Framing the Facts in Blog Marketing

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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.

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Thanksgiving is a Good Time to Talk Turkey About Blog Posts

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Despite the flair of those TV Chefs who seem to nonchalantly add “a dash” of this or that seasoning, as you’re preparing the Thanksgiving feast, it’s a good idea to measure the ingredients and the cooking time. Is it important to measure your time in blogging for business? Well…“It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong,” observed English economist John Maynard Keynes almost a hundred years ago.  I think that saying holds true when it comes to measuring the effects of SEO marketing blogs.

I realize that our Say It For You business owner and practitioner clients want to be able to measure the success of their blogging initiative. Still, I tell Indianapolis blog writers that Return on Investment is more than “analytics” and charts. Why is that so?

  1. Even using today’s analytics, it’s not always possible to associate a specific ROI measurement to blogging for business without regard to all the other initiatives the client is using to find and relate to customers.  All the parts have to mesh – social media, traditional advertising, events, word of mouth marketing, and sales.
  2. Blogging for business carries benefits in addition to helping increase sales, I’ve found. Continuously producing and making available quality content helps demonstrate that you care about quality in all dimensions of your business.

On the other hand, I teach content writers to measure, and the Thanksgiving turkey is a good metaphor to keep in mind. Just as in preparing the turkey, it is useful to measure where you business blogging time goes, I teach at Say It For You. Say you’ve allotted two-three hours of your time for each blog post. One fourth of that time might be devoted to finding, reading, and processing existing content published relating your topic. Then, the bulk of the blog creation time is taken up in thinking about the topic, and actually composing the post. Finding just the right photo or clip art to capture the theme of a blog post and inserting it into the post might take 10 minutes. Then, there’s formatting the text to make it more readable, editing, strategically employing keyword phrases – all that will take the reminder of the time involved in the gestation of a single blog post.

Measuring is important in blog marketing in another way. Blog posts should contain at least a third less content than a promotional brochure or a website page, and should focus on one idea having to do with the business – highlighting one product or service, debunking one myth, making one comparison, offering one testimonial from a customer or one true story. This is a case where increasing the amount or number of ingredients is going to take away from – not add to – the eating pleasure!

Thanksgiving is a good time to “talk turkey” about blog posts!

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Does Blog Post Length Matter to Readers? Think Duration Neglect

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Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to fix on any rule other than “It depends!”. I think maybe Albert Einstein said it best: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

A chapter in Chip and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments gave me a different perspective on that old long-short question. Research has found, the authors note, that “when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length.” This phenomenon is called ‘duration neglect”. People tend to rate an experience based on two key factors:

  • the best or worst moment (“the peak”)
  • the ending

In business blog writing, Dave Taylor explains (and as we content writers in Indianapolis know), there are no editors, layout people, or government regulators to dictate the length of any marketing blog post. As a corporate blogging trainer, I felt my own approach to the subject was vindicated when Taylor cited a common piece of editorial advice about how long a book or article should be: “Write just enough to cover the material at the appropriate level of detail, then stop.” That dovetails nicely with the advice I offer when offering business blogging assistance.

The Heaths’ concept of the “peak”-and-ending, I realized, suggests a whole new way to come at the long-short question. A business blog post should be designed to elicit an “Aha!” response, that “peak” moment when readers find the advice or the offer of a product or service which seems to be the exact right thing for them. (Of course, in blogging, that realization had better happen sooner rather than later, or searchers will click away from the page!)

A big part of successful blog content writing involves getting the ”pow opening line” right. To sustain the “pow!” effect, present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy challenging statement. “Pow” endings, then, tie back to the openers, bringing the post full-circle.

Readers who’ve made their way to the end of a business blog post are going to remember only two things: the best moment and the ending. If they’ve had a positive experience, how long or short the post has been will have lost importance – all due to the duration neglect effect.

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Blogging About Potatoes, Eggs, and Coffee Beans

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The story “Adversity” in Steve & Jacks Home News reminded me how powerful stories can be in moving readers to action by appealing to their emotions. After his daughter had complained that, due to her dyslexia, she needed to work twice as hard as her classmates, a father brought three pots of water to a boil, placing a potato in one pot, an egg in the second, and some ground coffee in the third. Each of the ingredients, he explained, had faced the same adversity in terms of the boiling water. The potato, which had gone in strong, became soft, the father pointed out. The egg, originally fragile, had become hard. The coffee beans had created something entirely new.

“Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story,” observes Seth Godin in his latest book, All Marketers Tell Stories. Essential elements of effective stories, he explains, include:

  • authenticity
  • an implied promise (of fun, money, safety, a shortcut, emotional satisfaction)
  • appeal to the senses rather than to logic

The story Steve and Jack Rupp chose for their newsletter is a very good example, I think, of the type of story we blog content writers can use in blog posts. The father-daughter relationship is one to which readers can relate; the message is inspirational and emotionally appealing. It uses trivia, pulling together facts we had probably not considered (the different effect boiling water has on eggs, potatoes, or coffee beans).

A big part of providing business blogging assistance is helping business owners and professional practitioners formulate stories about themselves and their own business or practice. The history of the company and the values of its leaders are story elements that create ties with blog readers. Online visitors to your blog, I teach at Say It For You, want to feel you understand them and their needs, but they want to understand you as well. The stories content writers in Indianapolis tell in their marketing blogs have the power to forge an emotional connection between the provider and the potential customer.

The “boiling water” represents both the environment in which that business or practice operates and the complex of problems for which they offer solutions. Every business or practice has wonderful stories just waiting to be told, describing how the “boiling water” made them stronger, more empathetic, and better able to bring something entirely new to their marketplace.

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Can “Blog-folding” Increase Engagement?

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Proteins designed by humans competing at solving “foldit” puzzles turned out better than those from a design algorithm, it was found in studies chronicled in AARP Bulletin.

What does “foldit” involve? Foldit is a citizen science puzzler game. Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. Players can experience intellectual challenges and have fun, while helping predict which new proteins might help prevent or treat important diseases such as HIV / AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The term “foldit” comes from the fact that proteins are born as long-chain molecules, but then bunch up, or “fold” into complicated shapes.

Should we blog content writers be taking a lesson from the fact that the involving the brain power of people resulted in better outcomes than those produced by computer algorithms? If there is, it’s about engagement.

The term “engagement” describes how involved and “tuned in” readers are. Marketer Jason Amunwa thinks so: “At the end of the day, engagement is thinking less about ‘increasing traffic and instead learning how to do more with the traffic you already have!” he writes.

Indicators that readers are “engaging” with the content (in addition to converting to buyers) include reading all the way to the bottom of the post, subscribing to the blog, sharing the content on social media, and commenting.

Foldit.com puzzlers have a powerful stake in the outcomes of their “games” (Who wouldn’t want to help prevent cancer and Altzheimers?) When it comes to blogs designed to develop buyers of products and services, it pays to remember that blog readers tend to be curious creatures.  What’s more, that curiosity factor is highest when readers are learning about themselves.  I’ve found that “self-tests” tend to engage readers and help them relate in a more personal way to the information presented in a marketing blog.

Readers, whether they are new clients, repeat customers, other companies’ clients, or potential clients, are always thinking: “So what?  So what’s in it for me?” Posing qualitative survey questions (questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”) in a blog post can help engage the reader through interaction. Reader engagement also results from an “I never knew that!” response to content that compares the way things were and the way they are today. What’s more, “folding” can consist of photos, graphs, clip art, and videos, all of which tend to boost reader engagement and response.

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