Posts

Blogging Starts and Grows Because of Trust

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

“In business, we need our customers and potential customers to trust us….otherwise they simply won’t want to invest time and resources into us and our business,” Safarz Ali writes in the Business Influencer. How do you prove that you are trustworthy? Ali suggests the biggest three ways:

1. Show, don’t tell. Live up to your promises and use client case studies to prove it.
At Say it for You, we emphasize that case studies chronicle a customer or client who had a problem or need, taking readers through the various stages of using the product or service to solve that problem.

2. Practice honest communication, brushing no issues under the rug.
Problems with customer service are going to arise, but those very situations offer you an opportunity to shine by making things right. Empower Then use writing for business as one excellent vehicle to tell about your own mistakes and the way you offer outstanding customer service by making things right.

3. Prove you know your customers.
Your blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than your business can be all things to everybody.  The blog 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 and how sophisticated your approach..

The top five best communication traits of a successful leader, Rebecca Weintraub and Stan Lowes think, are these:

1. walking the talk
The typical online searcher is leery of hype and unrealistic claims, and honesty in content writing has power.

2. authenticity (understand yourself first)
To demonstrate that you’re unique, you need to explain what you care about and what it’s like to work with you.

3. embracing a communication culture
Use your blog to demonstrate your full engagement and concern for your customer’s welfare, and allow real-time feedback from your target audience.

4. storytelling
You have to have a point, conveying the reason you’re sharing the story.

5. listening
When I’m ghost-blogging for a business, I need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, on what’s in the news, and about what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my client sells and what it does for its clients.

Blogging starts and grows because of trust!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Opening Up Options in Your Blog

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

 

In his business book Good to Great, Jim Collins writes that his favorite opening question when meeting a prospect is “Where are you from?” That opener allows the other person to respond in a myriad of ways, the author explains. The prospect might talk about her hometown or country – “I grew up in Berlin”, or about her employer – “I represent Fidelity Bank and Trust”, or reveal that she’s originally from LA, but has been living in the Midwest for most of her adult life. The concept is, as Daniel Pink mentions in his own book To Sell is Human, when talking to prospects, open things up rather than shutting them down by making people think you’re passing judgment on them.

When it comes to converting readers into customers, our job as blog content writers is to present choice, we stress at Say It For You. Given enough “space” to absorb the relevant and truthful information we present over time, consumers are perfectly able to – and far more likely to – decide to take action. Defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience in providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward.

But what I don’t mean in advising you to present a variety of options is the “Swiss army knife” approach – you don’t want your blog to be an all-in-one marketing tool that forces a visitor to spend a long time just figuring out the 57 wonderful services your company has to offer!. What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts.  I often remind business bloggers to provide several options to readers, including “read more”, “take a survey”, “comment”, or “subscribe”. On websites with no e-commerce options, of course, “Contact” might be  the ultimate reader “compliance” step.

I think the important take-away from Collins’ “Where-are-you-from?” approach is that people are different. Action-oriented readers will want our best recommendations from among the choices. Idea-oriented persons will want to know about the business owners’ core beliefs underlying the way that business is structured. A process-oriented reader will want to know how the process of purchasing and using the product or service works.

To sell what you do and how you do it is human, but be sure to open up a variety of options in your blog!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blog Content to Counter Those Second Thoughts

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

A humorous little poem in the 2023 Almanac for Farmers & City Folk is a good example of the challenge we blog content writers face in trying to get readers to take action:

The strain of work has zapped my zest;
The doctor says I must have rest;
He ordered me to get away
And forgo everything but play.
But where to go? How near or far?
By plane or train or boat or car?

As the potential traveler struggles to decide among the myriad of destinations and travel packages, she thinks of all the preparations she’d need to make in order to embark on the trip – find someone to walk her dog and feed her cat, purchase luggage, defrost the fridge, stop the mail, get new prescriptions, etc, etc., etc….. The no-longer-interested-in-travel customer concludes:

In checking off what must be done,
The chores outweigh the future fun.
Before I even make a start,
I’m too exhausted to depart.

“Problems arise when, instead of caring for their existing customers and treating new ones respectfully to win their business, businesses force both to jump through hoops during even simple interaction,” lament Mike and Blake Dubose. “Most customer service issues boil down to a simple problem: a failure to give customers what they want, when they want it, and in an outstanding way.” The same make-it-easy-to-buy concept applies to B2B customers – the more overwhelmed customers are, the less likely they are to buy, and the more likely they are to regret any purchases made. A prescriptive approach guides customers through the buying process with the greatest level of ease, identifying the customer decision roadblocks that must be overcome.

Blogs don’t make up an entire marketing structure, as I wrote years ago, but blog posts serve as bricks in the “decision-making architecture”. Readers might be a different stages in the sales cycle, so it’s a good idea t structure your Calls to Action so that those ready to buy can do that right away, but still providing for those not quite ready for even a phone conversation (who might be guided to watch a video or read an article). Remind readers of the annoyances and hassles they’re experiencing with their present providers and products, then go on to describe the perfect, hassle-free solution to their problems.

Making a business’ or a practice’s products and services accessible and easy to acquire or use has to be at the top of our best best practices list when it comes to writing content for business blogs!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Creating Hormonal Blog Content

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

Hormones affect choice, Jeanette Maw McMurtry explains in Marketing for Dummies. Neurotransmitters affect the actions we take related to finding joy and avoiding fear and pain.

  • Dopamine makes us feel infallible and euphoric.
  • Oxytocin gives us a feeling of connection and validation.
  • Cortisol makes us feel threatened and fearful.
  • Serotonin makes us feel calm and upbeat.

Marketers of products and services, McMurtry stresses, must learn to develop ESPs (emotional selling propositions), rather than the much-touted USPs. How will what you’re offering help buyers feel glamorous, confident, secure, superior, or righteous?

Research by psychologist Daniel Kannemann found that when people are faced with risking something in order to gain a reward, they will most often choose to avoid the risk. As a blog marketer ,then, consider how your product or service helps users avoid loss/ embarrassment/ risk.  Identify the fear that drives your customer, McMurty says, then diminish it, presenting a visible solution to the problem.

Know your target audience, the author urges. Think about which aspect of their personality best predicts their behavior and which form of “hormone” or psychological fulfillment your brand helps support. Should you be focusing on:

  • “scarcity” (only a limited supply of a product is available, the introductory price for a service is about to end; supplies are dwindling)
  • “purpose and mission” (socially responsible, environmentally responsible, charitable purpose)
  • “prestige” (feelings of superiority associated with the ownership of luxury goods)
  • “health and fitness” (appealing to fear of illness and a desire for longevity)

“Ask yourself key questions about the psychological fulfillment your brand helps support,” McMurtry recommends.

Creating “hormonal blog content” means perceiving – and then presenting/seeing your product’s value in the light in which your customers’ subconscious minds will!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Sharing the “We” in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , /by

In a Say It For You blog post last week, I mentioned the ongoing debate about the use of the two pronouns “you” and “we” in marketing messages. While many respondents to a Corporate Visions survey had said they used we-phrasing deliberately to position themselves as trusted partners with their customers, a set of experiments reviewed in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that sometimes the use of “we” arouses suspicion rather than trust, because prospects and brand-new didn’t yet have reason to feel a congenial relationship with the company.

My own feelings on the matter, as expressed in my monthly newsletter, are that “we” is a valuable syllable. In communication with the public, and particularly in blog content writing, there’s a very special purpose to be served by using first person pronouns – they help keep the blog conversational rather than either academic-sounding or overly sales-ey. When the owners of a business or practice use phrases such as “we think”, “we believe”, “we see this all the time”, they are offering their unique slant or opinion that differentiates them from their competition.

Much to my delight, as I read through my copy of this week’s Indianapolis Business Journal, I saw that editor Lesley Weidenbener’s Commentary column was titled “we’re listening; we’re focused on business” The article  presents an extremely personal accounting of the way Weidenbener and her editorial staff had wrestled with the decision about whether, as a business-focused publication, they should include breaking news stories about criminal and social events that affect businesses. How would they avoid sensationalism or “yellow journalism”? The newsroom staff met, readers’ advice was considered, and “WE” (the editor shares) “decided that WE will maintain our focus on business news and on how crime….affects business.”, There’s no “royal ‘we'” here; in fact, Wedenbrener tells readers “We want to know what YOU think…”

As blog content writers, we represent those business owners and professions who are – and should be – the “we”, the ones with the ideas, the knowledge, the products and services, and the ones who have the experience and the unique “slants” to share. Those real people behind the “we” are sharing their stuff with YOU, the online readers receiving the good advice and answers to their questions. Blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations or “aggregations” of information, even when that information is extremely valuable. There has to be human connection.

The “oomph”, I’m now even more firmly convinced, comes from sharing the “we” in blogging for business.

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail