Blog Readers Want A Hole, Not A Drill!

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Three marketing mavens, one message:

  1. Marketing expert Theodore Levitt told his MBA class at Harvard something bloggers for business would do well to heed: "People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole."
  2. "Truly successful marketers use reverse branding," blogger Ryan Karpeles emphasizes.  "People rarely think of your actual brand first.  They think about what they want.  Then they decide who, specifically, can fulfill that desire."
     
  3. Ron Karr, writing in Speaker Magazine, advises, "Sell the outcomes.  When someone’s deciding how to spend her limited budget, she will invest in services that help her achieve her goals. In other words, she wants results."

Consumer Electronics retailers, says Karpeles, are constantly telling customers that they have "all the best technology" at "prices you can afford". The lesson here:  Customers don’t want technology.  They DO want to have an incredible home theater experiences.  They DO want to capture family memories.  They DO want to print documents from any computer in their home.

Are you describing products and services in your blog posts, or are you selling outcomes?

Do your blog post titles convey the message, "Positive outcomes can be found here!"?

 

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Leitmotifs For Blogs

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Blog posts tend to be more effective when they focus on just one idea, I’ve found.  That idea might be:

  • Busting one myth common among consumers                  
     
  • One testimonial from a user of your product or service
     
  • On special application for your product
     
  • One common problem your service helps solve
     
  • One new development in your industry

Focus is what helps blog posts stay smaller and lighter in scale, and much more flexible than the more permanent content on the typical corporate website.

What helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing business blog marketing strategy are the blog "leitmotifs".

Leitmotif means "leading theme" in German.  In music, "the leitmotif is heard whenever the composer wants the idea of a certain character, place, or concept to come across," explains Chloe Rhodes in A Certain "Je Ne Sais Quoi",

Whenever I’m sitting down with business owners as they’re preparing to launch a blog for their company, I find that one important step is to select 1-5 recurring themes that will appear and reappear over time in their blog posts.  The themes may be reflected in the keyword phrases they use to help drive search, but themes are broader in scope than just key words.

A residential air conditioning firm, for example, might blog using keywords such as "air conditioning", "air conditioning repair", "air conditioning service in Peoria".  A theme for that company’s blog, by contrast, might be "Room comfort".

What leitmotifs will unify your blog posts?

 

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But What Does It DO In Your Blog?

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Develop Indy expects its rebranding effort to offer real results, says CEO Scott Miller.  Under the old name, Indianapolis Economic Development Corporation, he explains, the organization was often confused with the state’s IEDC, frustrating staffers and customers alike.

Freshbooks CEO Michael McDerment lists five characteristics he thinks good company names need:

 

  1. It’s easy to remember
  2. It’s easy to spell and requires no explanation
  3. Its describes your business category
  4. It describes your benefit
  5. It describes your difference

As examples of names that fit that five-point bill, McDerment points to three well-known companies:

  • PayPal
  • BestBuy
  • QuickBooks

McDerment’s own company name, Freshbooks, is intended to convey a fresh approach to "something as tired as accounting", he says.

As a professional ghost blogger and business blogging trainer, I think McDerment’s rules apply to blogs in at least two ways:

Blog post titles:  The title needs to be a pretty good indication of what the post will be about, serving as a strong clue to what the reader can expect to find.

URLs:  "If your business is online, you don’t want to have to explain how to get to your domain," says McDerment.  Your domain name should reinforce what you do.

Develop Indy aims to develop company expansion and attraction to Indianapolis.  What does your company blog aim to do?  Give it a name that says so!

 

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Un-mixing Them Up In Your Blog

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If you think the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis is a branch at the IU campus in Bloomington, or that it’s IUPUI’s law school, you’re not alone – just about everyone confuses the two law schools, explains Norm Heiken of the Indianapolis Business Journal in "The Other Law School". Law school dean Gary Roberts has the burden of forging a separate identity for his law school:

  • Mail is often misdelivered.
  • Students apply to the wrong admissions office.
  • The media mix the two schools up.

As a professional ghost blogger and business blogging trainer, I’d have to say all businesses face somewhat the same challenge of differentiating themselves from their competitors. Your website can begin the task by describing in some detail ways your business is unique.

A business blog can "flesh out" the distinguishing details:

  • Special pricing or fee structure
  • Additional services that are part of the package you offer
  • Your unique approach within your industry

I remember my grandmother repeating (today we might consider this sexist, but the saying made perfect sense to her) "A woman’s work is never done." It occurs to me that, in a very positive sense, a blogger’s work is never done, because there’s time in other blog posts to chisel, to hone, to correct, to add, to differentiate. As you continue to work on your business brand, your blog can keep up with your evolving mission and image.

 

 

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Blogs Are What You’ve Done For Them Lately

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Just the other day, a business owner prospect, B. posed a question I’d heard many times before:

 If my website is already showing up at or near the top of Page One on Google
and Bing, what value would having a blog add to the mix?

This question of what value a blog might bring to a business is the sort to which stock answers rarely apply. As I’ve mentioned often in earlier Say It For You blog posts, business blogging must be considered a single tactic in an overall marketing strategy. At the same time, it’s just the sort of question to kick off a discussion of the role a business blog might play in converting "clickers" to customers.

My friend Damon Richards, owner of Port to Port Consulting, would say B. has won the first set of a three-set match, in that he’s "won search". In fact, B. has "won search" without blogging.  B. performs a specialty service in a niche market, and his business name describes the service he provides. It stands to reason online searchers looking for that service will find B.!

Is B. winning the set and losing the match? Apparently so.  "Why am I not getting more business out of my website?" he asks, frustration creeping into his voice.

The second "win" B. needs is to have searchers click on the link to his website, so they can learn more about his business and how he solves problems for his clients. In fact, B. doesn’t know to what extent the second "click" is happening, because he has not set up analytics to give him that information.

Setting aside any judgment on the quality of B’s website itself in terms of content or graphics, adding a blog would keep the material current, offering readers a sense that they’re getting "the latest scoop". It’s much less cumbersome and much less expensive to add new, up-to-date content on blogs than on most traditional websites.

"What Have You Done For Me Lately?" is the title of an article about the Small Business Administration, about new services the SBA provides in addition to business loans. Bloggers for business, take heed. Your loyal customers may know what your core services are, but you can use your blog posts to tell online searchers what your business has been doing lately and what you can do for them!

 

 

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