Posts

Terms to Drop in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , /by

“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!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

The Magic of 3 in Blogging for Business

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

 

Humanity has had a love-hate relationship with numbers from the earliest times, Ian Stewart writes in Britannica. Ancient Babylonians used numbers to predict eclipses; priests in ancient Egypt used them to predict the flooding of the Nile. Millions of otherwise rational people are terrified of the number 13. In Jewish culture, 18 represents good luck.

Over my years at Say It For You, I’ve come to consider the number 3 important when it comes to writing blog content.

3 elements of a blog post

  1. pictures and charts (the visual presentation of the blog
  2. the content itself (the facts and figures)
  3. the “voice”, the way the message comes across – first person vs. third-person reporting, humorous or serious, casual or formal

3-minute Shark Tank principle
From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out”, it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3-Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information. Given the very brief attention span of online readers, the essence of the message needs to come across in 3 seconds!

3-legged stool
In business blog posts I recommend a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business, a practice, or an organization.  Other aspects can be addressed in later posts. Offer three examples or details supporting the main idea of each post.

3 levels of involvement
While having a clear Call to Action is important in blog marketing, truth is, not every searcher is going to be ready to make a commitment. In your business blog, therefore, It makes sense to offer 3 different levels of involvement (subscribing to the blog, submitting a question, taking a survey, for example), and an ”ultimate decision does not need to be made now

3-pronged strategy
Working Mother magazine is an example of a 3-part plan of attack: Compliment-criticism-course correction. In discussing various “Mon” personality types, writer Katherine Bowers would compliment the “Drama Mama” or “Snowplow Mom”, suggesting ways in which that parenting strategy is great, followed be a critique – where that mothering style is off-track, then offering “course correction” options. Those same 3 prongs could be used in a blog focused on financial management, healthy living, pet care, or fashion.
https://www.workingmother.com/content/you-know-type-mom-parenting-styles

The rule of 3 in writing
The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that a trio of events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers. The audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember the information conveyed because having three entities combines both brevity and rhythm with having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern.

How The Power of Three Can Make Your Communication Effective

When it comes to blogging for business, make sure to remember the Rule of 3!

 

 

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

How to Hug Customers in Your Blog

/0 Comments/in , , /by

“It’s not location, location, location,’ Jack Mitchell writes in Hug Your Customers. “It’s service, service, service.” Sure, a decent location with reasonable traffic, convenient to get to, and more than adequate parking – will do just fine if you learn to ‘hug” your customers. Personalized attention to customers is the proven way to achieve sales results, is the thesis of Mitchell’s book, based on Mitchell’s Family of Stores’ clothing and jewelry business.

Since the first publication of his book, the author admits, much has changed, with the most significant of those changes being the growth of Internet sales for all industries. One thing that has not changed, Mitchell, claims, is the need to deliver personalized customer service. People still yearn for at least a smile and a thank-you from an actual human being, he says. Actually, people do more than merely yearn when it comes to personal service – research shows that customers are willing to pay more for a product if they receive better customer service during and after a purchase.

At our content marketing company, we absolutely agree. The challenge we blog content writers take on is translating those “smiles” and “thank-you’s” into digital messaging. 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?)  It’s not enough to say it – you have to specifically illustrate ways in which your company’s customer service exceeds the norm.

There’s more. Personalized service includes teaching customers new skills, and some blog posts can take the form of actually tutorials and step-by-step instructions. Stories of all kinds –help personalize a business blog. Even if a professional writer is composing the content, true-story material increases engagement by readers with the business or practice. Case studies are particularly effective in creating interest, because they are relatable and “real”.

In Journalism 101 class, we were taught to “put a face on the issue” by beginning the article with a human example  A case study takes that personalization even further, chronicling a customer or client who had a problem or need, and taking readers through the various stages of using the product or service 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?

You might not think of simplifying your website navigation as another way to “hug” customers, but it absolutely is. Marketing blogs are all about getting found,, but now they’ve found you, both both the content of your blog posts and the navigation paths on the blog site had better be easy, calling for fewer keystrokes and less confusion.

When writing content for your own blog or when planning content with the individuals you’ve hired for business blogging assistance, keep in mind that online readers might decide at any point that 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.  Make the process feel like a smile and and a hug!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blogging to Make Them Want to See Things the Way You Do

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Communicating with pictures and words is what Dan Roam’s little book for speakers, Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations is all about. The purpose, the author says, of creating and delivering a report pitch, or story, is t make it s captivating that our audience wants to see things the way we do.

That’s a very hard thing for speakers to accomplish, Roam admits. (Blog content writers don’t have the advantage of facing the audience in person, using eye contact and gestures, which makes the task even more challenging!).

Dan Roam’s 3 Rules of Show and Tell can help, though, even if video clips are not part of the blog:

  • When we tell the truth in a presentation, we connect with our audience and we have self-confidence.
  • When we tell a story, complex concepts become clear, and we include everyone.
  • When we tell a story with pictures, we banish boredom and people see what we mean.

There are actually three kinds of truth, Roam points out, and as presenters, we need to ask ourselves: for this topic, for this audience, and for myself, which truth should I tell? I particularly like that observation, because at Say It For You, we emphasize the “power of one”, with each blog post having a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. Roam suggests presenters ask themselves the following question: “If my presentation could change them in just one way, what would that change be?”

There are really only four ways to move an audience, Roam adds:

  1. changing their information, adding new data to what they already know
  2. changing their knowledge or ability
  3. changing their actions
  4. changing their beliefs, inspiring them to understand something new about themselves or about the world

Which one of those four goals we choose determines the structure of our storyline in the content of the speech – or blog post.

Truth, story, and pictures – If we get those things right, Dan Roam assures fearful speakers, everything that follows will be a breeze. “When we trust our ideas and are confident, we will help our audience change.”

Change is what it’s all about, Roam says of presentations, and that’s certainly what it’s all about in blogging for business!

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail

Blogs to Inform and Lead

/0 Comments/in , /by

This week’s Say It For You blog posts are based on Brant Pinvidic’s powerful little book The 3-Minute Rule….

The A part of a WHAC presentation (Are you sure?) has a very important job to do – answering the questions that are on readers’ minds about the validity of your claims, Brant Pinvidic teaches. In keeping with my own idea of spreading content over a series of blog posts, rather than presenting your entire “case” in one long piece, I appreciated the list of questions Pinvidic says he often uses to help ramp up the thinking process in planning a presentation.

Each one of these questions relating to the A can serve as the inspiration for an individual blog post:

  • What have you said that someone might not believe?
  • Has a third party verified your claim?
  • How do you know there’s a need for this?
  • How have people succeeded in this before?
  • When and how did you realize you were on to something?
  • Why is this not “too good to be true”?
  • Why can’t your competition do this better?

One particularly fascinating piece of selling advice offered in this book is this – “Don’t open with the hook”. Many sales books and coaches teach that the hook is precisely what you open with, Pindivic says. (In terms of blog content, many believe the hook should be in the title.) This is called, Pinvidic explains, the state-and-prove method – you get someone to desire the outcome, then convince them your statement is true. What you want to do instead, he suggests, is start with the facts, allowing the audience to reach the conclusion that this is a good deal and form the “hook” for themselves rather than trying to poke holes in your assertions. Rather than state-and-prove, the author teaches, use the inform-and-lead approach.

At Say It for You, when our Indiana freelance blog content writers are sitting down with business owners or professional practitioners who are preparing to launch a blog, one important step in that launch is to select 1-5 recurring themes that will appear and reappear over time in their blog posts. The themes may be reflected in the keyword phrases they use to help with search engine optimization. Individual posts can focus on just one aspect of a theme (which might center around one of those questions under the A category of their WHAC).

Looked at in isolation, each blog post is designed to have one central focus. Yet, as blog content writing continues over weeks, months, and years, there will be a cumulative inform-and lead effect. And, yes, you can be sure of that.

Facebooktwitterredditlinkedintumblrmail