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Why a This When You Can Have a That?

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“Just as you need to understand customers’ needs, values and wants, you also need to have pride in your business and the quality of your products or services,” Richard Forest writes in a LinkedIn post. “When a customer agrees to a sales conversation with you, they’re probably seeking advice, and it’s your responsibility to provide this advice, based on your specialist knowledge.” Skilled sales people, Forest posits, begin by concentrating on a vision of what the customer ultimately wants as an ideal outcome.

But, what if the best means of achieving that outcome is one the customer isn’t aware exists as an alternative? As a content writer, I was taken by an ad in the AARP Magazine, titled “Why have a stairlift when you can have a Homelift?” The article* begins by summarizing the limitations of a stairlift (it won’t carry a walker or wheelchair; it’s slow; it can fit in only one spot in your home, has noisy vacuum system, requires a machine room), going on to suggest an alternative solution the buyer probably hadn’t considered – an elevator.
*There are a number of vendors of home elevator vendors – I’m merely using this particular ad to make a point about marketing techniques.

“Now, more than ever, clients are looking for firms with a distinct and differentiated point of view (POV) on how to solve the pressing business problems they face,” rattleback.com explains. “Buyers don’t want to waste time on solutions that aren’t a good fit,” forcemanagement.com points out.  When a product or service is new to the marketplace, simple claims are typically accepted by buyers, marketing maven Eugene Schwartz posits.  “As the market matures, and the same promise is made over and over by different providers, the market progresses to a new level of sophistication. Marketers need to enlarge their claims. As the market reaches a third, even more advanced, level of sophistication, it becomes necessary to market through unique value propositions.”

Blogging has “come into its own” as an important marketing tactic precisely because it is so prospect-centered, we realize at Say It For You .Through pull marketing, blogs connect those in need of solutions with precisely those who can provide those solutions. But with so many alternative solutions available, the key to content marketing success may lie in posing the question: “Why buy a this when you can have a that?”

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Blogging – Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

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Identifying new uses for a product can increase usage frequency and even convert current nonusers into users.
Both are aspects of a market penetration strategy, David Stewart observes in the Branding Strategy Insider, offering as an example an advertising campaign for orange juice: .”It’s not just for breakfast anymore”, a slogan that represents an effort to expand usage. Innovation challenges people’s existing perceptions of the category and gives them pause for thought, Nigel Hollis adds.

Blogging has a 30-year history.
“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy, Marc Prosser of SCORE stresses. Blogging has been around for the last 30 years, but it has certainly changed and evolved over those years, Ryan Robinson reminds us. The very first online journals were made up of plain text, with no graphics or formatting, and the word “blog” itself wasn’t coined until 1997. It wasn’t until 2003 that WordPress (the platform I’m using for this Say It For You blog) entered the scene. The next year “Blog” became Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

Blogging in 2023
Today there are more than 31,000,000 bloggers in the U.S. alone. Blogging, broadbandsearch.net observes, is “democratized content publication, not regulated by gatekeepers such as publishing houses, news organizations, universities, or governments. 70% of individuals favor acquiring information about a company through a blog, and 55% of brands gain new clients through blogging.

“The creation of relevant content for visitors and existing customers is one of the most important benefits of blogging,” VEZA Digital asserts. “Posting blogs regularly helps you engage directly with a user’s questions and queries that they are typing in a Google search. These questions help you to understand whether your customers are getting the information that they need from your blogs and also help to know if your keywords are performing well.”

Just as identifying new uses for orange juice expanded sales of the product, blog content can build value for a brand, leading to increased sales.
“Consider what is important to your target market and to existing customers,” VEZA advises. What problem does your product or serve solve? How will it help readers overcome barriers or do their jobs better? “Creating a connection between your brand and the customer is crucial. Brand awareness and trust go hand in hand.”

What your blog is for, we explain at Say It For You, is to provide relevant, useful, and timely content to your prospects and customers to help them solve problems, understand industry trends, and make sense of the news and how it relates to them

The power of the new
People are always looking for new things, Neil Patel explains – new software, new techniques, new ways to make and save money. Using new phraseology in your blog posts is a way to command attention, and smart blog marketing expands readers’ perception that there are new ways for them to engage with your brand.

Remember – blogging isn’t just for breakfast anymore!

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In Content Marketing, Hit Anything But the Ball Out of the Park

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“Cliches begin their lives as imaginative expressions and comparisons,” explains Richard Lederer in the Mensa Bulletin. But then, after repeated use, those phrases become trite, hackneyed, and lifeless, he explains.

For example, Lederer reminds content writers, you might hit:

  • the bulls-eye
  • the spot
  • the ball out of the park
  • the nail on the head

But your writing, he cautions, will turn out to be nothing more than “a yawn”. “Our hardworking English language means business,” Lederer reminds us, and we need to think about creating content that has impact without using expressions that are “dead as a doornail”.

Having devoted the last sixteen years of my life to wordsmithing blog posts at Say It For You, I know firsthand that variety can be the spice, not only of life in general, but of content.  Gray Matter, the Elevate blog, explains that the larger your vocabulary, the easier it becomes to break away from old thought patterns. We view our thoughts as shaping our words, but our words shape our thoughts, too. A large vocabulary isn’t for showing off – it should be used to expand your thinking – and that of your readers. There’s o much content out there – being boringly clichéd is a certain path to the bottom of the heap when it comes to engaging readers and converting them to buyers.

In addition to avoiding over-used expressions, content writers need to consider varying sentence length. Brandon Royal, author of The Little Red Writing Book, reminds us that not every sentence needs to be kept short.  Instead, Royal advises writers to weave in short sentences with longer ones. Every so often, he suggests, a “naked” (extremely short) sentence can add a dynamic touch.

“Using clichés is as easy as ABC, one-two-three, pie, falling off a log, and taking candy from a baby,” Lederer admits, but…don’t. It’d be all too simple for online visitors to click away. “The purpose of a blog is to create a more engaging website for your brand,” Indeed .com reminds business owners and candidates alike.

In content marketing, hit your target market, not the ball out of the park!

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Infuse Your Content Marketing with Freudenfruede

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“Finding pleasure in another person’s good fortune is what social scientists call freudenfreude,” Juli Fraga writes in Reader’s Digest, “describing the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds even if it doesn’t directly involve us. Freudenfreude can “foster resistance, improve life satisfaction, and help people cooperate during a conflict”.

When it comes to content marketing, it might appear that praising or even recognizing the accomplishments of a competitor is the last thing any business owner or professional practitioner would want to do in their blog content.  Yet, competitor-focused content can be some of the most profitable you’ll ever publish, Ramona Aukhraj of IMPACT writes, because prospective buyers need to know you’re aware they have other options, and that you can be trusted to  have their best interests in mind. (A side benefit, IMPACT adds, might be that, in writing content about competitors, you’re using keywords that might drive traffic to competitors’ sites!)

Alexander Chua of Kalungi.com agrees that, specifically with B2B blogging, there are good reasons to mention competitors, including showcasing your own confidence, controlling the conversation, and possibly generating mentions of you by those competitors.: Most important, Chua says, is that you’re providing value to your readers.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking, while all these posts mentioned valid and very practical reasons for referring to competitors, none suggested anything approaching the possibility of achieving pleasure at learning about or recognizing competitors’ achievements. The high road is the one to take in blog marketing strategy and tactics development,  we try to always remember at Say It For You. As Bing Crosby used to croon, “Accentuate the positive…latch on to the affirmative.”

Where content writers might find – and share with readers, that feeling of “freudenfeude”, I believe, is in celebrating the combined success in an industry or professional field. Your blog becomes a way to educate leads on industry trends and developments, informing readers about “what’s-going-on-and-how-do-we-fit-in”, celebrating how far we (as an industry or profession) have come in terms of both technology and human understanding.

Freudenfreude – it’s all about the “We”.

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Content to Win Search, Not the Lottery

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“There’s no shaking it. Your chances of winning the lottery are extremely slim.” The Associated Press patiently explained after the Mega Millions jackpot had climbed to more than a billion dollars, the largest in U.S. lottery history.” (Since the article was published, someone in Florida did, in fact, win the jackpot.)

There’s a long list of rare events that are more likely than winning the lottery, the AP author explains, including the 1 in 15,000 odds of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime . In fact, it’s about four times as likely that you die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery! (Depressing facts to all of us ever-hopeful lottery ticket buyers, to be sure.) Still, the article itself holds a valuable content writing lesson, which is that one very important function served by a blog is putting things into perspective.

When you think about it, the typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are, and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the function of the blog content to give readers a deeper perspective with which to process the information offered.. For every fact about the company or about one of its products or services, a blog post addresses unspoken questions such as “So, is that different?”, “So, is that good for me?” The facts need to be translated into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action.

Blogging helps you build authority in your industry, WP Beginner explains. “It is harder to prove your expertise and authority on a subject if all you have is a five-page website selling your products/services. Adding a blog allows you to regularly publish content on topics related to your industry. This helps you establish authority and win users’ trust.

As content writers, we understand that online readers have access to more technically detailed sources than our blog posts.  Our job, though, is to help those readers (and that includes B&B prospects of our marketing blogs) make sense out of the ocean of available information.

In blogging for business, we’re trying to “win search” and win hearts, not overcome enormous odds and win the lottery. But to truly overcome the still substantial odds against getting noticed, content writers must focus on putting avalanches of information into focused perspective.

 

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