To Be Interesting, Think Broad

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“Many people and most organizations narrowly define what’s relevant and interesting to their followers. They mistakenly assume that their followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects,” Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzgerald point out in The Art of Social Media.

As examples of how posts can be “broadened”, Kawasaki suggests that a restaurant chain might include news about atomic particles that help solve wine fraud, while an airline might offer news about drive-in theaters or mindful travel photography. It’s not that you don’t want to promote yourself and your own business to followers, the author explains; it’s that sharing interesting stuff and broadening by “catalyzing more interaction,” you earn the right to promote yourself!

As part of blogging training at Say It For You, I do often recommend including interesting information on topics only indirectly related to your specific business or profession (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, related to the client’s business or profession). If you’ve unearthed tidbits of information most readers wouldn’t be likely to know, so much the better. I agree with Kawasaki that even if some tidbits of information are not “actionable”, if they are intrinsically interesting, it’s worth including them simply to add fun and variety to your content.

But broadening the scope of information you offer in a business blog needn’t be only for the sake of adding fun to your content. Little known and trending news stories can be offered to readers with some very specific “ulterior motives” on the part of the business owner or practitioner, such as:

  • clarifying the way your business or practice works
  • demonstrating the many uses of your products
  • reinforcing the importance of a widespread problem
  • explaining why your business practices are designed to prevent that particular problem
  • busting a common myth

Online searchers who’ve arrived at your blog post definitely need assurance they’ve come to the right place. But now they’re here, you’ll have a better chance of engaging their interest by “going broad”!

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Blogging to Help X Do Y

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“Ultimately, your company profile matters. It can intrigue a new visitor to check out your products or services in more detail, and nudge potential customers into choosing your business over competitors,” Caroline Forsey writes. Forsey uses the Starbucks company profile as an example, incorporating the company’s mission, background story, products, and even folklore regarding its name.

All that material makes excellent fodder for website content, I thought. When it comes to blog marketing, however, I liked the very simple model for a business profile offered by Linked In sales enabler Missy Parrish: – “We help X to do Y”.

At Say It For You, we teach, blog content writers’ initial focus must be on the X. Even if your products and services are top-rate, that’s not enough to keep content fresh and make conversions happen. Your knowledge of the target audience has to influence every aspect of your blog. In fact, the very essence of content marketing is not “pitching” prospects and customers, but providing content that is truly relevant and useful to them

What about the Y? Most of the time, I explain to newbie blog content writers, at stage #1 of their search, online readers don’t know the name of the individual, the business, or the practice they want. What most consumers are likely to type into the search bar are words describing:

1.  their need
2. their problem
3. their idea of the solution to their problem
4.  a question

That means telling those visitors (the X) about the things you can help them learn and the things you can help them do (the Y) is what is most likely to lead to a next step. Always keep in in mind that, when you’re blogging, you’re talking to a friendly and interested audience about things that might help them (as opposed to forcing your message in front of people who are trying to avoid it).

What if you have more than one X and more than one Y? In fact, most business owners and professional practitioners tell me they have more than one target audience for their products and services. There may be one demographic that accounts for the majority of their customers, but they also have “outliers” who bring in just enough revenue to matter.

That is precisely the beauty of blog marketing. In fact, what you don’t want is an all-in-one marketing tool that forces a visitor to spend a long time just figuring out the 99 wonderful services your company or practice has to offer.  Each blog post will offer just enough to convey to individual searchers they’ve come to the right place (which they will have, based on the search terms they used).

Your welcome to those very visitors is the message conveyed in that very blog post: You help X’s like them to do Y!

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Steve Jobs and Pixar Illustrate an Important Principle of Blogging

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My realtor friend Steve Rupp sent me a piece with the following story about Steve Jobs….

After purchasing computer manufacturer Pixar, Jobs relocated the company to an abandoned factory, re-organizing the physical structure with offices and workspaces around a large, central atrium. Under this new (at the time) very unusual arrangement, the mailboxes, meeting room, cafeteria, coffee bar, and gift shop were all in the center of the space. The underlying principle? “When people run into each other and make eye contact, things happen.” Of course, electronic messages could have been sent throughout the Pixar building in a millisecond, Jobs realized, but the community context of the message is the part that would help people understand each other and work together.

Could Jobs have avoided restructuring the entire complex of buildings, relying on mandatory periodic meetings or even informal periodic staff get-togethers to accomplish his goal of employees “running into each other”? Perhaps, but that “eye contact”, “context-sharing” and cross-pollination of ideas, Jobs understood, needed to happen frequently in order to be meaningful.

At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of corporate blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “show up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. That sense of community Steve Jobs was after in the redesign of the Pixar facility? You might say the first job of a blog content writer is to help a business or a professional practice “get its frequency on”. What the blog does is get the business owners and practitioners into the “atrium” to “run into” their readers!

Good things happen in the blog frequency “atrium” for business owners who make blogging part of their routine as part of an overall business marketing strategy, with blog posts providing a steady stream of “sound bites” – little bits of different, interesting, and helpful content.

Steve Jobs building design was meant to encourage employees to “hang out” with each other in the Pixar atrium area whenever their schedules allowed, with no regular times posted. Over the years, blogtyrant.com relates, various studies have analyzed data to find out the best time to publish a blog post. Most often, though, we find that the issue is less that of choosing the optimal posting time and more about finding the time to create content to post in the first place!

Our mission, then as blog content writers, is to create an “atrium” where business owners and practitioners can share ideas with readers.

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Blogging to the Smarter Buyer

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”Smart buyers want to gain as much as possible while spending as little as possible,” Tom Sant teaches in his book Persuasive Business Proposals. “If you don’t show them how much they gain by choosing your recommendations, they will inevitably focus on the other half of the equation, spending very little.”

Several of the elements Sant stresses concerning proposals can be especially important in blog marketing:

1. Smart buyers want a business proposal to address their issues or problems right away, giving them assurance that the recommendations will be relevant.
At Say It For You, we emphatically agree. Corporate blog writing for business, will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers, the first or which is that the business owner or professional practitioner understands online searchers’ concerns and needs. That assurance need to find expression early in the blog post content.

2.  Smart buyers want clear, specific recommendations tied back to solving those problems.
Buyers need to understand that you and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. Since, other than the clues offered through the words searchers have chosen to type into the search bar, their individual needs are as yet unknown to you, include anecdotes as examples of common issues that have been solved using your products and expertise.

3.  Smart buyers want evidence that the vendor can deliver on time and on budget.
At Say it For You, we realize that having a specific audience in mind and choosing the best evidence for that target audience is crucial.. It’s specific evidence that will resonate with the right audience, including:

  • statistics about the problem your product or service helps solve
  • your years of experience, degrees, newspaper articles written by or about your business or practice
  • testimonials

Choosing the best blog marketing evidence is crucial!

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