In the spirit of a true Yankee, if you were to open the door to my grandfather’s shed, you’d find rows of rust-tinged coffee cans filled with screws, nails, nuts, and bolts. Some crates are filled with cut-off bits of wood leftover from who knows how long ago. There are probably a couple of appliances that don’t work but still have some usable parts.
Shirts with unmendable holes fill a bucket to be used as rags and half-empty paint cans are stacked along the wall.
Gramps had a career as a mechanic and was always fixing this or that around the house too. You just never knew when that bit of spare chain link would be needed to fix the chicken run or a wood block to level out the picnic table.
When I think about the definition of a Yankee, I don’t think of its historical use for people of a geographic region, I think about the qualities that make up the Yankee spirit. I picture my grandfather: resourceful, hardworking, thrifty, clever, direct, helpful, and ready to share a great story.
Yankee spirit approach to storytelling
Those qualities can also translate well to content marketing.
Add the Yankee spirit to your storytelling by being helpful and direct, frugal with your words, and thrifty with its uses.
Think about the best way you can be helpful. What knowledge does your business have that no one else does better? What are you an expert on? Find your niche and build your content strategy around it.
Consider what your potential customers are struggling with. What are the pain points?
Your content marketing should show that you understand the challenges they face and that you know how to improve the situation.
Pull all these pieces together with a good yarn.
You may already have the parts for these in your “shed.” Case studies and testimonials from your past projects provide direction for complications your customers are looking to address.
If you’ve already got a Yankee spirit, you’re probably humble about what you know, but by sharing helpful advice, you can showcase your position as an industry expert.
Straightalkin’ folks
There’s no need to overcomplicate matters when you’re creating your content. A Yankee never uses four words when one works just as well. Plain, straightforward language is the best way to get your message out.
That doesn’t mean you need to dumb down your writing, but you should consider the reading level of your audience. Most Americans can understand texts written at or below an eighth-grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. Understanding your audience’s background can also inform the readability level.
Even for the most educated audiences, you’ll want to keep things basic. Do you remember your English teacher warning you that she could tell you used the thesaurus when writing your essay? Sending customers to a dictionary is a sure way to lose their attention.
AI detectors can be more likely to flag content as AI-generated when there is a stiff or formal tone and when there is unusual word usage, too.
To avoid this, pretend you’re explaining what you do to a friend or your grandma.
Thinking thrifty
Once you’ve got your story content sorted out, you need to put it to work for you. Omnichannel marketing embraces a Yankee thriftiness in creating content in multiple forms that speaks to your brand identity.
Omnichannel marketing is essential to crafting a comprehensive and integrated customer experience. Beyond simply posting on multiple sites, an omnichannel strategy reaches your customers, and potential customers, where they are.
By harnessing a Yankee spirit, you make the most out of what you have, planning ways to shape a variety of content from a single source.
For example, a well-planned and produced video can also yield an article or blogs, photography, audio assets, and social media posts all without the need for multiple rounds of interviews, photographers, and social managers.
With some advance planning and Yankee thinking, you can reformat source material to highlight your brand story across media channels.
This process makes the most of your resources and time, allowing them to get back to running your business.
Talk to the experts if you think you could use some Yankee ingenuity to grow.