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They-Know-Why, You-Know-How Blog Marketing

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Even if you’ve never smoked, there’s a lot to learn about blog marketing from the “Josh and Kayla know quitting is hard” TV commercial for NicoDerm CQ®, I was thinking just the other day.

Story power:
You may or may not ever have been addicted to nicotine, but as humans, we’ve always been addicted to stories, Alex Limberg writes in SmartBlogger.com. Stories, he explains, engage a deeper part of our brains than any logical explanation ever could. In the NicoDerm CQ® video, Kayla, leaving her dad’s hospital bedside to grab a smoke with Josh, realizes she needs to quit – she’s found her “why”.

People:
People-based marketing is driving change across the U.S. advertising industry, reports viantic.com. Even if your blog is devoted to marketing product, focus the content on how people will experience using it. The NicoDerm CQ® commercial shows “real” smokers experiencing the “real” challenge of quitting in a “real” human hospital setting. In blogging for business, where face-to-screen is the closest blog content writers come to their prospects,  introducing people (both people working for the company and users of the product or service) can ignite the kind of personal connection that gets readers emotionally involved.

Empathetic:
The “You know why, we know how” slogan is catchy, to be sure. More importantly, the tag line creates an emotional response. While advertising communicates a message about what a brand does, the way the message is conveyed has a greater influence on how likely consumers are to buy, David Brandt of Nielsen explains.  Ads that make people feel closer to a brand have a positive empathetic score.

Targeted:
Obviously, the Nicoderm CQ® ad is focused on a target market – viewers who are smokers, and smokers who know they need to quit.   In the same manner, business blogs must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who will want to do business with you.  Everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it.

Advertising is “push marketing, while blogging is “pull marketing”, designed to attract searchers who have already identified their own need for a particular product or service. Those searchers already know why.What your blog content needs to demonstrate is this: you’ve done your homework and understand their “why”.  Your function is to furnish the “how”!

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Two-Tiered Business Blog Titles

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What’s “Into the Endgame” about? (How Parliament should weigh up the Brexit deal, of course.)
What about “Click to Download Teacher”? (Technology can help solve the problem of bad, absent teachers in poor-country schools.) “The New Abnormal”? (California faces the most destructive fire in its history). And “Drop It!”? (An argument about firearms will help to shape next year’s election.)

These and other two-tiered titles from this month’s issue of The Economist magazine can serve as a master tutorial for blog content writers. There are two types of titles, I’ve taught in workshops on business blog content writing. The “Huh?s” need sub-titles to make clear what the article is about, while the “Oh!’s” are self-explanatory. With one important purpose of marketing blogs being to  attract online shoppers, blog post titles are a crucial element in the process. That means that catchy and engaging as a title might be, it won’t serve the purpose if the words in the title don’t match up with the ones searchers used.

That’s the reason two-tiered titles use two layers. The first-tier “Huh?” startles and arouses curiosity.  The “Oh!” sub-title then serves to clarify what the focus of the content will be.  (No, this is not a bait-and-switch play, but more like a bait-and-focus one)

Which brings me to meta-tags, which are 160 character snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, as wordstream.com explains, but readers can see them on the search engine page. In addition to being scanned by search engines, those little content descriptors help readers decide whether they want to click to read the content. The snippet serves as a preview of the “Oh!” portion of your blog post title.

For example, underneath the actual link
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/11/15/into-the-brexit-endgame, a searcher would see this snippet: “6 days ago – Britain and the European Union Into the Brexit endgame. How Parliament should weigh up the Brexit deal. Print edition | Leaders. Nov 15th”.

“The New Abnormal” – Huh? “Oh!” It’s about the California fire. In writing engaging business blog content, try using two-tiered titles.

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What’s in a Name When Blogging For Business

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Richard Lederer, author of the book the Joy of Names, has a vested interest in his subject: his own name, he reveals means “powerful estate ruler leather worker”. But, “Must a name mean something?” (as Alice asks Humpty Dumpty).”Of course it must!” is Dumpty’s reply.

In writing to promote a business or practice, using stories about names and nicknames makes for engaging content. In fact, it’s an excellent idea to share anecdotes about people on the team who have earned a complimentary sobriquet.

Just this week, paging through a special edition of People Magazine devoted to The stars of Food Network, I noticed several examples:

  • Bobby Flay is “the elder statsman of Food Network”.
  • Ina Garten is “the ultimate hostess”.
  • Valerie Bernelli is “hot in the kitchen”.
  • Duff Goldman is “the designated baker”.
  • Guy Fiere is “mayor of Flavortown”
  • Alton Brown is “the geek of gastronomy”

As fellow blogger Michael Fortin reminds content writers, getting personal is a huge element in the success of business blogs. Sharing this type of fond moniker, along with an anecdote, adds interest to blog posts. Did you know that Alton Brown once invented a turkey derrick with ropes, pulleys, and a ladder, to facilitate safe and accurate fryer of a Thanksgiving bird?

Storytelling has the power to move from lifeless to life-filled copy, Luana Spinetti writes in webhostingsecreatreveals.net.

The following poem by Charles Delint (included on page 11 of the Lederer book) sums up the astounding power of names and the stories behind those names:

A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all of her parts,
But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it?
That the complex, contradictory individuals we are
can be called up complete and whole
In another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

As the People Magazine Food Network issue demonstrates, blending 6 cups of the power of names with 6 cups of intriguing anecdotes and – you’ve got some very delicious business blog content!

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We’ll-Just-Tell-You-Why-It-Should-Be-Us blogging for Business

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introducing you in your blog

At first glance, the WageWorks ad (the company provides Health Savings Accounts for employees) seems incredibly boastful:

“We won’t tell you which HSA to pick.  We’ll just tell you why it should be us.”

On second glance, this ad reminds me of two points I made about thought leadership in recent posts on this Say It For You blog. One refers to a Wall Street Journal Magazine story about Kasper Egelund, the Danish kitchen company CEO. Egelund tells customers they can have his kitchen in any color,” so long as it’s black”. The very arrogance and self-assuredness embodied in that statement makes customers want to follow his recommendations.

When it comes to blogging for business, positioning ourselves (or our business owner/professional practitioner clients) as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is obviously a worthy goal. We might be able to go one better, however, by presenting ourselves as thought leaders, willing to strike out in a direction that is a little different from the common wisdom – and being definitive about our opinions.

The WageWorks ad may be boastful, but it offers reasons employers should choose their HSAs over others available in the marketplace. In my “There’s-a-Reason-and-What’s-the-Reason Blogging for Business” post earlier this week, I explained that readers need to be offered a “because”, presented in terms of advantages to the reader of reading further and then following the Calls to Action in the blog post.

“When it’s your turn to speak, start with a bang, not the white noise of housekeeping,” Laurie Guest, CSP advises emerging public speakers. Opening strong, Guest explains, means being purposeful about your opening, with no quotes from famous people, or “Nice to be here…”, or humorous “ice breakers”.

In blog marketing, the idea is to powerfully position what you do and what your company does. Like CEO Egelund and WageWorks, be strong and bold – let them know why it should be YOU!

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New Blogging Means Being Controversial

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Be controversial, is the advice Ryan Deiss and Russ Henneberry, authors of Digital Marketing for Dummies. give writers. The idea – making yourself stand out by bringing up controversial topics even if you worry some of your readers won’t agree.

Whatever the topic, you have to answer four questions that will be in readers’ minds, Deiss and Hennberry stress:

  1. Why now? (Why is the information you’re offering timely?)
  2. Who cares? (Who in the target audience is likely to be affected by having or not having what you’re selling?)
  3. Why should they care?) How will their lives be different with your product or service?)
  4. Can you prove it?  (Here’s where case studies, testimonials, and news stories come in.)

Daniel of Freerange Communications agrees. “One way to increase organic traffic and build engagement is by writing controversial content while backing up your opinions”.  But, he cautions, “You cannot simply contradict what everyone else is saying…You need to support your arguments with accurate sources and data.

Daniel lists three possible approaches to writing controversial blog posts:

  • Riding coattails:
    Using an already popular subject to prove your point. For example, “Why Steve Jobs Constantly Ignored His Customers”
  • This versus that:
    “5 reasons email marketing is better than social media marketing”.
  • Being the messenger:
    “The  ——-  Myth Debunked”

If you decide to write about a heated topic, tackle the topic boldly, using clear sentences. You can even present arguments for both sides while making sure that the side you pick is clear, Daniel advises.

In blog content writing training sessions, I’ve always emphasized to content writers that blogs must have a strong, “opinionated” voice. Posts must go far beyond Wikipedia-page-information-dispensing and offer the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organization executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

In any field, there will always be controversy – about best business practices, about the best approach to providing professional services, about acceptable levels of risk, even about business-related ethical choices. Rather than ignoring the controversy, bloggers need to comment on the different views and “weigh in”.  New Blogging will consider controversy a tool for thought leadership.

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