Blogs Help Customers Tell Themselves The Story Of Your Brand

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Presidential politics is about storytelling, says John Harris of Yahoo!News, commenting that Barack Obama and his team won the 2008 election because they were better storytellers than the opposition.

What’s more, adds Harris, “Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that’s already neatly framed in their minds.”

That’s the way it works in business marketing, too, say Scott and Birk Cooper and Fritz Gruntzner, authors of Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business. “Consumers create their own associations and stories about your brand.”

“Customers don’t want to feel like they are being told a brand story.  They want to tell themselves the story.  They want to be a part of the story,” is Coopers’ and Gruntzner’s advice to business owners. When it comes to blogs, the Tips & Traps authors recommend using blogs to tell a story. “Engage readers of your blog with fascinating story-like entries.”

In their book The Hero and The Outlaw, Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark demonstrate that brands telling a single archetypal story have better long-term financial performance.  Commenting on this book, Coopers and Gruntzner  say most companies they work with are guilty of telling either no story or of trying to tell multiple stories.

“Always try to create a campaign rather than one ad,” Tips & Traps teaches. “You know you have a great advertising or communication idea when you can easily think of the next ad and the next and the next.” (I can’t help thinking that campaigns are precisely what corporate blogs are!) 

According to Coopers and Gruntzner, the goal in blogging for business is “creating loyal customers who have an emotional engagement with your brand.” Each new blog post is the latest chapter in the ongoing story you tell in your blog. The authors remind us that these customers are creating their own associations with your brand.  “The best you can hope to do is guide this process by giving them clues and by helping them feel something for your brand.”

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Blogs Have A Food-First Attitude

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Take a cue from the new bare-bones restaurant model," advises Amy Casper, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. "Stripping away the layers of white linen and battalions of waiters leaves them with something that people actually appreciate: a restaurant that’s putting its money and effort into what’s on the plate."

Casper might have been addressing business bloggers along with restaurateurs. 

It’s interesting that marketing maven Seth Godin says that most business owners should not want visitors noticing their website, only the "story" on the page.
In this sense "bare-bones" blog posts, shorter, less formal and more personal than websites, win out, showing the effort is gone into the "food", meaning the content of each blog post.  The site itself, says Godin, can’t be too cutting edge, clever, or slick.  On the other hand, it shouldn’t be amateurish, he adds.

In any economy, but especially during a recession, Entrepreneur emphasizes, successful restaurants offer real value for patrons’ money, with good food and good service "trumping" elegant décor and ambience. 

Entrepreneurs who venture into "putting food on the plate" through business blogging marketing will be pleased to find how bare-bones economical blog marketing can be when compared with traditional marketing tools such as brochures, direct mail, promotional events, billboards, and broadcast media.

For online searchers, the blogging equivalent of finding good food in a restaurant is finding up to date information presented in an easy-to-understand, engaging way. For visitors, the blogging equivalent of good restaurant service is convenience of navigation.  In creating your business blog, consider that, at any moment, visitors might be ready to learn more, to ask questions or post comments, to subscribe to the blog, and, best of all, to buy your products and services. You must ensure there’s a smooth path for them to accomplish those actions.

"This economy can work for a business," according to Entrepreneur. "Strip it down to the essentials.  Do what you do best and make it good." 

Bloggers, take heed.  Forget the elaborate widgets, flash, and even video.  Use words and perhaps a photo or two to tell what you sell, what you know about, and what you know how to do to solve problems and "make it good" for your clients and customers.

After getting just a "taste" of your business or professional practice through your blog posts, you want readers to be saying "Mmm, mmm, good information!"

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In Business Blogs, Deliberate Practice Makes Perfect

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The old saying “Practice makes perfect” was never the same once coach Vince Lombardi had pointed out that, no, it’s only perfect practice that can help players achieve perfection.  

Psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson, who has spent twenty-five years analyzing high-flying professionals, draws a somewhat different conclusion.  Elite performers in any field, he says, engage in deliberate practice, an effortful activity designed to improve performance.

For example, Ericsson says, most medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice and then move on, repeating this process thousands of times over many years. The most successful diagnosticians, by contrast, spend time following up on their patients to compare what the physician was thinking at the time of diagnosis with the actual patient outcome. “Just because you’ve been walking for 55 years doesn’t mean you’re getting better at it,” observes Ericsson.    
   
While practice may need to be perfect to win football games or deliberate to excel in medical diagnostics, plain old practice can play a very important role in business blogging. Momentum in the online rankings race comes from frequency of posting blogs and from building up longevity by consistently posting content on the Web over long periods of time.

In Quamat’s The Go To How To Blogging Guide, the authors note that many start out blogging with the best of intentions, but then find themselves unable to keep up the discipline. Tennis coach Spencer Fields might have been talking about business bloggers instead of college tennis stars when he summed up the problem: “Often they start out strong, but fizzle toward the end.”

Playing a game where the rules are constantly changing poses special challenges – the answer to the question “What do search engines want?” might be different next week than it was yesterday. On one thing, though, most mavens appear in agreement: One secret to winning search is consistent posting of relevant content on the Web.

Given the multiple demands on most business owners’ time, the level of “deliberate practice” it takes to win online search rankings might fall, in many cases, to professional ghost bloggers like Say It For You!

 

 

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Blogging’s Big Four

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The old saying about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link is certainly true of blogs.  Each time you publish a post, that post becomes the newest link in your blog chain. Actually, it becomes the first link in your blog chain, because all your posts remain on the Internet, appearing in reverse chronological order.

The chain concept is the secret behind blogging’s effectiveness in helping your company or professional practice get found.  “With blogs you’re casting a super-large net of keywords,” explains Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware. “By nature, blogs have more of the positive variables that search engines are looking   for when compared to a website,” he adds, citing four blog qualities:

1. Content-rich
Each blog post should offer expert information and advice in a professional, easy-to-understand way.  Visual aids such as the font you use, bolding, italics, photos, and charts can all add interest, but the main job of business blog posts is to assure visitors they’ve come to the right place, and to tell them why that’s so.

2.  Specific
Arriving at your blog, Web searchers are on a fact-finding mission, looking for information about what you do, what you sell, and what you know about.  Give them “Just-the-facts-Ma’am” satisfaction.

3.  Relevant
Keywords and phrases in the title and in the body of your blog post help search engines make as close a match as possible between the question and the answer, the problem and the solution, or the need and the product or service. Keep those “key people” – your blog visitors – in mind whenever you post!

4.  Personal
“Though we live with digital technology, it’s still an analog world,” comments Tony Fannin of Be Branded. Great marketing, he points out, is still about humans talking to humans, and blogs must give readers a sense of real people talking. (The essence of my work as a professional ghost blogger is to capture your personality and your message and express that to your customers and clients.) 

Before you hit “Publish” or “Submit”, give each of your blog posts the once-over to be sure that newest link in your blog chain meets the “Big Four” test!

 

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Incorporate Iconic Statements In Your Blog

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In "Fall-ify Your Home" (veteran realtor and friend Dan Bowden of F.C. Tucker faithfully sends my copy of Tucker Talks) I found a juicy word tidbit.  Regular readers of my Say It For You Blogs know how I relish little word groups that convey big concepts or that conjure up multiple connections, and one sentence in Tucker Talks did just that:

 "Pumpkins and gourds are among the most iconic parts of autumn, and easy to incorporate in your décor."

Fall, of course, provides us with many visuals – yellow and red leaves, for example. Acorns. Squirrels. Cornucopias. But Tucker Talks is right – pumpkins and gourds capture the essence of the season.

If you’re a business blogger, you might do well to think about icons as well.  Your business may offer diverse products and services, and you may have much knowledge to share in your professional specialty.  But, to the extent you can incorporate iconic statements in blog posts to capture the essence of what your business is truly "about" – for you as well as what you hope to bring to your clients – you’re that much more likely to capture visitors’ interest.

As I’ve often mentioned these blog posts, one question I always pose to new business blogging clients is this:

 If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what  
   what you know about, what you sell, and what you do, what would those words be?

But what if…your clients were given the task of explaining what you do in just three words?  Or in a picture?  Those are your icons! Make sure iconic statements find their way into each of your blog posts!

 

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