Excellence, Leadership, Intimacy – the Triumvirate of Business Blogs

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Positioning yourself in the market is all about carving out a spot in the competitive landscape, says Marketing MO, and one thing many small businesses overlook is how they provide value at the highest level. There are three essential methods for delivering value:

  • Operational excellence.  If this is the principal way you deliver value, you’re not focused on creating new or better products, but on producing more volume at a lower cost.
     
  • Product leadership. Your customers care most about quality and are willing to pay for it, so you’re focused on staying one step ahead and capturing more market share.
     
  • Customer intimacy. You’re focused on knowing as much as possible about your customers so you can deliver customized, correct solutions over time. Every interaction is a chance to deliver solutions.


“What you’re ultimately striving for is to be known for something – to own mindshare of the market,” Marketing MO goes on to say. The word “say” is key, of course, for all blog content writers.  That’s what we do, after all, at Say it For You – deliver the message about the way our business owner and professional practitioners deliver value.

As Marketing MO points out so clearly, you have a better chance of achieving mindshare if you define a strategy and build a brand around it. “You can provide the best offering, the cheapest offering, or the most comprehensive offering, but you can’t provide all three.” Whatever the decision, though, the challenge is to spread the word. Fellow blogger Phil Steele knows about spreading the word: “Online marketing is today’s most effective tool in building mindshare with your customers.”

Does continually providing fresh, new content in a company’s or a practice’s marketing blog accomplish differentiation in the mind of readers?  You bet. Blog content is ideal for further explanation, more details, updates, stories, and sharing owners’ core beliefs. Is your differentiator operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy?  

Your blog will help your readers know for sure!

 

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Use Business Blog Content Writing to Collect, Interpret, and Share

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Since 1830, the Indiana Historical Society’s mission has been “connecting people to the past by collecting, preserving and sharing the state's history, Director of Donor Relations Diana Mutz explained to us at a recent meeting of our Centric group.

On what is perhaps a more commercialized level, I mused, those same three things are important aspects of my mission as an Indiana freelance business blog writer. Sure, bloggers relay facts about a company’s or a practice’s products, services, and areas of expertise. But successful blogging means doing more than that. "Reading around" and "learning around", in fact, are my prescriptions for keeping blog post content fresh and engaging. That constant effort to stay abreast of news, trends, and O.P.W. (Other people's wisdom) represents the “collecting” part of our work.

Interestingly, the blogosphere represents one of the largest “archives” imaginable. As friend Chris Baggott, co-founder of Compendium Blogware pointed out to me years ago, the typical website has only a finite amount of space for text. On the other hand, Baggott explains, blogging doesn't have those constraints, because blog content stays around forever. As new content is added, all the formerly posted content moves "down" a spot to make room, but remains on the blogsite, adding to the cumulative number of repetitions of key words and phrases!

We business bloggers are nothing if not interpreters. Effective blog posts must go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner's (or the professional's, or the organizational executive's) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic. Naturally, the more technical the subject, the greater the importance our “translation and interpretation” function becomes. Our job as business bloggers is to help readers (and that includes B&B prospects of our SEO marketing blogs) make sense out of the ocean of available information.

The History Center’s mantra is sharing, which implies getting up close and personal, creating emotional involvement with visitors. And of course, what corporate blogging does best, is delivering the kind of customers to a business website who are already interested in the product or services that website is touting. But once the basic connection has been established, we blog content writers have our real work cut out for us – creating the emotional connection with readers, making them feel they are sharing with us and we with them.
 

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Becoming One of America’s Toughest Business Bloggers

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Syracuse, New York is America’s toughest weather city, according to the Weather Channel. But the reason Syracuse should serve as a shining example for us blog content writers is the tough way the city has chosen to “laugh in Mother Nature’s face”.  How does it do that?  Mental Floss magazine names five ways:

It’s been here before.  
Your marketing blog, I teach business owners and professional practitioners, will succeed only if it’s apparent to readers that you not only understand their needs, but you’ve been there before: You have the experience and technical knowhow to help them with their problems.

It knows things can always get snowier.
Be ready to use damage control. One use of corporate blog content writing is putting your own “spin” on any messages the public might be receiving about your industry – or about you – from competitors or critics.

It uses every weapon at hand.
To sustain our blog content writing over long periods of time without losing reader excitement and engagement, we’ve need to constantly add to our own body of knowledge – in our industry or professional field, and about what’s going on around us in our culture. Learn around and curate.
 
It’s relentless.
Every business owner knows by now that writing blogs in their area of expertise is a great idea for them, but most can’t take the time to compose and post content on a regular basis. Keeping on task is what makes the system work.

It goes big.
Blogs will have a strong, "opinionated" voice. Whether it's business-to-business blog writing or business-to-consumer blog writing, your blog content needs to “go big”, commenting on over-arching issues that affect your industry or profession.  Be a thought leader.

Syracuse was given a tough ongoing weather report, and the city became America’s toughest. Let’s do the same in the field of blogging for business!   

 

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Capable of Blogging About Your Incapabilities?

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“As a marketing distribution and communication firm, there are lots of things we’re really, really good at,” begins the Incapabilities section of the Rector Communications website. “However,” the piece goes on to admit, “like all companies, we do have our limitations.  And we believe it’s best to be honest and upfront.”

Well! As a blog content writing trainer in Indianapolis (where Rector Communications is based), I tell you, I could hardly wait to see where the writer was going with that one. Engaging readers is what business blogging is all about, and I gave that “incapabilities” opener a “10” on an attention-grabbing scale.

And get this one: “We suck at foosball.  And we don’t have a ping-pong table, a dartboard, or a winning fantasy football team…come to mention it…none of us are very good at bowling, either.”  (At this point I’m taking the bait, thinking, “So what ARE you good at?)

Actually, this entire “Incapabilities” page idea falls right in line with a question I raised in a Say It For You blog post last week: If we’re going to use good taste in blog marketing, never saying things about the competition we wouldn’t want said about us, how can we clarify the ways we stand out from those other companies or practitioners?

Rector uses self-deprecating humor. “We can’t pick you up and fly you to a meeting in our Gulfstream primarily because we don’t have a Gulfstream.  We also don’t have a 50 person creative team.  So, we’re sorry, but we can’t charge you for a 50 person creative team.” (Talk positioning – the What’s-In-It-For-Me in working with Rector’s small, local team is crystal clear to the reader, isn’t it?)  

Just in case a reader missed the point, Rector sums it up nicely: “All of our idiot creatives, tech geeks and damn AEs are right here in Indiana.  Which we think is a good thing, because what we lose in scapegoating ability, we gain in accountability and communication.”

Are you capable of blogging about your business “incapabilities”, turning your “lemons” into blog content writing lemonade?
 

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What’s Changed, What’s the Same in Business Blog Content Writing – Part Three

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Blogger Saugat Adhikari’s observation that “Things were different back then” made me curious enough to use all three of this week’s Say It For You blog posts to discuss some ‘state of the blog” observations of my own, looking back at the way things were in 2008 (when Adhikan and I began our respective blog series) and seeing what differences there are today.

Five years ago, I offered my readers the following explanation of the relationship between a business’ website and its blog: “Corporate websites provide basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details.”

“The big thing about a corporate blog,” I continued, “is that it's made up of lots of little blog posts! In each post, you highlight just one idea, showcase just one of your products, or describe just one special service you provide. Rather than a resume-like list of all you have to offer, you engage blog readers with several delicious details centered around just one idea. You can get to all the other wonderful things you have to share in future blog posts!

As Lisa Irby of 2planawebsite.com acknowledges, “Blogs are typically easier and cheaper to set up than websites.” Back five years ago, of course, it was even more difficult for an untrained business owner to create even a basic website. By contrast, “Today’s easy-to-use website building software offers…an endless choice of templates and functions,” according to “Top 10 Best Website Builders of 2013”..

Looking back over five-plus years of freelance business blog copy writing and website copy writing, I can see that, while websites have become far easier to update, the basic differences between website and blog still apply. Fellow marketer Michael Gaasterland organizes those differences as follows:

  •  A website is created to publish a definitive message; a blog is created to keep publishing fresh content.
  •  A website is organized hierarchically, intended to be read top to bottom. A blog, organized in reverse chronological order, contains hundreds of posts and can be searched by readers for specific content they want.


What’s changed? With all the new site building platforms available, it’s much more feasible for even non-techie business owners and professionals to make changes to their own websites. But what hasn’t changed is that blog writing is meant to accomplish different goals – creating current conversation around informal, newsy, frequently posted new content..
 

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