Who Should Definitely Read This Blog?

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Every month my Mensa monthly newsletter Mind has a book review section, and I love the way that review is presented. First, there’s a page-long description of what the book is about. But then, there are three smaller sections:

  1. Has this book changed the way you think or your attitude towards life?
  2. Who should definitely read this book? Why?
  3. Provide a short characteristic section, an awesome sentence, or an inspiring quote.

Question #2 is one that we blog content writers need to ask ourselves each time we work on a post on behalf of a client – Who should definitely be reading this?? That’s because, just as the only people who will be receiving the Mensa newsletter are those already qualified to be members, visitors to our blogsite “self-select” in terms of choosing to click on the link and read our content.After all, while I’m fond of thinking of ghost blogging as an art, there’s quite a bit of science to it as well.  A blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than any business or professional practice can be all things to everybody.  The blog must be targeted towards the specific type of customers you want and who will want to do business with you.
Years ago, I heard humor speaker Ron Culberson at a National Speakers Association meeting tell an anecdote that neatly sums up the need for audience targeting:

A woman attending a conference says, “This is the most boring conference ever. I’m going to skip the keynote address that’s coming up next and go to the beach.” Overhearing her, a man asks, “Do you know who I am? I’m the division president and I’M the keynote speaker!” The woman responds “And do you know who I am?” “No,” responds the man. The woman gets up and leaves…..

One of the very first principles of blog marketing is targeting.  Not only must the content you include in your business blog (or, in the case of Say It For You clients, the business blog content created by your freelance blog writer) offer valuable and up-to-date information, you must make clear to readers that the information has been assembled specifically for them:

  • You understand their concerns and needs .
  • You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

If readers find themselves asking “Don’t you know who we are?” those searchers are going to do what that woman conference attendee did – get up and leave.

A tantalizing title, well-researched content, opinion, story – all important elements to include in your well-thought-out blog post. But, before hitting the “Publish” key, ask yourself, “Who should definitely read this blog and why?”

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Guest Post: CMO Skills Essential for Marketing

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Since our Say It For You writers often work under the direction of a company’s Chief Marketing Officer, this insightful guest post about effective CMOs is of interest. Author Dana Harris is a writer and a freelance marketing specialist. She has been writing articles on marketing tips and strategies for over five years.

CMOs are invaluable members of any company. However, their role constantly grows and transforms due to the continuous evolution of the marketing world. From new tactics to the latest trends, there’s no shortage of skills and tools for marketers to master. But which strengths are truly essential for a chief marketing officer? This blog discusses what you need in a good CMO.

This Chief Marketing Officer resume guide details the top five common traits of a competent CMO:

  • good leader
  • quick adapter
  • customer-centered
  • great communicator
  • excellent data analyzer

A CMO needs each of these fundamental skills to fulfill all of the responsibilities of their position.

However, these are not the only desirable traits. A CMO’s role is so influential that it can make or break a company’s brand image, sales, and overall profit. It’s critical to prevent a decline in any of those areas. Here are five more skills your CMO should possess to boost your marketing efforts and impact.

Goal Setting

Knowing how to set goals is a significant marketing skill. As the leader of a company’s marketing department, it’s certainly a must-have skill for a CMO. They should know how to implement marketing tactics that align with the company’s goals. Not only that, they should continually aim for a stronger brand and a greater product reach. Even the best marketing strategy risks failure with no guiding goals in mind.

Understanding of UX & UI

Technology is a critical element for a marketing campaign to reach its full potential. This reason is why a company’s CMO and technical team must work together. However, a CMO with knowledge of basic UX/UI design skills is extremely valuable. These skills allow the CMO to build a consumer experience that supports a company’s marketing goals and strategies. Also, the technical team can achieve much more when the CMO has a basic working knowledge of their design skills.

Creativity and Innovation

The ability to be both creative and innovative is essential in the marketing field. Marketers should constantly look for new methods and inventive ways to execute marketing plans to keep up with the latest trends. A creative CMO has a better understanding of consumers and can deliver a valuable experience to them. The combination of data-driven insight and creative thinking is the perfect recipe for actionable campaigns.

Content Management

Did you know that 94% of consumers go to the internet to research products? People often go to Google to look for information and resources during the purchasing process. This fact shows the importance of content marketing. Content marketing covers the constant development and optimization of blog posts, videos, eBooks, whitepapers, and other content pieces. Content management skills have become essential with so much centered on the internet.

Excellent Storytelling

Every effective marketer should be a good storyteller. They should be able to use data to weave a compelling story and put the company’s name on top. Customers typically buy products based more on emotion than logic. A CMO must appeal to the audience’s emotional side and compel them to buy into the brand. Powerful storytelling speaks into the lives of customers and connects a product directly to a solution. It’s a balance of both emotion and logic.

Wrapping Up

Indeed, a chief marketing officer is a very complex and diverse role that is constantly evolving. Companies seeking a capable CMO shouldn’t overlook these essential skills, and neither should those seeking to be the next CMO. Regardless of marketing or technological advances, these skills will take both the CMO and the company confidently into the future.

 

 

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Blue Man Group as a Model for Blog Content Writers

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As Chip Munn writes in Financial Planning magazine, financial advisors can take several tips from the Blue Man Group entertainment act, begun in the 80s, which incorporates comedy, music, and humor performed by three men, with heads and faces painted blue, who speak not a single word in the course of their stage performances. There are valuable business lessons for financial planning practices Munn believes, which can be derived from the Blue Man business model. For blog marketers, there are lessons as well:

You need to understand what people you’re looking for on your team and in your audience. (In addition to being skillful stage performers, Blue Men performers need to be of fairly uniform height and build.)

In blog marketing, the bottom line is knowing your target audience. Intelligence about your reader base needs to influence every aspect of the blog – its look, its style, its length, its frequency. As Seth Godin points out in his book All Marketers Tell Stories, “great stories are rarely aimed at everyone”.

You need to own your image and your equipment. (Blue Man group created their own unique instruments.)

One of the very important purposes of any business blog is to demonstrate “only-ness” to readers. To have any hope of engaging readers’ interest, blogs must provide fresh, relevant content, a challenge due to the sheer volume of information on the Web. Two strategies include bringing in “unique instruments” – less well-known facts about familiar things and processes, and suggesting new ways of thinking about things readers already know. Taking a stance, using the blog to express a firm opinion on issues, is a way to leverage your uniqueness.

Stay close to your clients. (Blue Man founder Chris Wink would periodically leave the executive suite to perform and remain involved.)

People tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who give back to their community. Blog content can focus on personal anecdotes and on the personal values of the business owners and of the people delivering professional services, alluding to current community happenings and concerns.

Plan growth in small increments. (Blue Man group began in Chicago, and scaled to become a global entertainment force, ultimately purchased by Cirque du Soleil.)

The people who find your blog are those who are already online looking for information, products, or services that relate to what you know, what you have, and what you do! Your online marketing challenge is not to seek out the people, but to help them seek you out! In blog marketing, keep telling your story consistently and frequently, honing it all along the way, and allowing time for your “reach” to grow.

Blue Man Group can be a model for us blog content writers!

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Blogging the Way things Used to Be

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Whether or not you’re into home remodeling and décor, the new “Reveal” magazine by two of my own favorite reality show personalities, Drew and Jonathan Scott, is a great source of ideas for blog content writers. Last week in this Say It For You blog, I noted that the brothers had offered no fewer than five full articles about, of all things, tile, each one informative and imaginative.

Even the advertisements are uniquely creative in  “Reveal”, I discovered to my delight. A painting of a 19th century woodsman sitting in his shop with his dog’s face turned towards him takes up the bulk of the page, with an art-museum-style plaque that reads “Things dogs used to smell- their owners”. At the bottom of the page is a second plaque reading “Things dogs smell now: chicken”, positioned over a box of Cesar dog food.

“When it comes to business, trends come and go. This is particularly prevalent when it comes to marketing strategies,” Metova posits, noting that as technology becomes increasingly available to the general public, people are more receptive to marketing tactics when the material is formatted directly for them.

One really important point Metova stresses is that today, product comparison is an outdated and unnecessary marketing strategy. With trust in U.S. companies in general having dropped to 50% this year, now is not a great time for brands to be making lofty claims or taking potshots at competitors. Instead, Metova says, now is the time to be building trust and relationships.

This takes me back to the “Reveal” magazine ad for dog food. While making comparisons with competitors’ products and services may be passé, comparisons of “now” with “then” always hit the spot. Sharing memories of the “good old times” that weren’t really so good in terms of efficiency and convenience, you have the ability to share with blog readers a sense of look-how-far-we’ve-come togetherness.

The Business Dictionary definition of the term “product innovation” is “the development and market introduction of a good or service that is:

  • new
  • redesigned
  • substantially improved

What that means is that if you have taken something already there and made it better, that “innovation” is the most powerful thing you have to share in your blog marketing. After all, Drew and Jonathan Scott didn’t “invent” tile, and the Cesar company didn’t invent dog food. It’s probably true, we tell Say It For You clients wondering how they can come up with new ways to present their products and services through content marketing, that you can’t claim to have “invented” those products or services “from scratch”!

On the other hand, history-of-our-company background stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame adversity. Most important, tracing the “then” calls attention to the modern solutions that grew out of those past attempts and failures.

Blogging “the way things used to be” is a great way to help prospects and clients savor the way things are!

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For Humor and Allusions in Blogs, Make Sure Readers Don’t “Huh?”

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“Know your audience. Not everyone will think every joke is funny,” advises Michael Strecker in the book Young Comic’s Guide to Telling Jokes. Strecker’s advice applies to blog content writing, as we’ve learned through experience at Say it For You.

One reason certain jokes fall flat with certain audiences, I’m convinced, is not that those jokes are offensive or unfunny. It’s that many jokes are based on a cultural allusion that is simply not familiar to that audience.

A cultural allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, or idea that is not directly described. Here are a few of Strecker’s jokes that will be funny to you only if you happen to recognize the allusion to history, literature, mathematics, geology, or the Bible…….

  • What was the sea creatures’ strike called? Octopi Wall Street.
    (The allusion is to the protest movement against economic inequality that started in New York City and which was named Occupy Wall Street.)
  • Who invented the ball point pen? The Incas.
    (The allusion is to the ancient Incan empire in the country of Peru.)
  • Why was the precious metal so silly? It was fool’s gold.
    (The allusion is to the metal pyrite, which has no value, but which resembles gold in its appearance. Many treasure-seekers foolishly mistook pyrite for gold.)
  • How did the dentist pay for his vision exam? An eye for a tooth.
    (The allusion is to a passage from the Bible about punishing a man who injures another – “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…)
  • What do you do at a math party? East pi and square dance.
    (The allusion is to pi, which is the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately 3.14.)
  • What do you call a street where Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and James Patterson live? Writer’s Block.
    (The allusion is to three famous writers and to a psychological “block” in which a person represses painful thoughts of memories.)

In blog marketing, we might choose to use an allusion to get a point across without going into a lengthy explanation. Or, we might want to get readers thinking about our subject in a new way. We might even use allusions to cement a bond between our client and the blog readers, showing the business owner or practitioner has experienced some of the same problems and obstacles as their customers now face.

There’s only one problem – an allusion does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it’s referring – readers have to recognize the allusion. As content writers, we need to gauge our readers’ areas of interest and even their level of education. If they simply don’t know the underlying story, literary tale or other reference point, we could be leaving them scratching their heads, and asking “Huh?”

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