The Importance of Communication During a Business Crisis

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This guest post was contributed by New Hampshire business advisor Kimberly Gilbert. With years of experience in health and safety consulting and a degree in Business Management, Kim Gilbert hopes to help small businesses thrive in the pandemic economy. You may visit Kim’s website at https://www.gilbertbusinessconsulting.com . 

 

 

As the leader of your business, effective and consistent communication between you and your customers is the critical factor in maintaining solid business operations. This applies not only to communications with customers during the pandemic, but also going forward in the new, unknown normal.

Here are three key points to consider when you are ensuring that your business lines of communication are open during a crisis:

Add useful content to your website
It goes without saying that, for those business owners who maintain a website, it is important to keep all contact information and hours of operation prominently displayed, as well as the business’ COVID plan if the business has direct contact with customers.

But consider going a step further and add something MORE to your site, such as a blog with helpful hints or information pertinent to your business or industry that is beneficial to your customers. This will demonstrate your full engagement and concern for your customer’s welfare, and allow real-time feedback from your target audience. A reader may comment on your suggestions, or suggest an issue that you may be able to address that you hadn’t thought of beforehand.
(If you are not able to create this type of content with the resources you have in-house, there are a host of good writers such as those at Say It For You who are ready and able to assist!)

Coordinate the use of your social media sites
Many businesses use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or other social media sites in lieu of a website. If your company already has one or more established social media sites, be sure to keep them up to date as much as possible. Consider posting on a regular schedule, or when there are updates that should be broadcasted—change in hours, new products, new services, etc.

You do not need to overload yourself on this, but be positive and provide good content. Again, if your business lacks the resources or personnel to do this type of work, a ghost writer will be your next best friend!

As mentioned above, consistency in your message is very important. To maintain uniformity of your message across multiple platforms, consider using a Customer Relation Management (CRM) service, such as Hootsuite. Your content for multiple social media sites can be updated in one centralized spot. This will save you time!

Use your best marketing tool
According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company, email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media campaigns. This opportunity can’t be passed up, especially if you already have an established customer database. Use it to the max!

Topics to include in regular emails can range from updating your customers on your company status, offering new products or services, or just checking on your customers to see how they are faring during the pandemic. You will be amazed at the response!

An email campaign is especially useful if you have moved some (or all) of your business online, and would like to notify all of your previous and current customers.

If you haven’t already, consider using a service such as MailChimp or MailerLite to compile and grow your list. If you can’t find the time to write, again, consider hiring a ghost writer, like Say It For You, to craft a message in your voice, specific to your customer’s needs. Even better, consider sending a series of themed emails as part of an outreach campaign.

Whichever methods you chose to communicate with your customers, ensure that your message is positive, consistent, and empathetic. And always remember that there are resources to assist with the content of those messages!

 

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Increasing Blog Effectiveness Through Content “Vocals”

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“Vocals aren’t the actual words you use, but what you do with your voice to clothe words with meaning,” the authors of Close the Deal explain. Vocals include:

  • tone
  • pitch
  • emphasis
  • accent
  • inflection
  • pronunciation
  • volume
  • rate
  • tempo

The important lesson here: Vocals give you a tool to increase buyers’ comfort with you.

Of course, in video clips included in blog content, all these vocal elements would come into play. But can all these valuable tips about increasing buyers’ comfort come into play in non-vocal blog content writing? The answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Language has the power to establish personal connections. “Tone in writing refers to the writer’s attitude toward the reader and the subject of the message. The overall tone of a written message affects the reader just as one’s tone of voice affects the listener in everyday exchanges,” the OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab explains.

As a blog content writing trainer, I found three of the tips from Close the Deal are especially apropos to our work:

Vary your vocals.
You’ll bore buyers if you drone on, and get caught using a “singsong” delivery, the authors caution. Liven your speech patterns with variety, they advise.
As a businessperson or practitioner, I teach, you have many different kinds of stories to tell through your blog, including the benefits of your products and services, the history of your business and your own journey, successful case studies, and your perspective on trends in your industry.

Show friendliness through a relaxed tone.
Speaking louder than your buyers can make you come across as pushy and overbearing.
“The business writer should strive for an overall tone that is confident, courteous, and sincere,” OWL advises, “and should be written at an appropriate level of difficulty”.

Temper your accent.
Water down your regional accent in settings where the majority of people don’t share it. Reflect the buyer’s tempo, tone, and volume.
Having a focused topic in a blog post is important, but focusing on a specific audience is equally as important. Before writing, research your target audience. “Once you have your data you can start to put together personas and plan your online marketing activities around them,” Sleeping Giant Media teaches.

Just as vocals do, the language you use in your blog content has the power to increase buyers’ comfort with you.

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Blog Posts Don’t Seal – They Enable

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Will blog marketing “close” deals in the same way as face-to-face encounters between prospects and sales professionals? The answer is obviously “no”. This week’s Say It For You posts are devoted to the topic of blog marketing and its place in the overall sales process.

In the book Close the Deal, authors Sam Deep and Lyle Sussman suggest that a salesperson faced with a demanding prospect ask “What concession do you need from me to close the deal right now?” In blogging for business, of course, such a “bargaining” exchange would not be taking place between the business owner/practitioner and the reader/customer. On the other hand, one purpose of blog content is to persuade readers to act.

A very non-technical way I have of explaining the concept of blog marketing is this: Rather than running traditional ads for your brand of hats, vitamins, travel, or paint, you provide lots of information on the history of hats, on why vitamins are good for you, about exciting places to go on safari, and on the psychology of color. Consumers interested in your subject, but who never even knew your name, come to see you as a resource.

When blog readers follow your “calls to action” by phoning your business or practice, faxing in a request or an order, signing up for your newsletter, subscribing to your blog through an RSS feed, or proceeding to your shopping cart to buy your product or service, you know your blog marketing strategy is working Understand, though – it’s entirely possible that none of those things will happen at the first “meeting”.

Just as in traditional selling, you need to use blog content writing to “prove your case” by:

  • offering statistics about the problem your product or service helps solve
  • comparing your product or service with others on the market
  • providing testimonials from past and present customers and clients

Generally speaking, as I often stress when I offer Say It For You corporate blogging training, blog posts are not ads, and there should never be a hard-sell or boastful tone to the content. Blog posts are closer in nature to informative “advertorials”, positioning the company or practitioner as helpful, well-experienced, and knowledgeable.

Primarily, the blog post has to add value. Not just a promise of value if the reader converts to a buyer, but value right then and there in terms of information, skill enhancement, or a new way of looking at the topic. The best blog posts are never about yourself, your company, your services, or your products, but about why you see things the way you do.

Typically, a blog post doesn’t “seal” the deal, so much as it “enables” the deal.

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Design Thinking for Blog Content Writers

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“Design thinking is a process that helps companies and organizations solve problems, address challenges, and develop products,” a fascinating article in a recent issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal begins. Eureka!  At Say It For You, our blog marketing efforts are designed to demonstrate that our client companies and organizations can do those very same three things, I thought…

There are several different steps in design thinking, IBJ authors explain, and it’s best to move among the steps as needed. Meanwhile, I asked myself, how can we as content writers, use the first design-thinking step (Empathize) as a guide?

“See the problem you’re trying to solve through the eyes of the people facing it,” the authors suggest, exploring what the potential users of your product or service are saying, thinking, and feeling about the problem. 
I’ve written before about the concept of framing, meaning positioning a story in such a way that readers will focus on it and respect our blogging client’s expertise. In the course of delivering information (facts, statistics, features, and benefits, instruction and advice), we must create a perspective or “frame”.

Framing, a term that comes from behavioral science, is all about the Empathize step in design thinking. It’s about understanding in as much detail as possible what the target audience of readers is thinking, doing, and feeling about the problem our client is proposing to help solve.

While design thinking involves understanding what prospects are saying, thinking, and feeling about a problem, as content writers we need follow the advice client communications consultant Victor Ricciardi offers to financial planners: “Link your discussion to what clients will be able to DO or BUY with that (investment) income.”

When you’re composing business blog content, I teach at Say It For You, imagine readers asking themselves – “How will I use the product (or service)?” “How will it work?” “How will I feel?”  In other words, besides empathizing with prospects (where they are now), our job as content writers is to move them forward by helping them envision a good result. Readers found your blog in the first place, I remind writers, not because they were in search of your brand, but because of their own need. Needless to say, the blog must convey the fact that you can fulfill that need and that they have come to the right place. You must give online searchers a “feel” for the desired outcomes of using your products and services.
Blog by design – design thinking!
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Best Communication Practices for Business Blogging

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blog communication
No surprise – a special research study conducted for the Journal of Financial Planning on ways planners communicate with clients showed that, in most categories, more communication is better.  But exactly what kinds of communication matter most?

As Evan Beach, CFP® reports in the article, several different types of communication were examined:

1.  Educational pieces about investments: These had a high positive association with satisfaction and trust, but the difference was marginal when sent more than once per month.

2.  Non-investment-related educational pieces: These seemed to result in the most referrals, particularly when sent digitally.

3.  Interest and hobby-based pieces:
These are best sent quarterly, and should be focused on clients’ interests, not planners’.
Just as financial planners are trying to offer information, encouragement, and thought leadership to clients, we blog content writers are using different methods of reaching out to readers.

If we substitute the product or service being marketed for “investments”, we can use all three of these communication categories in blogging for business, seeking to increase reader engagement and trust:

 

1. Educational blog posts –
Business blogs are wonderful tools around facts.  That’s why business owners and professional practitioners can use corporate blog writing as a way to dispense information, but, even more important, to address misinformation. Blog content writing is a way of “cleaning the air”, replacing factoids with facts, so that buyers can see their way to making decisions.
2.  Non product or service-related blog posts –
One company that made the list of Forrester’s Top 15 Corporate Blogs was 37 signals.com. Why were they chosen? The company “rarely blogs about their products, instead devoting their blog content writing to sharing advice about business and other topics.”

3. Interest-based pieces –
One of the realities about corporate blogs that is toughest for newbie Indianapolis writers of blog content to accept is that other people, specifically online searchers, are interested, first and foremost, in themselves and their own needs, wants, and interests. Their curiosity about what you do – or about what you have to say or sell, I explain in corporate blogging training sessions, will be at its most intense when it concerns testing their own limits or their own knowledge.

Remember, Evan Beach told those financial planners, ”marketing events are just a conduit to get people in the door when the time is right for them.”  For us blog content writers, we use blog posts of different types to get readers “in the door”, so they can act when the time is right for them.
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