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In-Your-Neck-of-the-Woods Blogging for Business

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Listening to the morning weather report on TV, I often hear Al Roker say, “That’s what’s going on around the country. Here’s what’s happening in your neck of the woods”.

In blogging for business, that Roker model is a good one to follow, we teach at Say It For You. Your blog is a way to educate leads and customers by helping them stay generally informed on industry trends and developments, Hubspot explains. Once you are perceived as an expert or “thought leader” in that industry or profession, you can then go on to explain your own products and services, and your very own “neck of the woods” approach.

Hubspot offers examples of blogs that describe the general industry climate before bringing matters down to a local level:

Manufacturing
Manufacturing blogs are used to inform readers about best practices news, and trends in manufacturing, supply chain distribution, and logistics. The Marlin Steel blog, for example, talks about what robotics and automation mean for US manufacturing jobs (national picture), but also provides information on how to use specific steel tools.

Healthcare
In Six Month Smiles’ Chair Time blog, industry experts, doctors, and hygienists write about developments in their field. Potential customers can learn about specific services they may be interested in paying for on a local level.

Ecommerce
The M.M. LaFleur blog discusses general issues of women in the workplace, but then narrows down to specific advice about what to wear to different business occasions.

In fact, the function of “news” in blogs is to inform readers of “what’s-going-on-and-how-do-we-fit-in”. In a blog post, you might cite material from the news story, relating it to new developments in your own industry or field. The idea is not to regurgitate what’s already been said, but to showcase your own expertise and experience, offering a new perspective on that topic.

According to strategist Neen James in Speaker Magazine, a Subject Matter Expert or SME (pronounced “smee”) knows something. A thought leader, by contrast, is known for something. In their blog content, business owners and professional practitioners can first bring their audiences up to speed on general industry issues and developments. Through “in-your-neck-of-the-woods blogging for business,” they then become known for translating that knowledge into usable, actionable steps their readers can follow.

 

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Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

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“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

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What This Blog Isn’t

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This week’s Say It for You posts were inspired by James Marshall Reilly’s book One Great Speech, in which he describes his challenges in locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors.

In the introduction to his book, James Marshall Reilly makes sure readers know exactly what to expect.  In fact, the author provides three checklists:

  1. Who is this book for?
  2. What this book will teach you
  3. What this book isn’t

While it may not be practical for blog content writers to actually provide readers such a checklist for each post, it’s a great self-check mechanism for content creators.

Who is this blog post for?
Not only must a marketing blog be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and towards those who will want to do business with you, each post should have a specific type of reader in mind. That way, the content will clearly demonstrate that the business owner or practitioner and the staff understand the readers’ concerns and needs, but know how to meet those needs and solve those very problems.

What this post will teach you
The title of a blog post indicates what readers can expect to learn. There are two basic categories of blog titles, we’ve found at Say It For You. The first is very direct, using keyword phrases that match up with what a reader may have typed into the search bar. The second category gives only the barest hint of the content to follow and is meant to arouse curiosity A compromise I teach is to use a combination of a “Huh?” title to get attention and then an “Oh!” subtitle to make clear what the post is actually going to be about.

What this post isn’t
Of Reilly’s three lists, this one may be the most important for blog content writers to consider and at least indirectly, make clear in the content:

  • This is not an advertisement or a list of claims about a product or service.
  • This is not a news report (although it may be based on a news report, offering a fresh perspective on that news).
  • This is not a ”put-down” of our competitors’ products and services.
  • This is not a thinly veiled attempt to capture contact information from you.
  •  This is not a mere re-hash of widely accessible information.

Very much like a sculptor who “reveals” the shape by cutting away “excess” marble, blog content writers can craft effective posts by cutting away what the content is not!

 

 

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Comparative Marketing for Blogs

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“As long as the value of one product or service is being communicated through its comparison to another product or service, it qualifies as comparative advertising,” Conor Bond writes in Wordstream. The goal, as with all advertising, is to communicate value, but in the case of comparative advertising, that value is conveyed not only from quality, but from the disparity in quality between one product or service and another. The other company or provider serves as an anchor, Bond explains, something concrete to use as a reference point.

Bond offers examples of comparative advertising, including:

  • Mac portraying its own users as immune to the viruses that commonly attack PCs
  • Verizon portraying its own customers enjoying online games and YouTube videos on their phones while ATT&T customers suffer lack of access
  • Wendy’s tweeting about MacDonald’s beef patties still being frozen
  • Popeye’s “dinging” chick-fil-A for being closed on Sundays

Two companies that choose to compare themselves against an amalgam of others rather than a specific rival, Bond notes, are Dove (treats your skin with care, unlike the others who treat it harshly), and Allstate using Mayhem to show that they outdo competitors in preparing customers to deal with unpredictable events.

Can comparative marketing work for blogs? At Say It For You, we teach, negatives against competitors are a basic no-no. It’s almost axiomatic that, in writing for business, we want to clarify the ways we stand out from the competition.  In getting the point across that readers should want to choose this business or this practice, or these products and services over those offered by the competition, staying positive is still important. In fact, sometimes knowing what not to include in your business blog writing makes you a better blog content writer.

The “Golden Rule” advice Advisor Today gives to financial planning practitioners applies here: “say only those kinds of things about specific competitors that we’d want them saying about us!” The high road in blog marketing strategy and tactics development is what Bing Crosby used to croon, “Accentuate the positive…latch on to the affirmative.”

One format I’ve found useful is the “Some……but we….”

  • “Some stylists are in the practice of ……, but at Shirley’s Salon, we believe …….. is best.”
  • Some housecleaning companies require you to provide your own products, but at ABC, we supply our cleaning staff with green products.”

    In other words, accentuate the positive. Comparative blog marketing means explaining why you do things the way you do, letting readers draw their own conclusions.

 

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Blue Man Group as a Model for Blog Content Writers

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As Chip Munn writes in Financial Planning magazine, financial advisors can take several tips from the Blue Man Group entertainment act, begun in the 80s, which incorporates comedy, music, and humor performed by three men, with heads and faces painted blue, who speak not a single word in the course of their stage performances. There are valuable business lessons for financial planning practices Munn believes, which can be derived from the Blue Man business model. For blog marketers, there are lessons as well:

You need to understand what people you’re looking for on your team and in your audience. (In addition to being skillful stage performers, Blue Men performers need to be of fairly uniform height and build.)

In blog marketing, the bottom line is knowing your target audience. Intelligence about your reader base needs to influence every aspect of the blog – its look, its style, its length, its frequency. As Seth Godin points out in his book All Marketers Tell Stories, “great stories are rarely aimed at everyone”.

You need to own your image and your equipment. (Blue Man group created their own unique instruments.)

One of the very important purposes of any business blog is to demonstrate “only-ness” to readers. To have any hope of engaging readers’ interest, blogs must provide fresh, relevant content, a challenge due to the sheer volume of information on the Web. Two strategies include bringing in “unique instruments” – less well-known facts about familiar things and processes, and suggesting new ways of thinking about things readers already know. Taking a stance, using the blog to express a firm opinion on issues, is a way to leverage your uniqueness.

Stay close to your clients. (Blue Man founder Chris Wink would periodically leave the executive suite to perform and remain involved.)

People tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who give back to their community. Blog content can focus on personal anecdotes and on the personal values of the business owners and of the people delivering professional services, alluding to current community happenings and concerns.

Plan growth in small increments. (Blue Man group began in Chicago, and scaled to become a global entertainment force, ultimately purchased by Cirque du Soleil.)

The people who find your blog are those who are already online looking for information, products, or services that relate to what you know, what you have, and what you do! Your online marketing challenge is not to seek out the people, but to help them seek you out! In blog marketing, keep telling your story consistently and frequently, honing it all along the way, and allowing time for your “reach” to grow.

Blue Man Group can be a model for us blog content writers!

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