Framing the Facts in Blog Marketing

For us business blog content writers, it’s important to remember that every choice of words we make involves framing. Our goal is positioning our story in a way that our audience can focus on and respect.

Blog readers need to perceive a business owner or professional practitioner as an expert, I teach at Say It For You.  For that to happen, I believe, the blog needs to deliver more than information (facts, statistics, features, and benefits) and even more than instruction and advice. It needs a firm perspective or “frame”.

The term “framing” comes from behavioral science, which teaches that people decide on options based on whether an option is presented with positive or negative connotations. Certain features of a topic can be emphasized more than others through framing. For example, is a choice presented as a loss or as a gain? (“Prospect theory” indicates that people are loss-averse, disliking losses even more than they like gains.)

Even a slight alteration to the way something is presented can result in a completely different response or decision, the authors of the digitalalchemy.global blog explain. There are four main types of frames used in marketing, they add:

1. Gain: This approach highlights all the potential benefits of using the product or service.
2. Loss: This approach highlights all the benefits the reader “stands to “lose out on” by choosing not to use the product or service.
3. Emotion: This approach stresses how using the product or service will make the reader feel.
4. Statistical: This approach stresses the number of people using and endorsing the product or service.

Framing also means casting a potentially negative fact about your product or service into a positive light, Gerald Hanks teaches in Chron. At Say It For You, we know that “framing” responses to bad publicity is a valuable use for a blog. I call it “controlling your own journalistic slant”. Through putting their own “spin” on reports about their company, business owners can exercise control over the way the public perceives any negative developments. The blog can also correct any inaccurate press statements.

Does framing border on exaggeration and even dishonesty? Certainly it can, and those are effects we blog marketers must work hard to avoid. After all, we’re trying to build trust, and it’s crucial that we be factually correct in describing the extent to which our products and services can be of help.

At the same time, there is an ocean of information sources, and our blog readers are looking to us for a firm perspective or “framework” with which they can filter, understand and use the information for their own benefit.