Benchmark Blogging

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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” legendary management consultant Peter Drucker was fond of saying. “How do we know if we’ve identified a result rather than an activity?” he asks. To achieve any goal, whether personal or business, explains local consultant Michael Hill, use the acronym SMART:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Results-oriented
  • Time-phased

When blog content writers use SMART, that can greatly enhance the value of the information and advice they’re offering.

Specific:
Start by asking yourself what you want the person to do as a result of reading this post.
Each business blog post should impart one new idea or call for a single action. Focused on one thing, your post has greater impact, since people are bombarded with many messages each day. Respecting readers’ time produces better results for your business.

Measurable:
Readers need to know how they will know that choosing a particular product or service has been a good idea. Offer tips on small, incremental positive changes they should begin to notice.

Attainable:
Describe realistic, achievable and easily identifiable signs that can signal that the client is on a trajectory leading towards the desired outcomes.

Results-oriented:
While time may have elapsed from the initial transaction, the content of the blog can serve as a reminder of the initial reason for beginning the regimen, purchasing the item, or continuing to take training.

Time-phased:
Setting expectations based on time is a good idea for blog content writers. Imagine readers asking themselves “How will I use the product?  How much will I use? How often? Where? What will it look like?  How will I feel?”

Remember, if clients and customers can’t measure it, they will not even try to “manage it”.

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Blog “As-Measured-By” Calls to Action

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“Just Do It” worked for Nike. Let’s face it, though – readers of our marketing blogs aren’t going to convert to customers that easily.

True, as I stress in corporate blogging training sessions, blog content writing has an enormous advantage over traditional “push marketing” tactics, because, what blogging does best is deliver to corporate blog sites customers who are already interested in the product or service they’re providing!

In corporate blogging for business, the “ask” comes in the form of calls to action. Offering a reason for the requested action needless to say, greatly improves the chances of having your request fulfilled. At the City University of New York, I learned, experiment subjects were instructed to ask someone using a copy machine if they could go first.  When persons making that request offered a reason, they were given permission 94% of the time (versus only 60% of the time when they gave no explanation for why they deserved to go first).

There’s more, though, to improving the chances readers with fulfill your requests. Jason Buetler, who trains software design apprentices at Edusource, uses the “as-measured-by” principle. In doing what Buetler calls “predictive” planning, it’s crucial to establish sets of benchmarks by which progress towards the goal can be measured.

What-can-I-expect questions are implicit in every decision-making process:

  • “How will I know?”
  • “ How will I measure success?”
  • “ How can I tell it’s working?”

If our blogging Calls to Action are going to be effective, I realized, it’s up to us blog content writers to offer workable benchmarks, explaining the “as measured by”.

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?”

“As-measured-by” goes even further than that, setting up specific, time-based expectations. For reader/prospects to know what’s in it for them, they need the reassurance that certain signals will be there to tell them results are in the process of happening.

Use “as-measured-by” in your Calls to Action!

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Blogging to Help Increase Positive Behaviors

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blogging to encourage positive reactions

 

There’s a lot we blog content writers can take away from a very unusual experiment called “The Sentimental Savings Study”. This study, reviewed in the Journal of Financial Planning , is about using psychology to help increase positive behaviors (in that specific case, personal savings). And, isn’t that precisely what marketing blogs are designed to do – motivate readers to take positive action? Can psychology help readers envision the positive outcomes that our products and services can mean for them, in terms of improved health, wealth, status, comfort, knowledge, and skills?

At best, financial education efforts had achieved marginal success in improving savings behaviors of Americans, the researchers found. Based on the theory that invoking sentimentality would exert influence on behavior, they employed “emotion activism”, creating art therapy and linking memories of past experience with money to their present attitudes. Participants were each asked to bring in a sentimental item or a photograph of such an item. In the sessions, they were guided to recall in detail how and where they had received that item, and what values they associated with it. Overall, the results of the study appeared to be a strong endorsement of the way in which sentiment and emotional associations drive decision-making.

“Blogs are bricks in decision-making architecture,” I wrote five years ago in a Say It For You blog post. How can blogs, which are short, personal, and conversational, help potential clients and customers make complex decisions? I suggested three approaches:

  1. Suggest questions readers can ask themselves while choosing among options.
  2. “Map” consequences, showing what feeling the prospect might gain through the decision – relief, trust, pride, etc.
  3. Offer easy ways to make choices.

After reading the Sentimental Savings Study, I now think a fourth tactic might be to help readers “reminisce” about how proud or satisfied they felt after having made a decision on a purchase. An anecdote might be the best way to accomplish this type of introspection.

Incorporating emotion might be just the way to increase positive behaviors, converting browsers to buyers.

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Blogging to Make the Reward Worth It

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“Make the reward worth it,” Nancy Duarte advises business speakers in her book Resonate. “No matter how stimulating you make your plea, an audience will not act unless you describe a reward that makes it worthwhile.” The ultimate gain must be clear.”

Duarte lists 7 basic types of reward:

  1. Basic needs – include food, water, shelter, and rest. (Concern for others’ basic needs prompts generosity.)
  2. Security – includes physical, financial, technological, and psychological.
  3. Savings – includes savings in time, labor, and money.
  4. Prize – includes personal financial reward, privilege, market share.
  5. Recognition – People relish being honored for both individual and collective efforts.
  6. Relationship – a sense of community with a group of people who support each other and make a difference
  7. Destiny – includes fulfilling lifelong dreams and reaching one’s potential.

Since one important function of any marketing blog is converting lookers to buyers, and since I train Indianapolis blog content writers, this concept of perceived rewards really piqued my interest. The things that motivate people to buy are product or service features they want, of course, and, as I explain to new clients, when readers arrive at your business blog, it’s because they already have an interest in your topic and are ready to receive the information, the services, and the products you have to offer.

However, I caution the content writers, whether the blog leads to success in converting lookers to buyers will in large part depend on the rewards those readers perceive are in store for them. Remember, there’s so much information out there for searchers to use, so many bloggers telling what they have to offer, how it works, and how they can help. What needs to come across loud and clear is that the business owners or practitioners understand the readers and those readers’ specific needs and problems.

But more than that is required for success. The focus of each blog post must be on the end result from the recipients’ point of view. Help readers know how good they’ll feel (whether in terms of security, savings, recognition, or basic need fulfillment – after using your (or your business owner or professional practitioner client’s) product or service.

Blog to make the reward worth it!

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The All-Important Call to Action in Blog Content Writing

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One of the resources Ivy Tech offers to students is the Study Power Leader’s Guide. The Guide suggests students keep a daily activities list containing three categories:

  1. Must Do!
  2. Should Do
  3. Could Do

“We live in a culture of information-saturation. Consumers today are highly-distracted, which is why you need to end your posts with a bang, by including enticing, well-written calls to action,” writtent.com suggests. An effective call to action will act as a logical extension of your blog posts, the authors add. “Your calls to action should never seem abrupt, or you’ll struggle to get the reaction you’d hoped.”

Over the years of working with business owners and practitioners, I’ve encountered two very different attitudes towards blog marketing and specifically towards Calls to Action. At the one extreme are those who feel that any direct Call to Action is abrupt and obtrusive, believing that if the blog provides useful information, the reader will want, without being asked, to follow up with the company or practice. At the opposite end of the spectrum are owners who feel uneasy about giving away valuable information “for free”, even though they realize their blog will become a way of selling themselves and their services to online searchers.

In response to the first fear, I explain that a CTA does not at all invalidate the good information provided in the piece. When people go online to search for information and click on different blogs or on different websites, they’re aware of the fact that the providers of the information are out to do business. But as long as the material is valuable and relevant for the searchers, they’re perfectly fine with knowing there’s someone who wants them for a client or customer.

Similarly, I can reassure business owners getting ready to launch a marketing blog that the only people who are going to notice their blog are the ones already interested in that topic. “Giving away” knowledge showcases the owners’ experience and expertise rather than threatening it in any way. More often than not, readers want to get it done, not by themselves, but by the expert you’ve shown you are!

Using those three Study Power categories might be a good way to vary the Calls to Action in blog posts, was my thought.

  • Must-do!s can include safety and health checklists, along with an offer to download a white paper or brochure.
  • Should Dos might include links to landing pages with more information.
  • Could Dos include an invitation to chat or telephone for further information.

Using the three categories can help students keep track of their activities, and varying your calls to action can help you get the reaction you’d hoped for, I teach at Say It For You.

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