Mix Up the Personalities in Your Business Blog

Reading fellow blogger Michel Fortin’s post “Does Your Copy Have Personality?”, I was reminded that personality self-assessment tests have been around for years. I personally remember the Xerox version (back from insurance sales training days), while today as a college career mentor, I discuss Meyers-Briggs results and DISC profiles with my student mentees.

Different types of assessments tests have been popular at various times over the years, and there have been different names for the four different “quadrants” on the diagrams. The general idea is that understanding and relating to people with styles different from one’s own is a skill well worth perfecting.

Fortin sums up the four types:

• Drivers  (aka “directors “) are concerned with results.
  To appeal to drivers, blog about how your products and services helped solve problems, how long that took, and how much it costs to get there. In short (literally), give ‘em the bottom line!
  
• Expressives (aka “relators”) care most about how they’re perceived and about feelings.
  To appeal to blog readers in this category, emphasize the prestige that comes with using your products or services, and how customers can use those to express their own creativity.
  
• Analyticals (AKA “thinkers”) are preoccupied with details.
  To appeal to this audience in blog posts, offer lots of statistics, measurement, steps in a process, and lists of product ingredients.
  
• Amiables (aka “sociables”) are interested in relationships and in pleasing others.
  To appeal to blog readers who are in this category, blog about how your product helps others and helps build and strengthen personal relationships.
  

Now, not all of your blog visitors will fall neatly into one of these categories, and not every blog post is going to hit the spot with every reader. As Fortin puts it, you can’t be all things to all people. In fact, when it comes to ads, he says, writing copy that’s bland and “vanilla” in order to avoid offending anyone is a strategy that will, more often than not, prove appealing to no one.

As a business blogging trainer, though, I can offer reassurance. In blogging for business, there’s more “wiggle room” available.  You can write with one audience in mind today, and appeal to another tomorrow or next week. The trick, of course, is learning, over time, what works best for your business.

That’s not a lesson any business owner can learn by skipping over the trial-and-error part of the course!