Placement Smarts for Stores and Blogs

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Blog marketing and placement of goods in a grocery store have a lot in common, it seems.

Consumer psychologists have found that shoppers need a little time to get into the shopping mindset. That’s why you’ll often find magazines, books, and flowers near the front of the stores, to get shoppers into a more relaxed frame of mind, authors of The Big Book of Secrets explain. Then, since frequent customers who buy the same staples each week might ignore other items, stock is rotated frequently to lure shoppers to consider new items. Placement on shelves is super-important, because study after study has shown that items put at eye level are most frequently purchased. For that reason, smart merchandising involves placing the most expensive items on eye level shelves; suppliers may be charged extra for placing their goods at eye level,

Welcoming readers to the store or the blog
Just as shoppers arrive at the grocery store because they are interested in finding certain goods, online readers will have landed on your blog because they are interested in finding information on your topic and possibly making a purchase. Unlike the grocery shoppers described in the Big Book of Secrets (who know they’re in the right place, just need to be put into a more relaxed frame of mind), online searchers need immediate confirmation that they’ve come to the right place. To that end, according to blog mavens Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos, key words and phrases should be among the first words in your blog title and then reappear in your first lines of the post.

Staying at eye level
In comparison with putting grocery goods at shoppers’ eye level, eye-tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a page top to bottom and left to right, looking for information that matches what they typed into the search bar.

Putting the thesis and conclusion on the “end caps”
Grocery marketing studies have shown that placing items on end caps (the shelves at the outer end of each aisle), can boost sales by as much as a third. When it comes to blogging for business, I teach at Say It For You, the “end caps” of blog marketing are titles and closing lines. in helping high school and college students write effective essays, I often suggest they introduce their readers to both their topic and their thesis, doing both those things on the “end cap” where they’ll get the most attention. That way, I teach each the student writer, your readers will understand not only what issue will be under discussion, but towards “which side” of the argument you’re trying to steer your readers. In business blog writing, for the opening “end cap”, you may choose to present a question, a problem, a startling statistic, or a gutsy, challenging statement. Later, on the “back end” of your blog “aisle”, your “pow” closing statement ties back to the opener, bringing your post full circle.

Checking out
In a grocery store, even shoppers who leave totally empty-handed must pass by the checkout counters. In blog marketing, the equivalent is an “enticing, well-written Call to Action, as written.com suggests.

Just as if your were managing a grocery store, use your placement smarts in blogging for business!

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In Sustained Blog Marketing, Look for the Overlap

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James Marshall Reilly likes to think of the speaking industry as falling into a number of different buckets, including:

  • distinguished celebrity
  • leadership
  • health
  • the economy
  • gender
  • science
  • arts
  • education
  • inspiration
  • authors
  • technology
  • spirituality
  • futurism
  • sports

The key, Reilly tells speakers looking for engagements, is to start thinking about where your topic will fit, understanding that there will likely be overlap.

At Say It For You, we think overlap is an enormous advantage in blog marketing.

1. Years ago, I remember reading a quote from career coach Nancy Ancowitz. “Effective self-promoting,” she taught, “is finding the overlap between what you have and what your audience wants.” Of course, blogging is the essence of self-promotion, allowing business owners and professional practitioners to find the overlap between what they do and what searchers want.

2. Another way to understand and use overlap in blog marketing has to do with keeping on keeping on. Blogging is a perfect example of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. It’s the week-after-week, month-after-month work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing blog posts that gets many down. Just as Reilly explains to speakers that they can “tweak” their material so that their content is tied to some of the popular topics audiences are interested in hearing about, blog content writers can use precisely the same strategy.

You’re creating content to market bedroom furniture. You can relate that topic to:

  • health – lighting, clean-ability, and air quality in a bedroom
  • arts – appropriate artwork to display in the bedroom
  • technology – thread counts in bed linen
  • science – antimicrobial treatment of linens
  • gender – studies proving that men and women react differently to smell, sound, and color
  • celebrities – Elton John photographed amidst fur blankets in his bedroom on a private plane

For sustained blog marketing, look for the overlap!

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What This Blog Isn’t

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This week’s Say It for You posts were inspired by James Marshall Reilly’s book One Great Speech, in which he describes his challenges in locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors.

In the introduction to his book, James Marshall Reilly makes sure readers know exactly what to expect.  In fact, the author provides three checklists:

  1. Who is this book for?
  2. What this book will teach you
  3. What this book isn’t

While it may not be practical for blog content writers to actually provide readers such a checklist for each post, it’s a great self-check mechanism for content creators.

Who is this blog post for?
Not only must a marketing blog be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and towards those who will want to do business with you, each post should have a specific type of reader in mind. That way, the content will clearly demonstrate that the business owner or practitioner and the staff understand the readers’ concerns and needs, but know how to meet those needs and solve those very problems.

What this post will teach you
The title of a blog post indicates what readers can expect to learn. There are two basic categories of blog titles, we’ve found at Say It For You. The first is very direct, using keyword phrases that match up with what a reader may have typed into the search bar. The second category gives only the barest hint of the content to follow and is meant to arouse curiosity A compromise I teach is to use a combination of a “Huh?” title to get attention and then an “Oh!” subtitle to make clear what the post is actually going to be about.

What this post isn’t
Of Reilly’s three lists, this one may be the most important for blog content writers to consider and at least indirectly, make clear in the content:

  • This is not an advertisement or a list of claims about a product or service.
  • This is not a news report (although it may be based on a news report, offering a fresh perspective on that news).
  • This is not a ”put-down” of our competitors’ products and services.
  • This is not a thinly veiled attempt to capture contact information from you.
  •  This is not a mere re-hash of widely accessible information.

Very much like a sculptor who “reveals” the shape by cutting away “excess” marble, blog content writers can craft effective posts by cutting away what the content is not!

 

 

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Is the Size of Your Blog Post Inflated?

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For the second time this week, an article in the Indianapolis Business Journal caused me to consider some of the unique challenges of blog content writing…

“Looking for signs of inflation? Check the sizes of the goods you buy,” observed Cecil Bohanon & Nick Curott in the Indianapolis Business Journal. “Sellers of many consumer items resorted to reducing the quantity of the product to obviate explicitly increasing the dollar price of the product.” In other words, the package of cereal or cookies, or gum, stayed the same size; there was just less stuff in the box!

“Why are cereal boxes half empty?” Well, ABC Packaging admits, “bigger boxes give the impression that there is a lot of cereal inside”. “Large packaging is misleading and not fair, consumer campaigner Fred Isaac was saying back in 2016.

Well, duh….But economics aside, as a blog content writing trainer, I caution against “inflating” the length of blog posts. What’s the current wisdom on the subject? Brightedge.com offers the following advice in favor of longer posts: “If your piece does not provide enough depth or if it only gives a cursory treatment of the topic at hand, it may not be deemed high-quality content. You will want to dive deeper and provide more information as well as have an optimal blog post length.” “While attention spans may be going down, the average word count of blog posts is on the rise,” observes blogtyrant.com.

At Say It For You, we tend to agree with the checklist Jasmine Gordon offers. We blog content writers will know we’re done with a particular post IF:

  1. we’ve covered the topic in depth
  2. we’ve offered more value than the competition
  3. we’ve incorporated high-quality visuals
  4. we’ve verified our research and facts

My take is similar to that of Fred Isaac: Honest packaging should mean that longer posts deliver more information and a deeper dive into the subject. Having composed blog posts (both as a ghost and under my own name) numbering in the tens of thousands, I’m 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.” In blogging, I’ve found that as long as you stick to a central idea for each blog post, you need to “say it until it’s said”, making your post as short as possible, but not shorter.

Ask yourself – Is the “package” filled with necessary, useful information, or is the size of this blog post inflated?

 

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In Blog Post Titles, Beware of Anchor Bias

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Anchoring bias causes us to rely heavily – often too heavily – upon the first piece of information we receive. Whether we’re setting plans, making estimates about something – or reading a blog post – we interpret newer information from the reference point of our “anchor”, thedecisionlab.com explains. What’s the problem? The “anchor” idea gets stuck in our heads, making us reluctant to accept information that follows, information which might cause us to change our minds.

For business blog content writers, the first piece of information readers are going to receive is obviously the title of the post. We want the searcher to “drop anchor” by clicking on the link, and of course want search engines to offer our content as a match for readers seeking information and guidance on our topic.

When it comes to blog marketing, titles that seem clever are often not effective. The name of the blog post must make clear – to both searchers and search engines – what the post is about. Search engine optimization aside, a blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors. In essence, you’re saying, “If you click here…

  • you’ll be led to a post that in fact discussing the topic mentioned in the title
  • you’ll be led to a post that explains how to reduce an undesirable effect
  • you’ll be led to a post that explains how to achieve a desirable effect
  • you’ll obtain information on how to do something

The tone of the blog post title also implies a promise:

  • this content is going to be humorous or satirical
  • this content is going to provide a list
  • this content is going to be thought-provoking and/or controversial
  • this content is going to be cautionary or even frightening

As blog content writers, we also need to beware anchoring. As Decision Lab explains, “Anchoring is so ubiquitous that it is thought to cause a number of other thinking fallacies, including the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy describes how we tend to underestimate the time we’ll need to finish a task. Since researching and composing an excellent blog post for a business is labor-intensive, including “reading around”, researching, composing, illustrating, and sharing, both commitment and time management need to be part of the expectations from the get-go.

On a basic level, maintaining consistency – beginning with blog post titles, then to blog post content, and ultimately to delivering quality products and services to customers – is the only way for any business to become, and remain, valued in its marketplace.

Use blog post titles as anchors, but beware of causing anchor bias!

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