“Don’t just say ‘Clients have problems with dinosaur attacks,’ advises Allison Carter of Roundpeg.  Why not? That’s too general a description to engage interest.  Now, if you talk about “vicious velociraptors breaking through bedroom windows”, well, readers can feel the pain of that very specific situation, she adds. “The more details you can give, the easier it is for clients and prospects to feel that pain acutely – and understand how you can help them get rid of it.”

As a corporate blogging trainer, I explain this by saying that your blog content has to “put the hurt front and center”. That means focusing readers’ attention on the risks they’re facing and the problems they have that drove them to seek information about what you know and what you know how to.
 

Once readers are hooked by your understanding of their “hurt”, you can offer the “rescue”, the solutions your expertise and experience can bring to the table. The other side of this, by the way, is that in too many marketing blogs, the content is meant to scare consumers, with the idea of getting readers to do something about their fear right now! In blogging for business, I prefer to take a more moderate route, including enough information in the blog post so that it’s the solutions you’re provide that become compelling, rather than the fear.

One question that’s been posed to me, especially by newbie content writers, has to do with Carter’s “vicious velociraptors” idea of being very specific and personalized when presenting the “pain” situation. Isn't there a problem with getting too specific, they ask. Doesn’t that narrow the number of people   who will associate with the pain of that very situation?

 That goes back to the structure of the blog, accorder to Allison Carter.  In a problem – solution –lesson architecture, she explains, once the readers can “feel the pain”, in the lesson portion at the end of the post, you can “broaden things back out to make the lesson more widely applicable.”

And, if you end up “losing” some lookers because they couldn’t identify with the specific slant of the opening anecdote, that’s OK, too.  I like to say blog writing is made of very “stretchable fabric” Today’s blog post can slant in one direction; tomorrow’s can take the same theme or “leitmotif” and deal with it in a different way.
Bottom line is, Allison Carter is onto something: velociraptors are better attention-grabbers than dinosaurs!
 

I love “reading around” for this Say It For You blog – I learn so many useful tidbits about so many different everyday things. Listen to this one, from the American Marketing Association Journal:  When food is packaged in transparent wrappings, two very interesting things tend to happen, as Ohio State University marketing professors Xiaoyan Deng amd Raji Srinivasan discovered.

First of all, when the food in the package is visible, that tends to increase buying, the researchers found.  They called that the “salience effect”. No mystery here–customers know exactly what they’ll be getting when they open the package. Seeing is believing that it’s time to buy stuff, at least when it comes to food, apparently.

Transparent packaging has an “opposing” effect when it comes to food consumption, the professors found.  The transparent package enables consumption monitoring. In other words, customers now had the food home and could see how much they still had left in the package. That tended to make them "save" more and consume less.

Some of these insights about food packaging can be applied, I think, in our work as blog content writers.

 First of all, an increasing number of eyeballs are scanning our blog “packages”. 61% of global Internet users research products online, with 44% of online shoppers beginning the process using a search engine. Let’s think of the post’s title and opening lines of the blog post (the things that appear on Google or other search page) as the “packaging”.

The reader takes the next step in the “consumption” process by clicking on a selection on the search engine page, meaning the title of the blog post. Like transparent packaging on a food item, the title must make clear what readers can expect to find in the article.

One of the main motivators for having a marketing blog in the first place is to “get found” by the ‘right people, meaning those already interested in what you have to sell, what you know, and what you know how to do, and who need confirmation that they’ve come to the right place.

All they need to do now is open the packaging and begin consuming all the information and guidance you have to offer!