Don’t Keep Yourself a Secret in Your Blog

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“What we’re marketing is Y-O-U”,” career strategist Diane Wingerter reminds clients, subjecting their personal profiles to her “’red pen review”: It’s a mistake to introduce yourself to a prospective customer or employer with a laundry list of all the things you do, she teaches . In order to focus on how you want the reader of the profile to feel about you, weave your bio into a narrative that reveals your personality.

In fact, two P’s of business blogging, we remind clients of Say It For You, are Passion and Personality. As compared to brochures and advertisements, blog posts are ideal for revealing, while imparting valuable information to visitors, the unique personality and core beliefs of the business or practice owners.

Used to be, the emphasis in marketing was on conveying a USP, a unique selling proposition. Today, however, we should move in the direction of ESPs – emotional selling propositions,” Jeanette McMurtry cautions in Marketing for Dummies. And, in online communication, while need may have brought visitors to your blog, it’s their want (their desire to do business with you) that will move those visitors “down the sales funnel”.

Based on my years as a college career mentor, helping students secure internships, I have come to compare blog posts to long interviews. Searchers on the web are “recruiting” help, and just as in a face-to-face interview, they evaluate your content in light of their own needs. It’s more than that, as Diane Wingerter so aptly emphasizes. What interviewers really do, as the Helium Jobs & Careers website says, is “get a look at your personality.”

Business blog posts, shorter, less formal, and more personal than websites, are the perfect venue to showcase your personality and your unique approach to your field. Yes, a marketing blog must demonstrate what you have, what you do, and what you know how to do, but, whatever you do – don’t keep yourself a secret in your blog!

 

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Blog Reading Based on Different Motivations

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“There was a time when archaeology was commissioned privately by wealthy individuals,” I learned from the incredibly fascinating tome of trivia, Publications International’s The Big Book of Big Secrets. One of the most interesting chapters described the day in 1922 when, some 300 years after the death of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, a way to enter the tomb of “King Tut “was discovered. (I remember visiting the “Golden King” exhibit of these artifacts at the Children’s Museum back in 2009 right here in Indianapolis.)

From a blog marketing standpoint, I was fascinated by The Big Book authors’ insight into the differing motivations those wealthy individuals had for their ongoing efforts, spread over many years, to open the tomb. “Some of those benefactors desired to advance historical knowledge, while others simply hoped to enhance their personal collections of antiquities.” As things turned out, both types were rewarded for their efforts: Ancient plunderers raided the tomb for smaller items, making huge profits from mummies and from recovered items, while the historians were able to “catalog piles of priceless artifacts”.

Firstmondayorg, reporting on a study for the motivations of blog readership among recent college graduates, observes that readers used blogs for step-by-step instructions for hobbies, do-it-yourself household reports, and money management. ”Today, blogs mean a host of things to bloggers, blog readers, and new media researchers.”In the survey, most graduates said blogs were useful in helping them pick up skills they had not learned in college but which they now needed for their careers. Some interviewees reported that blogs provided them with essential professional tips. According to some interviewees, blogs served as niche learning resource tailored to their information problems.

At Say it For You, one valuable coaching tip we offer to blog content writers is to tailor individual blog posts – or series of posts – to different segments of the customer base (as opposed to trying to reach them all in any one post). In a way, each time you post you’re pulling out just one of those attachments on your “Swiss army knife” and offering some valuable information or advice relating to just one aspect of your business. Another day, your blog post can do the same with a different “attachment”.

Brenda Stoltz of Ariad Partners suggests accomplishing that very goal by designating “days” for different targets: Corporate accounting Mondays, Small Biz Wednesdays, or Freelance Fridays. As a variation on the concept, we’ve advised setting aside a section on the website for blog posts for certain specialty readers.

Just like the archaeologies of old, some historians, others antique dealers, blog reading is based on different motivations.

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In Blog Content Writing, Be a Mensch With Mentions

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Since a “mensch” is the type of person we’d all like to think we are, how does that play out in blogging for business? Guy and Peg Fitzpatrick weigh in on that very subject in The Art of Social Media, first explaining the difference between a “mention” and a “hashtag”.

Hashtags help people share a topic, the authors explain. If you wanted to discuss blog marketing with a group of other blog marketers, you’d use #blogmarketing. On the other hand, if you’re blogging about a certain topic, mentioning the name of a person or company (hoping they will see that mention), you’d refer to them as @name on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, if you want to attribute ideas you’re discussing in a blog post to their original authors, you’d link your text to the source, just as I did after naming the Fitzpatrick book above.

The Fitzpatricks remind us of a super-important fact: While with email, the recipient’s response is the only one that matters, in social media, the audience is everyone who reads your comment or your post and who might react to it either positively or critically. Inevitably, some people are going to disagree with you. The authors’ advice to us is to take the high road and maintain a positive attitude throughout.
“Blogging and social media not only amicably coexist; they complement each other,” the authors aver. The trick? Use your blog to enrich your social media with longer form content; use social media to promote your blog.

Being – and staying – a mensch is the key to successful “re-gifting” of others’ content to your own marketing blog readers, I teach at Say It For You.  In fact, quoting someone else’s remarks on a topic you’re covering in a blog post can be a very good thing, because, you’re:

  • reinforcing your point
  • showing you’re in touch with trends in your field
  • adding value for readers by adding variety in the way an idea is phrased

On the other side of the coin, content writers need to remember that we’re trying to make our own cash register (or the cash register of the business owner or practitioner who hired us) ring. In the final analysis, therefore, the voice that has to be strongest through the post is the one represented by the url on the blog site.

In blog content writing, be a mensch with mentions, taking care of business while “taking care” to give credit where credit is due.

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Blogging to the Smarter Buyer

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”Smart buyers want to gain as much as possible while spending as little as possible,” Tom Sant teaches in his book Persuasive Business Proposals. “If you don’t show them how much they gain by choosing your recommendations, they will inevitably focus on the other half of the equation, spending very little.”

Several of the elements Sant stresses concerning proposals can be especially important in blog marketing:

1. Smart buyers want a business proposal to address their issues or problems right away, giving them assurance that the recommendations will be relevant.
At Say It For You, we emphatically agree. Corporate blog writing for business, will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers, the first or which is that the business owner or professional practitioner understands online searchers’ concerns and needs. That assurance need to find expression early in the blog post content.

2.  Smart buyers want clear, specific recommendations tied back to solving those problems.
Buyers need to understand that you and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. Since, other than the clues offered through the words searchers have chosen to type into the search bar, their individual needs are as yet unknown to you, include anecdotes as examples of common issues that have been solved using your products and expertise.

3.  Smart buyers want evidence that the vendor can deliver on time and on budget.
At Say it For You, we realize that having a specific audience in mind and choosing the best evidence for that target audience is crucial.. It’s specific evidence that will resonate with the right audience, including:

  • statistics about the problem your product or service helps solve
  • your years of experience, degrees, newspaper articles written by or about your business or practice
  • testimonials

Choosing the best blog marketing evidence is crucial!

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Blogging the What-Do-I-Do

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In creating content – whether for blogs or newsletter, we’re sometimes so close to our own project that we forget to look at it from the reader’s point of view. Humor speaker Todd Hunt must have been reading a recent Say It For You blog post about the three questions prospects ask themselves: What is it? Is it for me? What do I do? No matter what, you can’t leave that third question unanswered. “Always remember where our customer is coming from,” Hunt cautions, showing a copy of an ad from the Twin Cities Pioneer Press touting the Doyle & Debbie Show.

The show is advertised in glowing terms: Brilliant! Drop dead funny! Fall-off-the-barstool fun!
Clever, Hilarious, Wacky & Brilliant! Extended Due to Overwhelming Demand! The only problem? Nowhere is the reader told either where the show is taking place or how to buy tickets! In other words, the what-do-I-do question goes frustratingly unanswered.

“If you find that your leads and prospects aren’t taking the next step in your sales process—whether that’s buying or simply requesting more information—the problem could be a faulty or non-existent call to action,” writes Mindy Lilyquist in thebalancesmb.com. It seems obvious to let people know the next step in doing business with you, but the truth is, many business owners don’t have calls to action in their marketing. Lilyquist thinks there are two possible reasons for this omission:

  1. a belief that the prospect already knows what to do if they’re interested in buying or learning more
  2. concerns that calls to action are obnoxious and will annoy the potential customer

Calls to action don’t need to be “calls to buy – now!”. In fact, the what-do-I-do question can be answered by suggesting the reader:

  • subscribe (to the blog via an RSS feed or to a newsletter)
  • share (via social media)
  • follow (on social media)
  • download (a white paper or book)
  • click to learn more (leading to more information-intensive landing page)

    The what-do-I-do can be in short form (a link or an icon to click on) or a sentence or two, AdEspresso.com explains. “Love learning about…… and want to learn more? Subscribe now for weekly updates….”):

While Todd Hunt reminds us to remember where our customer is coming from, “What-do-I-dos” and Calls to Action offer blog readers options for “Where do I go from here?”!

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