Making Heroes in Your Blog

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“Say ‘thank you’ often. Make heroes and heroines of employees who glorify your company’s values, “Jackie and Kevin Freiberg write in Nuts!:Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. At Southwest Airlines, saying “thank you” is not just good manners; it’s essential to creating an organization filled with vitality.

At Say it For You, we encourage our blogging clients to use their blog as an employee recognition tool. Highlighting employee accomplishments in a blog brings a two-way benefit: When readers learn about an employee’s enthusiasm and how that person put in extra time and effort in serving customers, that tends to cement the customer’s relationship with the company or practice. As featured employees proudly share those write-ups with friends and family, the blog becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

Do you have a team member who should be praised by you to your readers?

… for finding unexpected resources?
…for finding new and better ways to do things?
…for thinking beyond the basics?
…for leading and advising with empathy?

As a business owner or practitioner, you may find that blogging helps you realize your own “heroism”. After all, when you create content for your blog, you’re verbalizing the positive aspects of your business or practice in a way that people can understand. As you put your recent accomplishments down in words, you’re reviewing the benefits of your products and services, keeping them fresh in your mind. In other words, in the process of blogging, you are constantly providing yourself with training about how to talk effectively about your business!

As blog content writers, our Say It for You team is providing content writing, which seems like a contradiction to the idea of the readers meeting the actual team of employees who are providing the product or service. But even though the owner is not doing the writing, employees themselves can provide anecdotes and information, and different blog posts can feature different employees and owners.

Through blog marketing, business owners and professional practitioners have the power to make heroes – and be heroes as well! 

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Blog to Their Whys

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In order to retain good employees, Minesh and Kim Baxi explain in the book Stop Hiring Losers, practice using motivators. By clarifying both the “why” of your own interactions as a business owner, you can work to understand the individual “whys” of others, leading to positive results for all.

The authors define 6 defining attitudes or world views:

1. LEARNING-motivated employees can be given the opportunity for advanced training, along with the opportunity to train new employees.

2. MONEY-motivated employees can be rewarded based on performance outcomes with gift certificates or trips.

3. BEAUTY/HARMONEY-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to decorate for corporate events or redesign workspaces.

4. ALTRUISM-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to represent your company in community and fundraising events.

5. POWER-motivated employees can be given titles and the opportunity to attend leadership seminars.

6. PRINCIPLE-motivated employees can be given the opportunity to represent the company as spokesperson for a social cause.

There is a strong parallel between success in motivating employees and success in blog marketing, we’ve learned at Say It For You. The secret is knowing your particular audience and thinking about how they (not the average person, but specifically “they*) would probably react or feel about your approach to the subject at hand.

For example, while you may point out that your product or service can do something your competitors can’t, that particular “advantage” may or may not be what your audience is likely to value. For example, even if your target audience falls in the money-motivated category, are you the least expensive (that might appeal to a cost-conscious group) or the most expensive (your audience might prize luxury and exclusivity)?

When building a plan to connect with an audience, Francesca Pinder of Brussels event planning firm Spacehuntr cautions, consider not only age, gender, and nationality, but where your target readers “hang out”, what they read and watch, and what they’re saying on social media.. Interviews, focus groups, and a lot of very alert listening can help you understand what causes they support.

In creating blog content, speak to your target audience’s whys!

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Brand Names and Blog Post Titles

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When naming something, it is human nature to want to describe what you are naming, entrepreneur.com states. Examples of well-known company names that describe what they do or make include International Business Machines, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Despite that logic, there’s no denying non-descriptive names have value. In fact, Statistica lists the leading U.S. brands for 2021, showing brand value in the millions of US. dollars for companies whose names do not allude to their products and services:

  • Apple 262.38
  • Amazon 254.19
  • Google 191.22
  • Microsoft 140.44
  • Walmart 93.19
  • Facebook 81.48

Those startling performance statistics for non-descriptor names notwithstanding, at Say It For You, we advise making clear in the title of each blog post – to both searchers and search engines – exactly what that post is going to be about. Here are three important reasons why:

  1. A blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors. In essence, you’re saying, “If you click here, you will read information about…..”
  2. Since an important purpose of marketing blogs is attracting online shoppers, blog post titles are a crucial element in the process.
  3. The keyword phrases in the title are the way you “get found” by search engines; one keyword phrase is your brand name.

 

All that is not to say titles can’t be true to their topic and still be creative enough to entice searchers to want to read the content. You can, for example:

1. Create a title with an “agenda”, so readers have a clue as to your point of view on a topic before reading the article

2. Create an emotionally grabbing title “How Exercise Keeps You Young”

3. Create a how-to title

4. Create a “truth about” title with a hint of mystery

SEO company Yoast questions to ask in creating a brand and then executing a keyword phrase strategy:

– What does your brand stand for?
– What values does it represent?
– What’s the main message of our business?

While non-descriptive brand names such as Apple and Amazon have value in the billions, in titling blog posts, we’ve found at Say It For You, it’s best to tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em and then – deliver!

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Placement Smarts for Stores and Blogs

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Blog marketing and placement of goods in a grocery store have a lot in common, it seems.

Consumer psychologists have found that shoppers need a little time to get into the shopping mindset. That’s why you’ll often find magazines, books, and flowers near the front of the stores, to get shoppers into a more relaxed frame of mind, authors of The Big Book of Secrets explain. Then, since frequent customers who buy the same staples each week might ignore other items, stock is rotated frequently to lure shoppers to consider new items. Placement on shelves is super-important, because study after study has shown that items put at eye level are most frequently purchased. For that reason, smart merchandising involves placing the most expensive items on eye level shelves; suppliers may be charged extra for placing their goods at eye level,

Welcoming readers to the store or the blog
Just as shoppers arrive at the grocery store because they are interested in finding certain goods, online readers will have landed on your blog because they are interested in finding information on your topic and possibly making a purchase. Unlike the grocery shoppers described in the Big Book of Secrets (who know they’re in the right place, just need to be put into a more relaxed frame of mind), online searchers need immediate confirmation that they’ve come to the right place. To that end, according to blog mavens Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos, key words and phrases should be among the first words in your blog title and then reappear in your first lines of the post.

Staying at eye level
In comparison with putting grocery goods at shoppers’ eye level, eye-tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a page top to bottom and left to right, looking for information that matches what they typed into the search bar.

Putting the thesis and conclusion on the “end caps”
Grocery marketing studies have shown that placing items on end caps (the shelves at the outer end of each aisle), can boost sales by as much as a third. When it comes to blogging for business, I teach at Say It For You, the “end caps” of blog marketing are titles and closing lines. in helping high school and college students write effective essays, I often suggest they introduce their readers to both their topic and their thesis, doing both those things on the “end cap” where they’ll get the most attention. That way, I teach each the student writer, your readers will understand not only what issue will be under discussion, but towards “which side” of the argument you’re trying to steer your readers. In business blog writing, for the opening “end cap”, you may choose to present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy, challenging statement. Later, on the “back end” of your blog “aisle”, your “pow” closing statement ties back to the opener, bringing your post full circle.

Checking out
In a grocery store, even shoppers who leave totally empty-handed must pass by the checkout counters. In blog marketing, the equivalent is an “enticing, well-written Call to Action, as written.com suggests.

Just as if your were managing a grocery store, use your placement smarts in blogging for business!

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In Sustained Blog Marketing, Look for the Overlap

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James Marshall Reilly likes to think of the speaking industry as falling into a number of different buckets, including:

  • distinguished celebrity
  • leadership
  • health
  • the economy
  • gender
  • science
  • arts
  • education
  • inspiration
  • authors
  • technology
  • spirituality
  • futurism
  • sports

The key, Reilly tells speakers looking for engagements, is to start thinking about where your topic will fit, understanding that there will likely be overlap.

At Say It For You, we think overlap is an enormous advantage in blog marketing.

1. Years ago, I remember reading a quote from career coach Nancy Ancowitz. “Effective self-promoting,” she taught, “is finding the overlap between what you have and what your audience wants.” Of course, blogging is the essence of self-promotion, allowing business owners and professional practitioners to find the overlap between what they do and what searchers want.

2. Another way to understand and use overlap in blog marketing has to do with keeping on keeping on. Blogging is a perfect example of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. It’s the week-after-week, month-after-month work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing blog posts that gets many down. Just as Reilly explains to speakers that they can “tweak” their material so that their content is tied to some of the popular topics audiences are interested in hearing about, blog content writers can use precisely the same strategy.

You’re creating content to market bedroom furniture. You can relate that topic to:

  • health – lighting, clean-ability, and air quality in a bedroom
  • arts – appropriate artwork to display in the bedroom
  • technology – thread counts in bed linen
  • science – antimicrobial treatment of linens
  • gender – studies proving that men and women react differently to smell, sound, and color
  • celebrities – Elton John photographed amidst fur blankets in his bedroom on a private plane

For sustained blog marketing, look for the overlap!

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