Business Blogs are Positioning Statements

In their new book Branding Yourself, fellow Indianapolis bloggers Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy observe that the starting point of a personal brand campaign is the “positioning and transaction statement”. This statement, they explain, is basically a tagline, a catchy or memorable phrase or sentence that expresses the uniqueness of your brand.

In corporate blogging training sessions, I like to talk about leitmotifs or recurring core themes to which blog content writers can refer again and again.  The five-question exercise that Decker and Lacy suggest for setting up the P&T (positioning & transaction) statement can be perfect for pinpointing such central themes for any SEO marketing blog:

   Positioning:
   Who is your competition?
   How are you different (3 reasons per competitor)?
   How are you similar (3 reasons per competitor)?
  
   Transaction:
   What does the transaction look like?
   What is the end goal?

Just such a thought process leads to what I’ve nicknamed “the training benefit” business owners can derive from corporate blog marketing. (This holds true, I’ve found, whether owners do their own blogging or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger.)  The very exercise of answering the questions and thinking about your own business practices helps train you to articulate those things to clients and customers.

While the Branding Yourself authors are guiding business owners towards a one-phrase or one-sentence statement, the very same five questions they pose can be of business blogging help. In fact, the big advantage business blog writing has over ads, billboards, brochures, and even static website content is that blogs are, by definition, a work in progress.  Using blogs, the corporate mantra or professional practitioner’s message can continually be honed.

Blog posts, as we see them at Say it For You, are continuous-run positioning and transaction statements!