Benefits of cursing

Frankly, we do give a damn: improving patient outcomes with swearing

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Arch Physiother
v.12; 2022
PMC8928588

Arch Physiother. 2022; 12: 6.

Published online 2022 Mar 17. doi: 10.1186/s40945-022-00131-8

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Background

Words can change the way a patient thinks, feels, and performs. Swearing, or uttering a word that is considered taboo, is an often-ignored part of our language, even though over 50% of the population swears “sometimes” or “often”. If used correctly, within a biopsychosocial approach to care, swearing has the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes.

Discussion

Swearing can create tighter human bonds and enhance the therapeutic alliance between a patient and a physical therapist. Improvements in social pain, physical pain tolerance, and physical pain threshold can occur by strategic swearing by our patients. Even physical performance measures, such as power and force could be enhanced if patients swear.

Conclusion

Although the mechanism by which swearing is effective is unclear, swearing deserves attention in the physical therapy setting based on evidence indicating potential positive effects on patient outcomes.

Keywords: Swearing, Power, Force, Pain, Biopsychosocial

We were first introduced to the quote, “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”, in a previous Viewpoint, which discusses how the words used by physical therapists have the capacity to either heal or cause harm [1]. Like drugs, words have an ability to change the way another person thinks, feels, and performs. As physical therapists managing patients within a biopsychosocial approach, the language used may be just as important as, if not more important than, any examination finding or intervention.

Swearing, or uttering a word that is considered taboo, is an often-ignored part of our language due to the controversial nature of the topic and the potential negative consequences of swearing. In 1901, Patrick [2] concluded that swearwords are primarily used by soldiers, sailors, laborers, uneducated people, and criminals, and men make up the majority of these social groups. While swearing has been considered a predominately masculine activity, women now tend to swear as much, or even more often, then men [3]. Since swearing is considered taboo, these words are usually judged as shocking, and the swearer may be considered antisocial and offensive. Consequently, swearing can negatively impact how the swearer is perceived by others, which may lead to social isolation and depression. In groups of women with rheumatoid arthritis or breast cancer, Robbins et al. [4] found that swearing was related to increases in depressive symptoms, and this association remained significant even after accounting for variances in the depressive symptoms associated with disease severity. Interestingly, only swearing in the presence of others, and not swearing alone was correlated with increased depressive symptoms [4]. In specific contexts, swearing has been shown to produce negative outcomes.

Swearing may also be a sign of intelligence, is associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and higher integrity at the society level, and may be a sign of creativity [5]. The offensiveness and the positive or negative consequences of swearing is highly dependent on the context. While it is not fully understood why swear words are so powerful, it has been suggested that swearing is learned during childhood and that aversive classical conditioning contributes to the emotionally arousing aspect of swear words [6]. Swearers who disregard social codes and are at odds with the context, may offend the audience and break social convention, leading to negative consequences such as less positive attitudes towards the swearer [7]. This can occur by swearing in front of children or around people of higher status. To optimize the positive outcomes from swearing, physical therapists can use social codes cues of the situation which includes their intent, patient’s facial expressions, tone and gestures, and the relationship between the physical therapist and patient [7].

Humans have been swearing since the emergence of language [3] and is quite common, with evidence suggesting 58% of the population swears “sometimes” or “often” and less than 10% of the population report “never” or “rarely” swearing [8]. Most often, it is the swear word itself that is considered taboo rather than the semantic meaning it conveys. For example, talking about sexual intercourse by itself is not considered swearing; however, the F-word is a well-recognized swear word considered “very severe” by 71% of the population [9].

Benefits of swearing

Swearing in the physical therapy setting should be used to accomplish specific goals, such as relief from pain or stress. When swearing is based on biopsychosocial utility, it may add significant value if used correctly. Swearing tends to be more tolerated in private settings and among peers as opposed to a more formal and public setting. Swearing can lead to tighter human bonds and create informal environments where people are more likely to be themselves [3]. Social groups depend on some degree of shared willingness to participate in risks or taboo practices, swearing being one of them. In the physical therapy setting, an improved relationship or positive connection between a patient and a physical therapist, otherwise known as the therapeutic alliance, has been linked to improvements in musculoskeletal pain.

Language used by the physical therapist and the patient can impact social, psychological, and biological factors, all of which heavily influence symptoms presentation and prognosis [1, 10]. Social pain, described as a feeling of suffering brought on when social connections are lost or threatened, is biologically coupled with physical pain [11]. Similarly, the therapeutic alliance that decreases physical pain also mitigates social pain [12]. Establishing a strong, positive therapeutic alliance is valuable for addressing the psychosocial influence of pain. Swearing has also been shown to reduce social pain [13], which may be related to improved social connections.

Swearing has also been found to decrease physical pain. Repeating a swear word while your hand is immerged in ice-water will allow you withstand the cold for 40 s longer, on average, compared to repeating a non-swear word [14]. This ice-water immersion yields scores for pain threshold (time at which pain is reported) and pain tolerance (time at which the hand is removed) and swearing has beneficial effects on both pain tolerance and threshold. It appears swearing is most effective at increasing pain thresholds among people who swear less often [14].

There is evidence that swearing out loud can also increase physical performance. Uttering a swear word every three seconds for the entire 30-s Wingate Anaerobic Power Test allows you to exert greater levels of peak power and average power compared to repeating a non-swear word [15]. Evidence also suggests you can exert a greater level of maximal force while squeezing a grip dynamometer while repeating a swear word [15]. In fact, many athletes admit to regularly using swearing words [16], which may be related to the improvements in physical performance that occur when swearing.

Swearing can modulate physical and social pain, and increase physical performance; however, we don’t yet know the mechanism by which swearing works. Stephens et al. [15] did not find measurable cardiovascular or autonomic arousal effects, with no clear changes in heart rate, skin conductance, or blood pressure when swearing. Therefore, increased muscular performance during swearing may be achieved by mechanisms other than sympathetic activation. Distraction of one’s attention away from a painful stimulus is known to reduce pain perception. It may be that we are distracting ourselves when we swear, thereby decreasing our pain perception. It is possible that swearing-induced distraction produced the improved performance during the Wingate Anaerobic Power Test and grip tasks, making it more tolerable to pedal hard and produce force while griping; however, future research is required to determine the mechanism by which swearing is effective.

What swear word should be used to get these pain and physical performance improvements? It is advised to use a swear word that you would use in response to banging your head accidentally [15]. If no clear swear words come to mind, the S-word and F-word are the two most common swear words [8, 9] and were used by many of the subjects in the research showing the positive effects of swearing. There is evidence that a patient needs to use an actual swear word, not a made up or bad sounding word, to elicit the pain and physical performance improvements. Stephens et al. [17] discovered that pain tolerance and pain threshold improved in subjects that repeated the F-word, but pain metrics did not improve when subjects repeated the made up swear words “fouch” or “twizpipe”.

To elicit the positive effects on pain and physical performance, without negative consequences, patients should not swear at the physical therapist. The research showing positive effects on pain and physical performance had their subjects swear out loud, not at a specific individual. Being the target of verbal aggression by asking a patient to swear at a clinician appears to lead to a high degree of distress among health care workers [18].

Due to the potential negative effects of swearing, physical therapists should carefully determine which patients are likely to experience the greatest benefit from swearing, without risking negative consequences. The patients most likely to benefit from swearing are those who have strong rapport and therapeutic alliance with their clinician [8], those who use swearing sparingly which will preserve the hypoalgesic effects of swearing [14], and those who can swear privately or among their peers [4].

Patients’ dysfunctions develop from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors that may also influence how their dysfunctions progress and their prognosis. Swearing deserves attention in the physical therapy setting based on evidence indicating positive effects on physical pain, social pain, and physical performance (Table ). Swearing has positive and negative effects. Obviously, the possible use and effect of swearing may be highly dependent on its context. The relationship between the swearer and others in the social context, the formality of the situation, and the public or private nature of the situation are examples of such contextual factors that can influence the functionality of swearing. Many factors will play into whether including swearing will improve patient outcomes, one of which is the need for clinicians to have excellent relationship skills to help patients strategically incorporate swearing into their treatment plan. If words are the most powerful drug used by mankind, then the physical therapy profession should embrace swearing to change the way our patients think, feel, and perform.

Table 1

Possible Improvements in Patient Outcomes Due to Swearing

Improved Therapeutic Alliance
Decreased Social Pain
Increased Physical Pain Tolerance
Increased Physical Pain Threshold
Increased Physical Power
Increased Maximal Force Development

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NBW was responsible for idea conceptualization. NBW and RS were responsible writing and approving manuscript prior to submitting. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

No funding is affiliated with this project.

Not applicable, no data.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable. This viewpoint uses no patient data and does not require institutional ethics approval.

Consent for publication

We consent to have this work published in Archives of Physiotherapy. The work is not submitted elsewhere, and the work is original to the authors.

Competing interests

NBW and RS declare no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Articles from Archives of Physiotherapy are provided here courtesy of BioMed Central

5 ways cursing and swearing can be good for you

CNN —

Polite society considers swearing to be a vulgar sign of low intelligence and education, for why would one rely on rude language when blessed with a rich vocabulary?

That perception, as it turns out, is full of, uh … baloney. In fact, swearing may be a sign of verbal superiority, studies have shown, and may provide other possible rewards as well.

“The advantages of swearing are many,” said Timothy Jay, professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, who has studied swearing for more than 40 years.

“The benefits of swearing have just emerged in the last two decades, as a result of a lot of research on brain and emotion, along with much better technology to study brain anatomy,” Jay said.

Well-educated people with plenty of words at their disposal, a 2015 study found, were better at coming up with curse words than those who were less verbally fluent.

MORCAMBE, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 22: Despite inclement weather pensioners raise a happy smile as they perform the famously British dance of comedians Morcambe and Wise next to a statue of Eric Morcambe, at Morcambe Bayon June 22, 2006, in Morcambe, England. Confidence & Happiness specialist, Scientist Cliff Arnall from the University of Cardiff has identified June 23, 2006 as being the happiest day of the year. His calculations were based on outdoor activity, nature, social interaction, childhood summers, positive memories, temperature and holidays. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

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Participants were asked to list as many words that start with F, A or S in one minute. Another minute was devoted to coming up with curse words that start with those three letters. The study found those who came up with the most F, A and S words also produced the most swear words.

That’s a sign of intelligence “to the degree that language is correlated with intelligence,” said Jay, who authored the study. “People that are good at language are good at generating a swearing vocabulary.”

Swearing can also be associated with social intelligence, Jay added.

“Having the strategies to know where and when it’s appropriate to swear, and when it’s not,” Jay said, “is a social cognitive skill like picking the right clothes for the right occasion. That’s a pretty sophisticated social tool.”

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Science has also found a positive link between profanity and honesty. People who cursed lied less on an interpersonal level, and had higher levels of integrity overall, a series of three studies published in 2017 found.

“When you’re honestly expressing your emotions with powerful words, then you’re going to come across as more honest,” said Jay, who was not involved in the studies.

While a higher rate of profanity use was associated with more honesty, the study authors cautioned that “the findings should not be interpreted to mean that the more a person uses profanity, the less likely he or she would engage in more serious unethical or immoral behaviors. ”

Want to push through that workout? Go ahead and drop an F-bomb.

People on bikes who swore while pedaling against resistance had more power and strength than people who used “neutral” words, studies have shown.

Research also found that people who cursed while squeezing a hand vice were able to squeeze harder and longer.

Spouting obscenities doesn’t just help your endurance: If you pinch your finger in the car door, you may well feel less pain if you say “sh*t” instead of “shoot. ”

People who cursed as they plunged their hand into icy water, another study found, felt less pain and were able to keep their hands in the water longer than those who said a neutral word.

“The headline message is that swearing helps you cope with pain,” said lead author and psychologist Richard Stephens, in a prior CNN interview. Stephens is a senior lecturer at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, where he leads the Psychobiology Research Laboratory.

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We all do it. But is swearing at work really ok?

Stephens said it works like this: Cussing produces a stress response that initiates the body’s ancient defensive reflex. A flush of adrenaline increases heart rate and breathing, prepping muscles for fight or flight.

Simultaneously, there is another physiological reaction called an analgesic response, which makes the body more impervious to pain.

“That would make evolutionary sense because you’re going to be a better fighter and better runner if you’re not being slowed down by concerns about pain,” Stephens said.

“So it seems like by swearing you’re triggering an emotional response in yourself, which triggers a mild stress response, which carries with it a stress-induced reduction in pain,” he added.

Careful, however, the next time you decide to extend your workout by swearing. Curse words lose their power over pain when they are used too much, research has also discovered.

Some of us get more out of swearing than others. Take people who are more afraid of pain, called “catastrophizers.” A catastrophizer, Stephens explained, is someone who might have a tiny wound and think, “Oh, this is life threatening. I’m going to get gangrene, I’m going to die.”

“The research found men who were lower catastrophizers seemed to get a benefit from swearing, whereas men who are higher catastrophizers didn’t,” Stephens said. “Whereas with women there wasn’t any difference.”

Swearing appears to be centered in the right side of the brain, the part people often call the “creative brain.”

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“We do know patients who have strokes on the right side tend to become less emotional, less able to understand and tell jokes, and they tend to just stop swearing even if they swore quite a lot before,” Emma Byrne, the author of “Swearing Is Good for You,” said.

Research on swearing dates back to Victorian times, when physicians discovered that patients who lost their ability to speak could still curse.

“They swore incredibly fluently,” Byrne said. “Childhood reprimands, swear words and terms of endearment – words with strong emotional content learned early on tend to be preserved in the brain even when all the rest of our language is lost.”

Why do we choose to swear? Perhaps because profanity provides an evolutionary advantage that can protect us from physical harm, Jay said.

“A dog or a cat will scratch you, bite you when they’re scared or angry,” he said. “Swearing allows us to express our emotions symbolically without doing it tooth and nail.

“In other words, I can give somebody the finger or say f**k you across the street. I don’t have to get up into their face.”

Cursing then becomes a remote form of aggression, Jay explained, offering the chance to quickly express feelings while hopefully avoiding repercussions.

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“The purpose of swearing is to vent my emotion, and there’s an advantage in that it allows me to cope,” he said. “And then it communicates very readily to bystanders what my emotional state is. It has that advantage of emotional efficiency – it’s very quick and clear.”

What makes the use of naughty words so powerful? The power of the taboo, of course. That reality is universally recognized: Just about every language in the world contains curse words.

“It seems that as soon as you have a taboo word, and the emotional insight that the word is going to cause discomfort for other people, the rest seems to follow naturally,” Byrne said.

It’s not just people who swear. Even primates curse when given the chance.

“Chimpanzees in the wild tend to use their excrement as a social signal, one that’s designed to keep people away,” Byrne said.

Hand-raised chimps who were potty-trained learned sign language for “poo” so they could tell their handlers when they needed the toilet.

“And as soon as they learned the poo sign they began using it like we do the word sh*t,” Byrne said. “Cursing is just a way of expressing your feelings that doesn’t involve throwing actual sh*t. You just throw the idea of sh*t around.”

Does that mean that we should curse whenever we feel like it, regardless of our environment or the feelings of others? Of course not. But at least you can cut yourself some slack the next time you inadvertently let an F-bomb slip.

After all, you’re just being human.

features of self-perception of IT-specialists / Sudo Null IT News

Hello everyone! My name is Sergey and I am a practicing psychologist.

Disclaimer: Due to the approach to work, it so happened that I usually advise people of intellectual work. In the last year, these are mainly managers and employees of the IT sector. These are people who have been solving any problems "over their heads" all their lives. Such an approach inevitably leaves an imprint on the personality and non-professional life. I am engaged in minimizing the negative consequences of such features. And within the framework of the articles on this resource, I summarize my professional experience and provide useful information.

Speaking of benefits. I'll ask you just one question: "What are you without your job?" .

Couldn't resist

To paraphrase, you can ask differently: "If you can't be useful, then what is your value?".

If you need to give a more concrete example to get used to it, you can imagine old age, infirmity, paralysis, psychiatric illness, dementia, a sudden change in the market. ..

So, is there an answer? And not just an answer, but an answer that suits you and does not drive you into an existential hole? While you are thinking, read the list of typical answers to this question:

If I can't bring value, then there's no point in living.
If I do not bring benefit, then I just smoke the sky.
Without benefit, I cannot justify my existence.
Without use, there is no point.
Why then all this?
Then I'm just a nobody.

How much does it resonate with you? And how will your answers coincide with the above options? If you have your own answer that suits you, that's it, you can not read further. All doubters, keep going.

As a result, there is always a block, after the removal of which the tower collapses

First, about the danger of such an approach. In terms of importance, this is comparable to the lack of backups, because if something happens (for example, one of the above), then everything (read: the meaning of life) will collapse. I'm not an IT specialist, so I hope they will tell me a more correct analogy, which I could pick up for myself for further use.

When does it fire? Usually in normative age crises.

Normative developmental crises are transitional stages of age development that take place between stable (lytic) ages.

Despite the many interpretations of the crisis, in this context, one must understand this: a normative crisis sums up a certain result of the past period and sets tasks for the next one. And the severity of the crisis is directly related to the correspondence of reality to the existing life plan, as well as the speed of the formation of tools for successfully living the next stage.

But there is a catch here. If you think that you can "endure" the crisis and just continue to live, then it will not work out that way. If the age problem is not solved in a crisis, then it shoots into the next one. Consequently, the experience of the next crisis becomes more difficult.

Let's take a situation as an example. During the crisis of adolescence Hypothetical Gennady could not learn how to communicate with children of his own and the opposite sex, so he suffered from loneliness. But the difficult period ended, he chose a profession, graduated from the university, blew out 30-35 candles on the cake. And everything seems to be good enough. Yes, at work I would like a promotion, and a bigger apartment. But, objectively, everything is fine. It seems that there are all prerequisites for successfully overcoming the crisis. But no, the issue of loneliness, "hammered" in adolescence, shoots with renewed vigor and exacerbates the experience.

And this is a positive option when the current crisis does not pose difficult challenges. And if the tasks of crises are layered, then it will be really difficult for a person to solve them en masse.
To complete the picture it is worth mentioning that crises are not only normative, but also non-normative - for example, dismissal, business failure, loss of money, etc.

How does this mechanism get started?

Why does this perception arise? For further understanding, one should learn this - in the psyche there are practically no uniquely maladaptive models of thinking and behavior, because absolutely maladaptive models are not supported by anything and disappear. That is, each has a place to be effective in some situation. Usually quite narrow. But it applies to a wide range of situations. This is what leads to difficulties.

Usually, managers and IT-specialists (do we still remember whom we are talking about?) have three important prerequisites:

Education. Often such people's parents are also carriers of the idea of benefit. Plus, there is praise for the result. Boys are told that "a man is manifested by deeds." Girls, that "who needs you if you can't sew on a button / cook borscht / do something else?". Laziness is presented as a vice and sin, and work as an unchanging good;
Self-assessment. If a person believes that it is not he who is valuable, but his functions and capabilities, then for him benefit is a necessary condition for a comfortable life.
Working with objective and measurable reality. When you constantly interact with figures and facts, then the rejection of immeasurable and amorphous substances like emotions and feelings gradually begins;

Now let's talk about maintaining the model. Let's imagine a person who forbids himself to be lazy, works hard and invests in his future. What does this lead to? Probably some success. Success is reinforced by public approval (including parental). The model is fixed. The rest of the ideas fade into the background and even the third plan.

Hypothetical Gennady curses the computer chair that took his life

Now to the most important thing - what to do with it? How not to put your eggs in one basket? The very main recommendation is to contact a specialist, it is more effective than self-help. If you want to figure it out on your own, then here are a few ways:

Find out what you and other people appreciate about you, apart from usefulness. This can be achieved with a banal survey like: "What do you like about me?", "What is our friendship based on?", "Why are we good together?". Remember how some of us kept diaries of friends in childhood and filled out questionnaires there? It's time to refresh your knowledge! :)
Understand what is important to you in life? What values are really values? I analyzed this in more detail in the fourth "What is in the head of a programmer?".
Find out what you value in other people? What matters to you? What is closeness based on?
Admit it, do you love yourself? This is not an idle question. Are you human or human function? How this can be understood: analyze your feelings during rest, relaxation, in general, in any "useless" moments, for the presence of guilt. This is a clear marker.
Think about how you need to structure your life and mindset so that you can be happy without being useful. Make a plan. And then another. And further. The more you can find options for a happy "useless" life, the easier it will be for you to get out of this paradigm.

Each of you reading this article deserves to be happy simply because you are. No more reasons and excuses for happiness.

Post-disclaimer. As before, this does not claim to be the ultimate truth. This is just my professional experience and my opinion. Not absolute truth.

Sincerely, Sergey Maksimov.
Psychologist.

P.S. If you are interested in understanding the issue a little deeper, then here are links to articles on similar topics:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4 homework from the participants of the Expert Content course and I see how the same mistake wanders from work to work: a lot of general words, few specifics. Now - now I will specify what I mean =)

754 views

I see three problems with the lack of specificity in the content:

Error #1. Spherical content plan in a vacuum

It's impossible to tell whether a content plan is good or bad before we determine:

what is our strength and expertise
what audience we work for
customer journey and how content should move through the funnel

Let's take it step by step:

What is our strength and expertise.

The template will help answer this question:

But the template itself does not guarantee anything. You may end up with the following wording:

If you do something like this, you run the risk of falling into a gray mass with competitors. And most importantly, it is completely incomprehensible how to build content on this foundation, what and to whom to talk about?

What to do:

There are 2 methods for formulating expertise.

Direct method.

Answer the questions:

Who are you?

As you call a ship, so it will sail. Who are you - a performance agency? Scrum studio? Or just a contextual advertising agency, without showing off? Take your time, think The wording will attract some customers to you and repel others.

What audience is the focus on? What is important to them?

If you are a Scrum studio, obviously your audience is those who share your value. An example from another area: you produce eco-cosmetics for those who care that all components are “green”, without chemicals and preservatives.

What is your goal?

Why did you open a business? The answer “make money by buying cheaper in China and selling more expensive” is normal, the bad news is that you can’t build a successful content strategy on this. Content helps to sell more, rebuild, occupy a special shelf in the head of the target audience. If you're just shipping a product and don't have anything to say, the content will end up being dull and fake.

Who is your "enemy"?

Let's take an example from another area: if you produce eco-cosmetics, your enemy is the mass market with the periodic table in cosmetics. The enemy must be found, this will help you create conflict in any piece of content. And the human brain works on conflict, if there is no conflict in your article, case, presentation, you will not be able to grab and hold attention.

What do you do differently?

We continue the example of eco-cosmetics: we add essential oils and “green” preservatives.

Due to what (unique resource)?

Supplier of quality essential oils and knowledge of their benefits.

If you answered the questions, but it still turned out gray and dull, use the method “on the contrary”.

2. The opposite method

There was a print shop manager in one class, and he tried to fill out a template, it turned out sadly: “We will be the best print shop for customers who are interested in high speed printing of business cards, low price and high quality ". It became obvious that the wording needed to be changed, and the following dialogue took place:

Me: Do you like making business cards?

Listener(S): No, they have to be dumped, rushed, and in the end it turns out badly.

Me: What do you like to do? What are the best clients you have worked with in the past year?

S (perks up): Oh, we had 2 catalog orders. One company produces ceramics, and we made them a cool catalog that conveys texture and color so well that they no longer have to carry samples with them to exhibitions. The second client also ordered a catalog, it turned out cool.

Me: What unique resource did you do well for a client?

C: We have a unique machine for this task, it is not currently loaded. Plus a technologist who knows how to accept layouts for printing to get the right color.

Me: So why did you focus on printing business cards then?

C:¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯. There is more demand for them on the Internet.

As a result, the printing house focused on printing catalogs, and the entire content plan was worked out for this direction.

Ask yourself:

Which clients do you not want to work with?
What do you want?
Are there examples with whom it worked successfully?
Due to what?

2. What audience do we serve

The previous step helped us understand who we will focus on. But it is important to present not in general “foremen” or “women aged 30-35”, but in the form of a specific person. If from the very beginning, in the first minute of the speech, in the first sentence of the article, you did not get into pain, then nothing will help, attention is lost. Therefore, it is important to write not “for yourself”, but to keep in mind the image of the audience. To do this, there is a method of persons (they are also “avatars”, “characters”).

The person method came from development, where it solves two problems:

1. Make a product/interface for the user, not the developer

2. Take into account the peculiarities of different users. For example, there is a grandmother who needs to make a big "Call me back" button and an advanced user who needs instructions to do everything himself.

This method can be used throughout the entire promotion strategy. Including content marketing.

How to introduce the reader? Where to get data? How to write for a real target audience, not fictional characters?

Let's look at an example.

Let's take a company that automates medical centers and clinics: a patient's personal account, a record log, a patient's medical record, a treatment plan, a waiting list - that's it. Checklist of questions:

Who is the target audience?

This is a B2B product, which means that the audience is a company, not a person. Obviously, these are clinics and medical centers.

2. Who makes decisions in the clinic? How does it take? And who influences the decision? What kind of pain do they have?

There are two "persons":

Olga Ivanovna doesn't understand anything about automation (there isn't even such a word in her dictionary), but she worries about two things: revenue and patients. She wants patients to be comfortable, so the idea of providing test results in a private office seems like a good idea to her. And she believes that if the patient is satisfied, he will return, and this will affect the revenue.

Anatoly as a "computer" is approached for everything: a printer is broken, or a website needs to be made. He is tired of this and does not mind entrusting the task to the contractor, but he is skeptical and does not trust contractors' IT specialists in advance. His trust must be earned.

How to know your audience?

To answer this question, you need:

1. Listen to the recordings of calls and talk to managers.

In small companies, for self-employed people, this is easier: the manager himself speaks and works with clients, and participates in the provision of services / product development. As a company grows, marketing and sales begin to live in different worlds. But a good article, presentation - any piece of content should work like a good seller: arouse interest and answer questions and objections in the reader's head. Checklist of questions when listening to calls / communicating with managers:

What questions do customers ask?
What objections do they have?
How do the best managers handle these objections?
How does the customer name the product/service they are interested in?

All this can lead to useful insights: for example, you thought you were selling a Multiwidget for a website, and your audience calls it an “online consultant”.

I jump from one example to another on purpose to make it clear how it works in different businesses. Want to know how to apply this to your business? Come to the Expert Content course, launching March 5th. On the course

- formulate USP and expertise

- study the audience and its pains

- build a customer journey

- create a content plan based on the path

- create convincing cases and articles

- make presentations

See the course program and register here.

2. Collect meter data.

All available data will help:

- look in Yandex.Metrica in the visitors section of the social dem. characteristics (it is better to look at those who have achieved the goals on the site, and not at all).

- if there is a group in the social network, there are not 1.5 diggers in it, but hundreds of participants, and they are alive people, not bots, you can see the same social dem. and interests.

3. Customer Journey

Content marketing should move the consumer through the funnel. And in order for the movement to go, you need to build a customer path.

There is no one size fits all business. If you sell bread, you do not have a latent need, the demand is formed. However, if you're selling low calorie whole grain toast, you'll have to create demand. And so with any stage - you need to build exactly your Customer journey and work with it.

How to create a customer journey:

Describe decision benchmarks
Describe sales funnel
Which triggers move along the path

Error No. 2. Too general wording of topics without specifics

Below in the photo you see two content plans (the table is incomplete, it does not contain the columns “format” and “distribution channel”). The content plan was made for a company that automates clinics and medical centers (from the example above).

Smoker's content plan.

Healthy person content plan:

See the difference?

What gives specifics in the content plan:

you can delegate the content task to other people, for example, a hired copywriter
at the planning stage, it becomes clear whether the content hits the pain of the audience, hooks it or not.
it is clear where and in what format to distribute content

Mistake #3. Common words instead of history

Bad:

Very often in our practice we have to convince customers (for other projects) of the need to create site page structures based on search demand, and not according to the logic of specialists in this subject.

Specialists better and more competently understand the features of the products they represent. But, users are not specialists, and they form search demand based on their own, sometimes not entirely correct understanding of the names and properties of goods. Therefore, if our goal is to get a lot of traffic on the site from search results and, as a result, sales, then when creating the page structure, it is correct to focus solely on the demand generated by ordinary users, and not on the opinion of specialists.

Good:

In May 2017, a client came to us, an online tire and wheel shop. Ivan, a marketer, set the task to “increase traffic from search engines”. And we set to work on the checklist.

Stage 1. Demand analysis.

We analyzed the site and realized that it needed to be changed: in its current form, the site is not suitable for promotion, there are no necessary pages. Here is an example: frequency analysis showed that users type the query “winter tires size 225 60 r17” (queries that mean the same thing are highlighted in yellow)

are winter tires in size 225 60 r17. In order for the search engine to bring visitors to the site, you need a separate page that looks like a response to a query.

Stage 2. Designing a site for requests

We proposed to create this and several dozen more pages for each request. Ivan showed our structure to Sergey, the commercial director, and we received a long letter with corrections. Sergey participated in the development of the old site and insisted that the current site structure is ideal. They thought about it for a long time with the developers, and it has a logic that takes into account the correct names and properties of the product. However, users looking for tires are not experts and often misinterpret product features and names. But search demand is formed by users, not specialists. Therefore, you need to focus on them.

Can you feel the difference? In the first example, we fought windmills. And in the second they began to tell the story.

Summary.

1. Before writing an article, formulate a content plan

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