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Copywriting: Is Your Content a Purple Cow?

A purple cow standing out in a field of other cows.

Could three questions really help you get more compelling stories for your website content and content marketing? Communications Consultant Christine Nelson uses her journalism mojo to find those great stories hiding among your professionals and your work with clients. If your content marketing could use better storytelling, this is a must-see video.


If you prefer to read this content, the video transcript is below.

An accountant I interviewed quite a few years ago told me a story about slinging pizzas for his client. He had stopped into the restaurant on a very busy night. He wanted to help, and that night the client needed him to make pizzas. And so he did!

You can bet the client was grateful and stayed with that CPA. And that’s a Purple Cow story.

Purple cow is defined by Seth Godin, a US entrepreneur and bestselling author, as delivering a remarkable experience with your product or service. It’s fresh. It’s unexpected. It’s a first.

But mostly we get brown cows when we visit websites…the same old “quality service and dedicated team and responsive delivery”…and it’s why most firms can’t get lead conversion on their websites.

What if, instead, you were able to stand apart from the brown cows? Few professionals do it because it’s easier to talk about your services and not your extraordinary experiences for clients.

You need to find the real story behind the services.

Just this week, I was talking to a professional about audit services. You might think it’s the brownest cow there is. But as I asked more questions, this auditor got pretty animated. He wasn’t talking about audits. He was talking about the outcome his clients wanted and how the audited financial statements took them there.

I want to hear and write that story.  Don’t you?

To get started, here is a simple formula I use to draw out that purple cow story. Ask these three questions:

Who has it helped?

Why does it matter?

Why do others need that kind of solution?

Answering these questions gets you out of the brown cow writing and into a more direct answer to the solutions that your website’s visitors are searching for. Try it with your next eblast or blog post, and send me the link here at Ingenuity for a quick Purple Cow review!

CONTACT US AT INGENUITY ABOUT BUSINESS GHOST WRITING SERVICES

See an example of technical engineering data transformed into our client’s project success story.