How to write a Nut Graf

Very early in any brand article you write for a client’s prospects or customers, usually about the third or fourth paragraph, you will need to drop in what journalists call the Nut Graf.

The Nut Graf has three primary purposes:

1. It provides a transition from the lead paragraph to the body of the story.
2. It tells readers why the story is timely and pertinent.
3. It encourages the target audience to continue reading.

This is not time to be coy, creative or cute. What you want to write is a direct, tight summary of what your story is about. This summary will serve as your guide for composing the rest of the story. It will also help your readers quickly assess whether your story interests them and determine if they should continue reading it.

Keep your Nut Graf to one paragraph of less than 50 words. You can break it up into two or even three sentences.

Collection and assembly

Probably the easiest way to write the Nut Graf is to collect the individual parts, then assemble them:

• WHO are the specific customers you want to reach? Make it clear in the Nut Graf:  This story is for you.
• WHAT is problem your story is solving? Again, be both clear and specific. Imply that you are making a promise: If you read this story, it will show you how to solve this problem. The “what” usually includes one or more of the keywords from your SEO research.
• WHEN and WHERE is the problem most likely to occur? This is your news peg. It explains why the customer must read your story right now.

For example, in my story about diagnostic testing for West Nile virus in horses:

• The WHO are veterinarians who work with horses.
• The WHAT is the need to prevent, detect and diagnose the disease that is caused by the West Nile virus.
• The WHEN is the summer, when mosquitos are most common and the disease is most likely to spread to horses.
• The WHERE is the United States.

When I assembled the parts, I got this Nut Graf:, which I also used as the lead:

“Summer is when the West Nile virus poses the greatest threat to the health of horses in the United States. It’s important for veterinarians to work with horse owners this time of year to prevent, detect and accurately diagnose a potential infection.”

It’s simple, direct and just 42 words. There’s nothing “creative” about it. (Like David Ogilvy, I generally avoid “creative” approaches. They tend to confuse readers. When confused, readers rarely try harder. They just quit reading.)

Here’s an example from a web story from Cosmopolitan magazine headlined: “Want to get rid of your cellulite? These 9 smooth operators can help!”

• The WHO are women who want to make their bodies more attractive.
• The WHAT is their desire to hide the cellulite that may accumulate on their butts, thighs and stomachs.
• The WHEN is the approach of bikini season. As an additional news peg, the story references a recent hit song by the pop group Black Eyed Peas, “My Humps.”
• The WHERE is the beach.

When assembled, the Nut Graf looks like this:

“We're 100 percent sure women everywhere loved Fergie's song, "My humps, my lovely lady lumps," but 90 percent of them probably sing a different tune when it comes to actual lumps aka cellulite. But while there's still no cure (what is taking so long?!), you can at least camouflage the "orange-peel" look of skin temporarily. We suggest slathering up now, and your butt, thighs, and stomach, should be in top shape (with the help of eating right and exercising!) by the time bikini season rolls around.”

This is certainly longer and more creative than the first example. (After all, it is Cosmo.) But it remains tight, easy to read, and only 86 words.

Here’s another example, this one from a Guns & Ammo web story headlined, “How to pick the best zombie pistol.”

• The WHO are all gun owners.
• The WHAT is choosing the right weapon.
• The WHEN AND WHERE is a future, post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested Earth. This news peg comes from popular culture, especially among millennials who fully expect a zombie invasion in their lifetimes. (They aren’t kidding.)

Here’s the Nut Graf:

“While there can be no denying that rifles and shotguns have distinct advantages in both power and reach, it is the handiness and convenience that makes the handgun indispensable when the excrement hits the wind generator and the dead start walking the earth.”

Again, this one is tight and direct, a little fun and creative, and still only 43 words.

There’s a reason Mark Ragan calls these stories “refrigerator journalism.” You’ve likely clipped out or printed out stories just like these and keep them for later use. You’ve probably shared them with friends and peers. They work.

Learning to identify Nut Grafs in the wild

 Go to your local newsstand and buy a handful of magazines that specialize in “refrigerator journalism.” There are scores of them. You may even subscribe to a few.  If in doubt, check the magazine covers for headlines with phrases like “How to ..,” “Top 10 ways to …” or “Our guide to …”.

Read the stories inside those publications and try to identify the Nut Graf. Break the Nut Grafs down into the Who, the What, the When and the Where.

Some Nut Grafs are obvious. Others aren’t. But every refrigerator story is going to tell you within the first five paragraphs who the story is designed for, what problem it solves, and when and where the information is relevant.

The more of these stories you study, the easier it will get when it comes to writing your own Nut Grafs.

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Here are the presentation slides that go with this text.

How to make your copy more efficient to write, edit, read and optimize from Rusty Cawley

Four steps to discovering your newscraft story

Here's an excerpt from my latest book, "Newscraft: How to produce brand-journalism content that attracts customers and sells more product."

Getting through the research phase may seem tedious, but it is essential. The good news is this process will shorten greatly if you write several times for the same client, or if you work in a niche like health, or fashion, or finance.

But let’s assume we have a new client in an unexplored field. How do we approach the research?

My approach to research is adapted from the three years I worked as a financial reporter for the Dallas Business Journal.  I took on the beat knowing little or nothing about the world of finance. By the time I left the DBJ to join Levenson Public Relations, I had written extensively about commercial banks, thrifts, credit unions, investment banks, merchant banks, venture capital, stocks, bonds, initial public offerings, reverse IPOs, leveraged buyouts, angel capital, equity events, turnarounds, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Each time I wrote about one of those subjects for the first time, I had to bone up on the subject. It was more difficult then than it is today.  We didn’t have Google (though we did have Yahoo and Alta Vista). We didn’t have Wikipedia. So I would usually search for whatever I could find online (usually scraps of background information I had to knit together into a whole). I would also look for books on Amazon and documents on government sites.  Much of the financial world is highly regulated, so there tends to be a lot of background material available from state and federal agencies.

Once I had a working knowledge, I would look for an expert in the subject who would be willing to brief me over a lunch or over drinks.  Only then did I feel ready to pursue an actual news story on that particular subject.

Home-court advantage

As a brand journalist, you have a major advantage. A lot of that information is yours for the asking from your client’s archives and your client’s in-house experts.  Whatever you can’t get from your client is now readily available through Google and Wikipedia.

Usually your clients know the product they want you to promote. They often already know the audience they want to target. You can get about 80 percent of what you need just by studying whatever the marketing department has already generated: studies, fact sheets, brochures, white papers, Power Points, advertisements, radio commercials, TV commercials and such.

Rarely does a client ask the brand journalist to generate these materials. Most often, the client is just looking for you to present the most important, most interesting, more pertinent, more persuasive, most saleable elements of all this information in a way that most appeals to customers.

So ask. Then go study.

When I’m going through these materials, I’m using a highlighter and I’m taking notes.  What am I looking for?

The four goals of your research

When you start your research, there are four primary things you looking to find:

1. A general understanding of the problems that the product solves, and how it solves them.
2. A general understanding of the product’s market, and how the product is matching up against the competition, and any under-served niches within the market that the client’s marketing may have missed or ignored.
3. A specific understanding of the wants and needs of the product’s customers: What problems do they have that the product can solve?
4. A specific understanding of what your clients want to accomplish with their story: What specific audience do they want to influence and what action do they want that audience to take?

Once you understand your goals, you may not find the research quite so tedious. I actually enjoy research. I act like an archeologist, digging interesting artifacts out of stacks of company materials, and then arranging what I find into a story that will capture an audience. That’s what journalists do. We dig out stories and put them on display. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, and certainly more satisfying than writing news releases.

I approach my research in four phases.  You’ll get about 80 percent of what you need from reading and watching whatever the company has generated about the product for both internal and external audiences. You’ll get the other (and vital) 20 percent from talking to people in and around the company: the product’s designers, its marketing chief, its PR team, its copywriters and designers and its salesmen.

So here are the four steps I use to gather my research:

First: Study every document you can about the product, both internal and external.

The process of creating a new product – from research to development to production to marketing – creates a stream of materials: reports, white papers, brochures, advertisements, slide decks, web pages, research materials, speeches, presentations, and more.  Get your hands on everything you can and study it diligently.

Even a new product will produce volumes of market research and product reports. Get them. Read them.

David Ogilvy, one of the great copywriters of the 1950s, started his research with the product. He would get copies of everything his client had produced about a product the client wanted to advertise.  He would hole up in his study at home and just read, read, read.  His goal was to internalize the information until he saw a benefit he could hone into an appeal that would sell the product.

“The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it,” he says in “Ogilvy on Advertising,” a book you should definitely read. “When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across the statement that ‘at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.’ This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.”

You can find Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royse ad online.  It is generally considered a classic of 1960s advertising. You should study this and other Ogilvy advertisements carefully, because we will apply several of his techniques to creating the newscraft story.

Second: Ask a lot of questions about the product.

Document all its features and its benefits.

A feature is a specific aspect of the product.  A benefit is what it does for the customer. (A car may have a V-8 engine (feature), but the benefit is that it allows the customer to drive like a bat out of hell.)

Work hard to identify the most important benefit. But keep in mind that “most important” can change with the target customer.

Look for qualities like reliability, durability, economy, luxury and efficiency. How do those qualities stack up against the completion?

Is this a niche product or a mass product? What qualities does it have that the competition has missed?

Try to find someone is the company who is an expert on this specific product. Talk to the guy to lead the product’s development, or to someone who is selling the product in the field. They know a lot of things that never shows up in the marketing materials.

Third: Ask about the target audiences.

  

Who buys this product? Who is it meant to serve? What motivates customers to buy this product over the competition?

Remember, you are looking for something interesting that you can present as either a How-To story or a Ways-To story. Look for anything out of the ordinary. Are customers successfully using the product in unexpected ways to cure unexpected problems? Is there a problem the product solves that hasn’t been promoted heavily? Look for outliers. They can be gold.

But don’t just listen to the folks at headquarters. Go outside. Talk to the customers. Definitely talk to the companny’s frontline sales pros. They may have found uses or qualities that the client’s marketing department has missed entirely.

Branding pioneers Jack Trout and Al Ries call this “going down to the front.”  This means to go into the mind of the customer by observing behavior and asking questions.

“You are looking for an angle,” Trout and Ries say in their book “Bottom-Up Marketing,” one of their lesser-known books, but one you should own. “A fact, an idea, a concept, an opinion on the part of the prospect that conflicts with positions held by your competitors.”

The angle you are looking for is a common or emerging problem that customers can solve using your client’s product or service.

That angle is the nugget around which you can build your story

.

Tony Schwartz, a highly regarded broadcast copywriter during the 1960s, called this process “pre-search.”  The goal, he said, is to find out as much as possible about a specific audience: Their dreams, their desires, their problems, their opinions and their attitudes. This information, he said, helps you to hone a message that resonates with this audience. If a message resonates with an audience, then the audience is far more likely to agree with the message and act upon it.

By the way, Schwartz wrote a book you should have in your library and you should study often: “The Responsive Chord.” It is out of print, but you can buy a used copy online.

Fourth: Find out what your client expects from your article.

Have a candid discussion with your clients. Ask point blank: What do you want customers to do after they read this story?” What is the call to action? Do we want them to:

• Race down to the store and buy the product?
• Ask for more information via a toll-free number or a web site?
• Share the story with their friends and family?
• Embrace the brand?
• Try using the product in a new way?
• Buy the product in greater quantities?

You have to know what the client wants your story to accomplish. Without that information, you can’t judge your success. You can’t hit a target you can’t see.

As a brand journalist, you will apply both Schwartz’s and Ogilvy’s approaches to research.  You will carefully study the audience that your client wants to reach. You will also carefully study the product your client wants to sell.

Your job is to find a connection between the two. You have to find something in the product that resonates with customers. Something they will find interesting. Something they will want to act upon right now. And you will have to find a news peg that will catch the customers’ attention and cause them to want to read your story right now.

Creating that connection between the product and the customer is everything: Catch their attention. Spark their interest. Keep their interest from beginning to end. Inspire them to act on what they learn.

That’s the job of the newscraft.

Is your content team creating marketing tools -- or selling tools?

Brendan Cournover at the Content Marketing Institute says: 

If you ask me, a great strategy does both. Think about all the ways salespeople rely on content to sell:

• Via prospecting emails

• During live meetings and sales calls (hello PowerPoint!)

• As part of post-meeting follow-ups

• With updates for existing customers to encourage renewals

So where is the majority of this content coming from? Ideally, it’s the marketing team. One problem is that too many people still equate content marketing with being strictly “non-promotional.” It’s true that thought leadership content like this is great for attracting new audiences — but really? That’s all you’re going to use content for?

Now on Kindle: My new book for brand journalists and other content marketers, "Newscraft'

My new book is now available on Kindle.

It's called, "Newscraft: How to produce brand-journalism content that attracts customers and sells more products." You can sample the book on Amazon. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow it for free for the next 90 days. If you own an iPad or a iPhone, you can read it via a Kindle app.

I've occasionally blogged about newscraft over the last few months. This is my first attempt to pull together my thinking on it.

In a nutshell: Newscraft is a hybrid that blends traditional journalism methods, tested copywriting techniques and proven SEO strategies to create a 600-800 word story that attracts highly targeted readers (online or offline), converts readers into prospects, and helps your client to move products out the door.

Newscraft is an approach I've developed over the last two years and one that I use in my daily practice with my clients. It works as well for B2B and B2C.  It is also extremely flexible. You can use it to create web copy, flyers, brochures, video scripts, live demonstrations and more.

Check it out. It's just $2.99 (cheap).

If you read it, please send me your feedback.

How to manage your social media from Twitter to Instagram in 30 minutes a day (infographic)

Atlanta-based Pardot offers a software service that automate business-to-business marketing. So it makes all the sense in the world for the company to create content that shows customers how to get more out of that service.

This is classic "how-to" journalism. What Mark Ragan calls "refrigerator journalism." What I've started to call "newscraft," which is the subject of a Kindle book I plan to release in August.

In short, newscraft is a hybrid that blends traditional journalism methods, tested copywriting techniques and modern SEO strategies to create a 600-800 word story that attracts highly targeted readers (online or offline), converts prospects into customers, and helps to move products out the door.

Or, in the case of Pardot, a really neat infographic that -- unlike all too many infographics -- is actually useful. It solves a common problem that customers face, and makes Pardot's service a key element in solving that problem. It's an outstanding example from which all brand journalists and content marketers can learn.

Also note: Pardot made it easy to share its infographic by including an embed code. Very smart.

Embedded from Pardot

Want more readers? Write stories and headlines that offer clear benefits

From the Function Writing Group blog::

Want people to read your post? Tell them what they’re going to get out of it. 

Like a gorilla swimming laps in Lake Michigan, useful headlines are easy to spot:

• How-To’s
• List Posts (Like, say, 6 Ways To Teach Your Gorilla To Swim)
• What Blank Means to Blank 

Headlines used most frequently by copywriters, bloggers, content managers and anyone else who wants people to read their work immediately convey benefit, usefulness and education. I use these all the time. 

People are busy and are constantly asked to manage a surplus of information every day. Let’s make life easy for new readers.

Brand journalists: David Pogue shows us how to construct a great Top 10 list

In this video, New York Times tech columnist David Pogue demonstrates for brand journalists how to create a useful and interesting Top 10 list:



The only difference is that a brand journalist would design a Top 10 list where each point relates back (directly or indirectly) to the client's product or service.

(Perhaps it goes without saying, but "Top 10 list" is a general term. Shoot for a minimum of three things on your list and make 10 your maximum. Anything in between will work fine.)

Why readers love lists -- and why brand journalists should love to write them

Blogger Jeff Bullas has found out what David Ogilvy discovered in the 1960s and Guy Kawasaki echoed in the 2010s: People like to read and share lists. It's an invaluable lesson for the brand journalist.

Bullas writes on ragan.com:

I can hear some of you yawning. The reality is, in a time-poor world, giving people a list of things to do—for example, 10 tips for creating a great video—is the type of headline and article people click on. Packaging and chunking information tells your readers you won't waste their time. Lists are also easy to read and view. This type of content works well. 

Mark Regan calls this "refrigerator journalism." Reader's Digest built an empire on this format. David Wallechinsky created a series of best sellers in the 1970s with it.

Back when I reported for the Dallas Business Journal, our most popular and anticipated annual product was ... The Book of Lists.  We charged $35 per copy. It was that in demand.

My advice on writing lists for any brand journalist:

1. Learn it.
2. Live it.
3. Love it.