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Helping Readers Organize Their Perceptiions

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Helping readers organize their perceptions of your industry and of the services and products you offer is one of the core functions of blog marketing. An article in Forbes, “5 Cybersecurity Strategies for a Riskier World“, is an excellent model of how to present information in a well-organized, easy-to-digest format. For each imperative, a statistic is presented, followed by a piece of advice.

  1.  (Imperative) Balance innovation and security.
    (Statistic) 41% of executives say cyber risk initiatives at their organizations have not kept pace with digital transformation.
    (Advice) Don’t invest in cleanup for legacy systems – bake in security with new efforts.

2.  (Imperative) Inventory your highest risks.
(Statistic) 4 in 10 organizations now take a risk-based approach to cybersecurity.
(Advice) Get your technical teams, partners, and suppliers on the same page.

3. (Imperative) Safeguard remote work.
(Statistic) 67% of business-impacting cyber attacks target remote workers.
(Advice) Offer security awareness training for employees and their families, paying for the use of family password stories and                          antivirus protection for home devices.

In marketing a business or practice, organizing relevant and useful information in a structured format can be very useful to readers. Bullet points and numbered lists help readers’ eyes move quickly through the material. And, when the blog content “walks” readers through logical steps to a conclusion, that can increase the likelihood of them staying around to read all your key points.

Statistics can actually serve as myth-busters; if there’s some false impression people seem to have relating to your industry, or to a product or service you provide, you can bring in statistics to show how things really are. Statistics can also serve to demonstrate the extent of a problem (which is precisely how they are used in the Forbes article).  Once readers realize the problem, the door is open for you to show how you help solve that very type of problem for your customers!

In terms of offering advice, I’ve often mused that, out of all the possible advertising and marketing tactics a business or professional practice might use, blogging’s way ahead of the pack because it attracts customers who want to be sold. In fact, it’s the close match between the type of advice the searcher wants and what you know about that accounts for your meeting them in the first place!

It’s important that the entire format of the Forbes article is built around numbers, both in the “listicle” format and in the statistics. . In an analysis by HubSpot of their own blog posts to see which titles had performed the best in terms of search results, the top eight each included a number. In blogging for business, numbers are a great way to be specific about your accomplishments.  They also show that you pay attention to benchmarks and concentrate on setting and meeting goals.

Organizing the material offered in your blog post helps readers organize their perceptions.

 

 

 

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One By One Problem-Solve in Blogging for Business

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This week, our Say It For You blog is sharing insights gained from the book The Writer’s Resource , by Day and McMahan….

“Analysis is always a part of effective problem solving,” the authors assert. Take any topic, isolate the parts, and think about them one by one, they advise. Why is it so hard to study English? Think of the component parts: a) You have not bought the textbook. b) The light bulb in your desk lamp has been burned out. c) You turn on the TV the moment you come home from school. Tackle each of those three, then think up three more rationalizations and deal with those, the authors say. Eventually, you’ll get to the heart of the problem, and the breakthrough will be due to your growing analytical prowess.

At Say It For You, we realize that our clients’ blog readers are not their students, and it’s going to be up to us content writers to “solve” readers’ issues, answering their questions, engaging their interest, and moving them to take action. The secret may lie in the story Day and McMahan tell about the composition teacher who told her students: “If, after writing the opening paragraph of your paper, you find you’ve run out of ideas of what to say next, begin the second paragraph with the words ‘for example'”. Even if you’re not writing about something difficult or abstract, the authors say, you still need examples to prove your point, as well as “to add verve and interest”. All good writing, the authors conclude, uses examples and illustrations.

But, in order to follow that opening-paragraph-followed-by-examples format, it’s important to first isolate one small aspect of your topic, focusing on just one idea in each blog post. Not only will that add more “punch”, but it allows the content writer – and the reader – to focus on that one central point. Remember, that opening paragraph is there to make clear not only what need, issue, or problem is to be discussed, but also what “slant” the business or practice owner has on the issue.

Then, the “for example” content might be based on real customer experiences, an issue with which the founders had wrestled before discovering the solution.

In blogging for business, it’s a good idea to tackle problems one by one!

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Different Strokes for Different Folks in Blogging for Business

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Is your business blog reader’s tummy rumbling?

In this month’s Writers Digest, ten winners were announced. Contestants had been given a photo prompt showing a grocery store aisle and asked to write the opening line of a story based on that prompt. My personal two favorites were these:

  • “My tummy rumbles as I walk past all the things I cannot buy with the seven dollars in my pocket, the seven dollars for her cigarettes.
  • “We fell in love reaching for the same tea and fell apart picking different ice cream.”

I think this exercise illustrated two concepts related to business blog content writing:

The importance of your opening line

  • The first sentence of a blog post functions as “a hook:” and, next to the title, it’s the most important set of words in the post, creative-copywriter.net explains, advising writers to “say it fast, strong, and well”, right into the action and addressing their deepest problem instantly.
  • Readers are looking for connections. The challenge is to get the reader to nod his or her head, thinking “Yeah, that’s me.” Ann Hanley says in orbitmedia.com.

  • Writer’s Digest wasn’t talking about online content, but for blogs, the opening lines are where it’s important to incorporate keyword phrases to help with Search Engine Optimization.

The same general topic can be approached in a myriad of ways.

  • In order to add variety, I teach blog content writers to experiment with different formats, including how-to posts, list posts, opinion pieces, and interviews.
  • Different posts can present the same business from different vantage points, “featuring” different employees and different departments within the company.
  • Individual blog posts – or series of posts – can be tailored to different segments of the customer base.
  • Remember that, even within your target market, each reader’s need for information, products or services was born in a slightly different space and has traveled a different path. Not every message will work on every person.

From the very opening line and continuing throughout the blog post, remember – there are different strokes for different folks in blogging for business!

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Post-It Note Blogging For Business

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Several years ago, while serving as an English tutor at Ivy Tech Community College, I created a writing guide for my students, urging them to complete the first three steps before sitting down at their laptops to write an assigned essay. They were to use Post-It® Notes to jot down ideas. That way, the order of the different paragraphs could be switched around. Blog content writers can follow an identical process in organizing their thoughts…

Step One: Select your topic. (Hint: Your TOPIC is not necessarily the same as the title for the post. Your topic is also not the same as your thesis statement. Your topic IS the answer to the question I might ask a person who’s just finished reading your blog post: “So…what was the subject of that piece?

Step Two: Compose your thesis statement. Another way to think of your thesis statement is your “one-sentence speech”. The thesis statement tells the reader what your particular “slant” is on the topic. Are you out to explain how to use a product or service? Are you intent on raising awareness of a problem you know how to solve? Are you aiming to demonstrate your involvement in your community?

Step Three: the three-legged stool
Just as a stool will not stand firmly without having at least three legs, you should plan to have three “legs”, or points to use in proving your thesis.

Step Four: Support your points
This is where students would find statistics, or articles by authorities who have opinions that support their ideas. (Even in this digital age, I used to advise students to print out pages they were going to quote, so that they could highlight specific passages they might cite.) On a Post-It®, which they’d affix to the page, they’d capture the information needed to cite that source on their References or Works Cited page).

Step Five: Outline your paper (or blog post)
With your tools now “lined up”, you are ready to decide in what order you’ll present the ideas. (This is where you experiment by moving the Post-It notes around). Once you’ve settled on the order, it will be easier to see which element is best for capturing attention at the start, as well as which makes for a powerful ending statement. This can also be the ideal time to select a title to arouse readers’ interest.

Try Post-It® blogging for business!

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Blogging This or That

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For the same amount of money, Jeana Harris explains in Indianapolis Monthly, you could have a four-bedroom Roaring Twenties foursquare in Meridian-Kessler or a sleek two-bedroom downtown condo just five blocks from Mass Ave. Would you prefer a view of peaceful streets sheathed with mature trees, or a sixth-floor view of the city coming alive at night?

Unlike upselling, which involves encouraging the purchase of anything that would make your customer’s purchase more expensive with an upgrade, enhancement, or premium option, Sophia Bernazzani explains in Hubspot.com, cross-selling pitches other products or services that work together with the ones already owned by the client or customer. Investopedia.com points out that both methods are “suggestive”, requiring only marginal effort on the part of the sales professional compared with the potential additional revenue.

“Having a larger number of choices makes people feel that they can exercise more control over what they buy. And consumers like the promise of choice: the greater the number of options, the greater the likelihood of finding something that’s perfect for them,” Sheena Iyengar and Kanika Agrawal assert in The Art of Choosing. But not everyone agrees. “More Isn’t Always Better”, says Barry Schwartz in the Harvard Business Review. Research now shows that there can be too much choice, inducing “choice paralysis”, with consumers less likely to buy anything at all.

Can business blogs help potential clients and customers make better, sometimes complex, decisions? A possible path to achieving that precise result, we have found at Say It For You, involves suggesting questions readers can ask themselves while choosing among many options. (Do they want ease of use? Current functionality? Future capabilities?)

No, more isn’t always better, but companies that get the balance right will be amply rewarded, Schwartz concludes. Due to the natural “drip effect” of blogs .consistent posting of informational “this-or-that” content can help consistent marketers achieve that Goldilocks “Mmm…just right” result.

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