Highlight the Team in Your Business Blogs

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“Highlighting your team is a great way to bring your readers behind the scenes and let them see the team camaraderie. This kind of transparency builds trust with your readers,” says Any Porterfield in socialmediaexaminer.  “Your team can help you keep things informal, fun and relatable,” she adds.

Since I work as a professional ghost blogger, I’ve obviously needed to abandon most of my generational bias towards long, individually composed business letters and long phone conversations and come into the world of electronic marketing tools.  But there’s a reason  I gravitated towards composing blogs rather than website copy.  In a way, blogs are the humanizing factor in the online communications family. The blogs are where you meet the people running the business or professional practice.

One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into human, people-to-people terms. In fact, one reason I prefer first and second person writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting” is that I believe people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.

“Getting down and human” in business blogs is so important that it becomes a good idea for a business owner and professional to actually write about past mistakes and struggles. After all, it’s much easier to connect to someone who has been where you are.

It’s interesting – blogging is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world, but very few business owners can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to have much of an effect. As blog content writers, our Say It for You team is providing that service, which seems like a contradiction to the idea of the readers meeting the actual team of employees who are providing the product or service..

Not really. Even if your hired gun “ghost blogger” is doing the writing, employees themselves can provide anecdotes and information, and different blog posts can feature different employees and owners.

Humanizing the blog by bringing readers behind the scenes helps keep your company or professional practice relatable. The old saw still applies: People want to do business with people!

 

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Sales-Lite for Business Blogs

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Your objective of blogging may be to generate leads, to increase web traffic, or to raise your profile as an authority. But if you use your blog just to spread your sales messages, cautions kissmetrics.com, you may struggle to find readers.

So, how do you get your sales message across through your blog?  This week, my Say It For You posts are devoted to that very question. Here’s what some folks are suggesting:

Kissmetrics: To gain business with your blog you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. By providing solid advice on a regular basis, you build authority and trust; and that’s how you win new customers.

B2bleadblog: Automation can help you manage lead nurturing, but you can’t automate trust.
Trust is earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your prospects. When considering what targeting options to use, you need to know and understand the make-up of the heavy user. Knowing gender and age is only a fraction of the story. You need to also learn about the benefits they seek as well as their motivations for using that particular product or service. Get into the mind of the heavy user. Knowing who they are and what they do every day will help you better decide multiple locations where you should place the message to reach the right consumer and what that message should look like.

Alina Diaz, Center for Sales Strategy: At the end of the day, the marketer is looking to get their message in front of the right audience. Using analytics, pay attention to the characteristics of heavy users.

Jane Sheeba Media of dailyblogging.org:
For online sales, especially through blogs, you should be cautious to provide the information in a logical fashion, addressing all expected concerns from a customer point of view. If the content is provided by careful wording, product images (with front view, top view, left view and right views and other angles) revealing the functional components, there is a great chance to make a sale in the first shot.

For blog content writers, serving up a sales-lite menu can help increase leads that lead to sales.

 

 

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Stop Asking for More in Business Blogs

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“The more information you offer to people, the more likely they’ll be confused.  When people are confused, they don’t become customers,” warns Neil Patel in his quicksprout.com blog.

I couldn’t help remembering those words while enjoying the humor in a recent Dilbert comic strip. Carol’s  babysitter canceled, but Wally said “I will not watch your kids tonight.” “I was going to ask you to adopt them,” Carol said.  “Absolutely not,” Wally says. “The best I can do is watch them tonight.” This seems to demonstrate that, if you ask for a lot more than you want, you might get the customer to agree to what you really wanted in the first place.

Sorry, folks, that just won’t work in blog content writing.

What can work, says kissmetrics.com, is, in your marketing message, teaching your leads how to move as close as possible to Z (the point they want to reach) before you ask for their money or their commitment. The closer you get them on the road from A to Z, the more likely they are to buy from you in order to go the final few steps needed to arrive at their desired end result.

Even more powerful, advises kissmetrics, is using the pain motivator, showing your prospects all the dangers on the road from A to Z, and how your product or service is the weapon they need to defeat those dangers and discomforts.

In “Say This, Not That”, Christine Georghiou advises salespeople to justify a request or statement with the word “because”.  That word immediately answers the question on every prospect’s (and every online reader’s) mind – “What’s in it for me?”

Your team will love our software because we offer email response tracking.

“Emphasize value over price when presenting your product,” adds Georghiou. Value is results-oriented, and results are precisely what you want the prospect to be pondering, not price (which highlights what he/she will lose).

As a trainer in corporate blogging, there’s another reason I think the Dilbert ask-for-more-than-you-want technique would fail miserably in blogs:  Carol doesn’t like sitting for his own kids, but is trying to get someone else to want to do it. Blog content is at its most compelling when the writer is immersed in the lifestyle whose participants they’re trying to attract as customers. “It’s not an essential key to a successful business but it does help that you are immersed in the lifestyle of it, says Steve Watts on Shopify.com.

Stop asking for more in business blogs; focus, instead, on moving prospects closer to Z!

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Know Your Reader When Using Allusions in Business Blogs

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An allusion is a figure of speech that makes reference to a place, person, or event. The point of using allusions in writing? An allusion can:

  • get readers thinking about your subject in a new way
  • get a point across without going into a lengthy explanation
  • cement a bond between the writer and readers based on shared experiences and knowledge

Blog content writers can use allusions with all three of those results in mind.

  • In a financial planner’s blog: There’s no need to act like a Scrooge (allusion from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”). Simply plan your charitable giving as part of your overall monthly budget.
  • In an internet security provider’s blog: You may think a new piece of software can be useful to your business, but it can turn out to be a Trojan Horse (allusion from Homer’s “Iliad “about how the Greeks won the war through trickery).
  • In a nutrition counselor’s blog: If chocolate is your Achilles’ heel (allusion from Greek mythology), allow yourself one chocolate indulgence each week, cutting back on other sweets.

Because allusions make reference to something other than what is directly being discussed, explains yourdictionary.com, you may miss an allusion or fail to understand it if you do not know the underlying story, literary tale or other reference point.

In the Indianapolis Star the other day, I solved the Cryptoquip as follows:  “Did you see that bird meditating while using a mantra? It was probably an om-ing pigeon.” This rather clever puzzle uses a combination of a pun (homing pigeon) and an allusion. It also reminded me that, as a blog content writer, I need to gauge my readers’ level of education and familiarity with the reference.

Remember, an allusion does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it refers. The writer expects the reader to possess enough knowledge to spot the allusion and grasp its importance in a text. Problem is, if readers don’t get the connection, they’re going to find your content frustrating more than illuminating.

Know your reader when using allusions in business blogs!

 

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Blogs Must Optimize for Users, Not Search Engines

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“No longer should SEOs optimize web content just for search engines,” cautions The 2016 Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to SEO, “They must focus on optimizing for consumers. SEO success is achieved when consumers find a brand’s content to be relevant, top quality, and valuable.”

Thinking of search only around traditional search engines, the Guide author Relevance adds, is too limiting, because nowadays, social platforms are being used to answer questions, solve problems, and entertain.

In fact, a true content contribution solves customer problems in three ways:

  • by educating
  • by informing
  • by entertaining

I agree, and, as a blog content writer and trainer, I have something to say about each one of these elements.

Educating
One big goal of the writing we do for our business owner and professional practitioner clients is positioning them as experts in the eyes of their clients and of online searchers. But, in order to be positioned as an expert, you can never stop educating yourself in your area. Only after you’ve done that will you be equipped to, in your blog, discuss topics of interest and newsworthy developments in your industry, showing your level of knowledge on each topic while remaining relevant and current.

Informing
There’s one big difference about presenting material in blog posts versus other media. Once I’ve posted content on this Say It For You blog, for example, it can remain on the Internet forever.  Past blog posts don’t disappear; the content remains on the site in reverse chronological order. And what that means is that blog content writers need to include material that is evergreen, information that can continue to have relevance even months and years later.

Entertaining
Ideal blog content includes material that makes people laugh and then makes them think. While good blog posts can and should be entertaining, most online searchers are not pursuing a recreational activity, but instead are on a fact-finding mission. You can hook them with humor, but the material you serve up in your posts needs to be not only valuable, but actionable.

SEO, Relevance concludes, was once all about building off-page links.  Today, brands need to first create valuable content to contribute to their industry space. Blogs, simply put, must optimize for users, not search engines!

 

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