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Resisting the Urge to Repeat? Not!

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Ask a question and wait for a response, no matter how long it takes, is one piece of advice given to newbie salespeople. In other words, resist the urge to repeat your question, instead waiting- wait for an answer. Your prospect will inevitably feel moved to fill the silence, is the theory. Some health experts agree, citing repetition compulsion, or called trauma reenactment, which involves repeating physically or emotionally painful situations that happened in the past.

Not all sales trainers are on board with the advice about waiting for prospects to respond. “The mistake many people make–including me–is not following up often enough,” Minda Zetlin writes in Inc. Magazine. “When customers don’t hear from you for a while, they’re liable to forget you just at the moment when you want to be top of mind,” she says. Ask yourself, Zetlin advises, if there’s a follow-up note you can send with additional metrics or other information that will help your potential customer make a decision. Meanwhile, the trainer adds, “You don’t want to make the classic mistake of losing customers you already have while you’re busy landing new business.”

Hubspot agrees with Zetlin’s approach, saying that following up on a sales call or email significantly increases your chances of getting a response. Research shows that if you add just one more follow-up email, you can increase your average reply rate by eleven percentage points. In fact, first followup emails show. a 40%-increase in reply rate in comparison to the first email.

At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “follow up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. Blog marketing maven Neil Patel reminds business owners and practitioners that “Google isn’t shy about rewarding websites that publish regular, high-quality content.” The “frequency illusion”, Mark Zimmer adds, means that each time a customer is exposed to the message there is a sense of omnipresence.

At least when it comes to blogging for business, resisting the urge to repeat is not the way to go!

 

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How Not to be Passive in Your Posts

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In “The Tyranny of the Verb To Be”, Tobias Buckell describes how, as a new writer, he “almost destroyed himself” trying to eliminate passive verbs from his material. What’s so terrible about the passive voice? Buckell asks. Isn’t it time to stop worrying about “staying active”? Some of our overuse of passive voice, he believes, comes from academic writing, which removes the narrator from English papers.

“While tense is all about time references, voice describes whether the grammatical subject of a clause performs or receives the action of the verb,” grammarly.com explains. It’s the difference between “Chester kicked the ball” (active) and “The ball was kicked by Chester” (passive). “If you’re writing anything with a definitive subject who’s performing an action, you’ll be better off using the active voice,” rhw grammarly author advises. “Using active voice for the majority of your sentences makes your meaning clear for readers, and keeps the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy,” the Purdue Online Writing Lab agrees. .Sometimes, though, the active voice is simply awkward, Alice Underwood of grammarly explains, as in “People rumor Elvis to be alive”, as opposed to “Elvis is rumored to be alive”.

As writers, we teach at Say It For You, we need to decide (in each sentence and phrase) what – or who – matters most in each particular sentence – do we want to emphasize the action itself or the doer of the action? When it comes to actual “voice” in terms not of grammar, but of messaging, in a business blog, it’s important to have “voice variety”. That can come from writing some of the content in I-you format, with other posts written in third person. If a company person or a customer is being interviewed, the content can be written in the “voice” of the interviewee or that of the interviewer. “Third person narratives so often mimic the ‘beige voice’ of an objective reporter,” William Cane says in Write Like the Masters. With first person, he advises, “it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky.”

In the grammatical arena, the most important thing, Bucknell concludes, is to test each sentence to see whether its SVA (subject, verb, object) arrangement could be written in a more interesting way. Achieving interesting writing is not as simple a matter as changing all the verbs to active, he realizes. “But looking carefully at all those ‘to be’ sentences might not be a bad way of diagnosing places where we have the opportunity to push ourselves a little more artistically,” he says.

Of course, as blog writers, we want to come across as passionate, never passive, towards our topics and towards our readers.

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Your Blog is Part of Your Customer Feedback Loop

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According to one Forbes study, 86% of consumers will actually pay more for a better customer experience, Devin Pickell, writing for helpscout.com, reminds business owners and practitioners; one of the best ways to put your customer first, Pickett urges, is implementing a customer feedback loop. Constantly collecting feedback from customers and readers and following up on that feedback allows you to improve areas causing user frustration and do more of what’s working well. Customers need to “feel heard”.

Agreed. As part of the business blogging assistance I offer through Say It For You, I’m always talking to business owners about their customer service.  The challenge is – EVERY business says it offers superior customer service! (Has any of us ever read an ad or a blog that does NOT tout its superior customer service?)  Fact is, individual blog posts can become a valuable part of each content writing client’s own customer feedback loop.

  •  Blog content should include stories specifically illustrating why your company’s customer service exceeds the norm.
  •  Surveys and self-tests can be used in blog content to find out what negative, “pet peeve” experiences may have caused reader to contemplate changing providers.
  • Messaging must offer the opportunity for personalized service – both before and after a purchase (yes, even in the online product purchase world of today).
  • Customers value the ability to gain new insights and learn new skills. Blog posts that take the form of tutorials and step-by-step instructions tend to be valued by readers.
  •  In Journalism 101, I was taught to “put a face on the issue” by beginning articles with a human example  A case study takes that personalization even further, chronicling a customer or client who had a certain problem or need, taking readers through the various stages of how the product or service was used to solve that problem. What were some of the issues that arose along the way? What new insights were gained through that experience, on the part of both the business and the customer?
  • The navigation paths on your blog site had better to be “easy to digest”. I caution new clients. You may have hired us for business blogging assistance, but keep thi important factor in mind: At the very moment that an online reader decides they’re ready to learn more, that they have a question to ask, or that they’re ready to take advantage of your products and services, you must make it convenient for them. They may want something, but not enough to spend extra energy to find it!

Whether you use survey tools, life chat, social media monitoring, or analytics tools, HelpScout reminds owners, what’s important is that you actually collect feedback so that you know what you’re doing well and what to improve upon.

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Blog to Help Them Feel Smart

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“What will I tell my friends?” “Why will I tell them?”

It’s never the case that people will tell their friends about you and the products and services you offer just because you want them to, or because you asked them to, Seth Godin points out in This is Marketing. Please-give-me-a-favorable-review-on-Yelp isn’t how it really works now, Godin cautions. Give them a reason for sharing, he advises.

During my 25 years’ writing a financial advice column (long before Say It For You was born), I learned that people like to sound smart when they’re in conversation with others at their tennis club, on the golf course, or while out with friends at an eatery. In addition to offering valuable advice, I came to realize, a second function of content writing was “arming” readers with tidbits of information they would enjoy sharing with others.

Half a dozen years ago, the Business Insider published a semi-humorous piece titled “14 Meaningless Phrases that Will Make You Sound Like a Stock-Market Wizard”. The authors listed market phrases that “sound intelligent but don’t mean anything”, such as “The easy money has been made.” “It’s not a stock market. It’s a market of stocks.” “Stock are down on profit-taking.”

That sort of smart-sounding but meaningless information is not at all what I mean when I talk about using blog marketing to “arm” your readers with shareable nuggets. Nor is it what Seth Godin is alluding to when he describes the “people like us do things like this” phenomenon. For most of us, Godin says, our decisions are primarily driven by one question, “Do people like me do things like this?”

In blog marketing, accentuate the practical, we teach content writers at Say It For You. Go ahead and teach readers “secrets” of how to do what they want to do – better, faster, and more economically. Since people like helping one another, your practical, useful (not merely useful-sounding) “secrets” are likely to be shared at the dinner table, across the tennis net, or on the green.

“What will I tell my friends?” By providing ongoing, relevant, and useful information in your blog, you will have provided the answer to that question. “Armed” readers will want to share, because, after all, that’s what “people like me” do!

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Should Blog Titles Tell All?

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Besides being an absolutely fascinating read, Popular Science Magazine‘s special collector’s edition “Journey to the Future” offers a course in creating interesting titles (a topic of extreme interest, as you may imagine, to any blog content writer).

Of course, when it comes to blogs, the very first piece of information readers are going to receive is the title of the post. We want the searcher to click on the link, and of course we want search engines to offer our content as a match for readers seeking information and guidance on our topic. More than that, though, a blog post title in itself constitutes a set of implied promises to visitors. In essence, you’re saying, “If you click here, you’ll be led to a post that in fact discussing the topic mentioned in the title.

Here are some very straightforward titles from Popular Science Magazine:

  • Quantum Computing: the Future of AI
  • Will Robots Help or Harm? That’s Up to Humans
  • The Future of Transplants
  • Boosting Memory

    In blogs, as we teach at Say It For You, even the tone of the title constitutes a promise of sorts, telling the searcher whether the content is going to be humorous, satirical, controversial, cautionary, or simply informative. Then, for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes, the title needs to contain keyword phrases, which each of these titles does. At the same time, an important purpose of marketing blogs is inducing searchers to read the post, and for that, the title must arouse curiosity and interest.

Curiosity-piquing titles in this Popular Science issue include:

  • Get Ready to Sniff Disease
  • Engineered for Ethics
  • Running on Reckless
  • Eyes on the Earth
  • Re-defining Meat
  • Always on Duty

(Fascinating, curious titles, but you don’t really know what sort of content to expect in the article to come.)

One compromise is what I call the “Huh?-Oh!” two-part title, in which the first part is an attention-getter, with more of an explanation in the second part.

Examples of two-part titles from Popular Science:

  • All Together Now – Human Societies are the Technologies of the Future and Cooperation is the Fuel
  • The Extra-Dimensional Artist – When Visual Art and Augmented reality Merge

One popular misconception I run into as a business blogging trainer is that blog titles need to be what I would call “cutesy”, meaning they must have an enticing “ring” to them that arouses attention. My opinion – Cutesy belongs in baby clothes. Yes, blog post titles need to capture attention, but when readers click on a link, they need to find material that is congruent with what the title promised would be there.

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