adopt X business practices” can be a hit if it’s something few others are talking about. But, if all the other publishers have already agreed on that and moved on to “the best way to implement it,” you’re not going to get much traction. Familiarizing yourself with Aristotle’s stasis theory can help you think about the “state of the conversation” surrounding your content, which will, in turn, ensure you’re talking about the relevant parts of your chosen subject.

But once we get it right (and we will), we’ll bring content marketing up to the edge with us, drive more engagement, and help our businesses win.