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Terms to Drop in Blogging for Business

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“Most important business decisions are made with incomplete information and under conditions of uncertainty,” Marketing professors Kim and Todd Saxton write in the Indianapolis Business Journal. Uncertainty permeates decisions about products/technology, market, people and funding. For that reason, the Saxtons believe, we need to change some of the terms commonly used in business planning.

Road Map
What would be more appropriate is a set of sailing instructions. There’s still a vision to motivate and inspire, but everyone aboard is also monitoring winds and currents that create challenges. The entire crew is involved in constant adjustment and adaptation to make sure the ship continues to make progress.

At Say it For You, where we specialize in creating blog content, I couldn’t have come up with a better metaphor for blogging than an ongoing set of sailing instruction adjustments. Unlike brochures, client newsletters, online magazines, and websites, blog posts are more casual and conversational, hence most adjustable to what’s going on in the present moment. 

Think Outside the Box
Most businesspeople are used to thinking within constraints. Give people a new problem to solve inside a box: What’s the biggest hassle using our product and why? What customers use our product in the most unusual ways? Give people structure for their brainstorming, the Saxtons advise.

Very important to successful business blogging is addressing current issues readers care about. A prospect may have a need and not be aware there is a solution. Content marketing raises awareness of solutions and educates consumers about products they may not have considered before. A single blog post can help readers think outside their “box”.

Low-Hanging Fruit
Rather than taking the easy way out by isolating yourself from challenge and competition, embrace the hardest product-development and customer service challenges. Remember, the Saxton’s say, the low-hanging fruit is available to all your competitors as well – dare to be different.

A really important point all blog writers and business owners need to keep in mind is that, whether it’s business-to-business blog writing or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. 

When working with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for their business blogs, I begin by challenging the owner of the business or professional practice to make clear their own opinions about best practices for their own profession or industry. Providing information about products and services may be the popular “low-hanging fruit” way way to write marketing blog posts, but in terms of achieving Influencer status – that takes opinion!

“Road map”, “Thinking outside the box”, and “Low-hanging fruit” may all need to be dropped in blogging for business!

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Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

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Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

  1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
  2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
  3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
  4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
  5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
  6. Lead conversion (Slack)
  7. Visibility (Tesla)
  8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
  9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
  10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
  11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

  • Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
  • Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
  • Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”

 

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Think Like a Buyer in Your Blog

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We’ve heard it before, but as blog content writers, we need to hear it again and again. It’s not about us or our clients – it’s about the buyers…

“When you’re selling a business, think like a buyer”, advised Keith Rand. At a recent meeting of our Circle Business Network group, Rand, who along with his son, specializes in making business transfers happen, quoted from two books: Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus and Think Like a Man. The common message, Rand explained, is this: achieving success in business means understanding – and focusing the conversation on – not what you have to offer, but what the other party is seeking. 

Financial advisor David Nienaber, CPA, CFP®  tells business owners to consider three things “as you plan for your next chapter”, including  identifying a professional team to effect the transfer, establishing tax consequences and  future cash flow, and judging the ramifications of a sale for family members.

 While Keith Rand would agree that sellers must carefully weigh all those factors prior to entering into a sale, his point is that during the negotiations themselves, the focus needs to be not on why the seller has decided to sell, but on what on what’s going on inside the buyer’s head as he or she pictures owning and running the business going forward. 

In fact, a “selling” mindset can actually hurt your marketing strategy, Liz O’Neill of Precision Marketing Group agrees. Many entrepreneurs and small business owners are stuck in the seling mindset, so caught up in their brand or industry, they forget that clients are indifferent to all that.

Your thinking is centered around who you are and what you do.  Meanwhile, the buyer starts with a problem that needs solving. In other words, O’Neill explains, when crafting  content for your web pages, “you need to divorce yourself from in-house terms, and begin to speak broadly,” not about precise offerings and skills you have.

In blogging for business, as business coach and Say It For You guest blogger Andrew Valley suggests, “Don’t tell them what you do.  Tell them what you do for them.” In fact, Valley says, “most people are interested in what you do only if it fits with what they need or want.”

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The 4 Things Your Resume – and Your Blog Page – Should Include

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“There are many different opinions on what information you should and shouldn’t include on your resume. But there are certain basics that must be there,” Zip Recruiter advises in an article reprinted in the Indianapolis Star. “Here’s the good news.” The authors say: “You already have all the answers.”

As a content marketing professional, I found this Zip Recruiter advice highly relevant. What’s so interesting is that, while there are articles galore about what elements should be included in a blog post, there’s relatively little guidance on basic pieces of information that need to appear on a blog page.

Forbes offers a list of 8 must-haves for the blog post content itself:

  1. magnetic headline
  2. compelling lead-in
  3. useful subheads
  4. informative body
  5. appealing graphics
  6. powerful call to action
  7. relevant internal link
  8. good meta description

However (and this is the eye-opening aspect of the Zip recruiter piece), as blog marketers, we’re missing the boat if certain key information isn’t right there, in the same visual field as our wonderful content, quickly accessible to our blog readers:

Contact information
“Include your name along with the proper pronunciation if you find that others have trouble with it,” Zip Recruiter advises. Include the phone number you use most, and your email address. (Sure, your website has an “About” page, but what if a blog visitor is moved to act now?)

Work experience
Your blog is a way to assert your authority as a SME (Subject Matter Expert). You’ve successful dealt with – many times before – the problem with which the reader is dealing now. You’ve got this!

Education
Do business blog readers need to know about educational credentials of a practitioner or business owner? You bet. Today’s consumers won’t do business with someone they don’t trust, and “credentializing” is one way to build trust. Degrees and certifications may be listed or shown as logos, and educational experiences can be woven into blog content itself.

Skills
Demonstrating not only what you know but what you know how to do is a crucial function of any business blog. Specific services offered may be listed on the blog page itself (in addition to offering case studies, testimonials, and descriptions as part of the blog content.

The Zip Recruiter article serves as a reminder to us content writers and the business owners who hire us: The visitors you hope to attract to your website may not be in search of a job, but the same four types of information that belong on a resume belong on your blog page!

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Reify Your Blog Posts

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There are concepts that exist in a purely abstract way, and, in blog content marketing, we have to, as hackernoon.com puts it, “find ways to explain those concepts so that they make sense to as many people as possible”. In fact, as we’ve come to realize at sayitforyou.net, blogging itself is a way of reifying complex information.

To reify is to make something abstract more concrete or real. Sociology textbooks define ‘reification” (which literally means to “turn into things”) as “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things”. In the two sayings “You can’t fool Mother Nature” and “fighting for justice”, Nature and Justice, both abstract concepts, are treated as real people, even though we know they’re not, There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, authors Chevette Alston and Lesley Chapel explain in study.com, because reification can turn language abstractions into tangible understanding.

“Concepts like happiness and intelligence and personality are called constructs. We cannot see them directly. They are labels, concepts, literally constructions in our heads. By giving such complex processes a label, we can discuss them, psywww.com explains.

Not everyone agrees that reification is beneficial. “When we assume that a concrete, tangible thing has the quality of abstract concepts, when the thing-in-itself is forgotten and the thing-as-thought-of is mistaken for the thing itself, that can be dangerous, Biznewske.com explains. For example, assuming that someone is an expert simply because they have a degree is a reification fallacy. Assuming that a boxed product such as cereal is a symbol of health and nutrition is a fallacy. Reifying an idea such as “male privilege” means taking it as true when it might or might not be true.

Hacker.com, though, “gets it”. The essential challenge we blog content writers face, they understand, is explaining abstract concepts in the right way, because doing that makes the difference between business success and business failure. Readability is a critical aspect of online writing, in which we business bloggers are out to retain the clients and customers we serve and to bring in new ones.

The products and services we’re writing about can’t be amazing in the abstract, which is why reifying blog content can be just what’s needed to make it engaging and real..

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