Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles made headlines, but not the kind to which anyone involved in corporate blogging for business would ever aspire. 

The feature story “Dear BMV: Are you talking to me?” centered around a big fat “Oops!”, because 58,000 people across the state had received postcards urging them to renew their drivers’ licenses.  The postcards arrived, all right, but the intended courtesy of the effort was lost when recipients discovered each card had been addressed with the correct last name and address, but with the wrong first name. 

For every business owner, marketing director, and freelance blog writer, there’s a real takeaway in this communication-gone-wrong story. Blogging for business, as I stress in Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions, is an aspect of “pull marketing”.  That means one of the main motivators for having an SEO marketing blog in the first place is to “get found” by the ‘right people”.  (Who are those? People already interested in what you have to sell, what you know, and what you know how to do.) Until they are matched up with your blog, though, those potential customers don’t know you exist and they certainly don’t know that, in your blog content writing, you’re talking to them!

That’s precisely where “targeting” comes in. Without marketing research, corporate blog writing can all too easily fall into the same Are-You-Talking-To-Me “Oops” as the BMV.  The “postcard” arrives (meaning the search engine delivered the online reader to your blog post or website), but you got the “first name” (the message) wrong.  Your blog might written in too formal – or too casual – a style for your market demographic. The “buzzwords” might strike the wrong note for the age group you’re targeting. Significant “disconnects” between your readership and your business blog content writing can cause the blog visitor to think “This content doesn’t sound as if you’re talking to ME!” 

Ironically, business blogging can serve as a form of market research in itself, as smallbiztrends.com points out. “Start a blog on your company website, tell your customers about it, and post information about your products and services.”  Afraid customer comments might be negative? Just the opportunity to show how you respond to customer concerns.

As something of a wordsmith when it comes to corporate blogging for business, I’m always listening to the NPR Radio programs dealing with language.  Tuned in the other day to “RadioLab”, I learned the most interesting thing:

There are 7,000 languages used around the globe , and in fully a third of them, there exist no words for “left”. “right”, “front” or “back”.  Instead, direction is described in those languages as “north, “northeast”, “south”, “southwest”, etc., with the orientation being a birds-eye view above the person being referenced.

In fact, the radio host explained, among Australian tribes, rather than the standard greeting being “How are you today?”, it’s “How are you headed today?”

Since, for all of us blog content writers, words (and, to a lesser extent pictures) are our only tools to tell the business owner’s story, it’s important for us to appreciate how the language we use shapes our own thoughts, and how we can use language to help shape the thoughts of our online readers.

In the 1940’s, I learned, a linguist named Benjamin Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi (a native American language spoken in parts of Arizona) see the world differently because of differences in language.

All of this, at least in my mind, goes to suggest the importance of what words we select for our business blog writing. Sure, we need to remember to use a lot of the website’s keyword phrases in an SEO marketing blog, but I’m talking a couple of layers deeper than that. After all, blogging is about “heading” our readers in the direction of understanding who we are, our unique fix on our marketplace, and what level and type of service and product we aim to bring to consumers.

In a way, that very concept is what I was trying to express in my own Say It For You website when I referred to the “training benefits” the business owner gets from writing the blog content or (often to an even greater extent), from working with a blog writing service. In continually being involved with talking effectively about your business, putting your accomplishments down in words, verbalizing the benefits of your products and services, the language you use has an influence, not only on visitors to your blog, but on you!