Blog Away Purported Providers

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“Do you know who does most of the estate planning work in our country?” attorney Brian Eagle asked at the start of his professional education lecture series. The startling answer – not legal professionals, but real estate agents and corporate human resource departments.

Since proper and complete estate planning, Eagle teaches, is meant to help organize one’s affairs in such a way as to “give what I have to whom I want, the way I want, and when I want, saving every last tax dollar, professional fee and court cost possible,” merely signing 401(k) beneficiary forms or property purchase agreements is hardly going to get the job done….

One core function of a business blog is explaining to readers what it is you do. As Certified Business Coach Andrew Valley once explained in a 2020 Say It For You guest post, “You must tell the listener how your product or service can benefit that person, and how you can do it better or differently than others who do what you do.”

But what about those many others who think they can offer advice on “what you do”, pushing out content on your topic, but who totally lack experience and training in your field of expertise? Your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, Valley stresses, must be unique; something competitors cannot claim or have not chosen to emphasize in their promotions. A USP, Valley says, raises your business or practice above the “noise”.

Just as Eagle Wealth Management lists client objectives that can be accomplished only with the guidance of experienced and trained legal professionals, including:

  • control – giving “to whom I want, the way and when I want”
  • tax savings
  •  avoiding court costs
  • privacy
  • conflict avoidance

through your blog, you must make clear to readers how your experience and training benefits prospects and clients in ways that “shortcuts” – and lesser-trained providers – cannot.

“A good way to get more participants is to address and solve their challenges. By first mapping out the challenges your audience faces and then showing what it takes to  truly satisfy and solve these challenges, you will be able to stand out in the crowd of providers,” Eline Hagene writes in frontcore.com.

You can leave “purported providers” in the dust when you demonstrate ways in which your clients can achieve “what they want and how they want it”!

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Blogs are Flip-Flop Interviews

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In the book Stop Hiring Losers, Minesh and Baxi devote an entire chapter to a list of interview questions employers should pose to job candidates. “Why are you leaving your current job?”, for example, is designed to identify past problems a candidate might carry over into a new job. On the positive side, that question can reveal the fact that the candidate sees the new position as an important forward career step.

When you think about it, blog posts are interviews, too. But, in the case of blogs, things are “flip-flopped”, because it’s the blog reader (the “candidate”) interviewing the business, rather than the other way around. At Say It For You, we teach content writers that searchers have some sort of need and are recruiting help!  Just as in a face-to-face interviews, those searchers read what you put out there in your blog posts and evaluate that content in light of their own needs.  Their scanning your blog is the equivalent of them interviewing your business to see if you’re a good fit for them.

Many of the questions Minesh and Baxi recommend that employers pose to job candidates are those blog readers are mentally posing to you when they are reading your content:

  • Why should we employ you rather than one of the other candidates?

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is a succinct, memorable message that identifies the unique benefits that are derived from using your product or service as opposed to a competitor’s. Your blog offers you the chance to constantly refine and improve your USP.

  • What would your co-workers say about you?

Testimonials and client anecdotes in your blog are ways of answering this question.

  • What contributed to the best working conditions you ever experienced?

Your blog posts should include stories about how you successful solved clients problems in the past, expressing the satisfaction you gained from helping customers overcome obstacles. Offer advice about how users can gain the greatest benefits from your product or service.

  • What is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your career?

I teach freelance blog writers to include stories of their clients’ past mistakes and failures. Such stories have a humanizing effect, engaging readers and creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame not only adversity, but the effects of their own mistakes!

  • What are you most proud of on your resume?

Although at Say It For You, I remind owners and practitioners that blogging is not boasting, it’s good to offer “credentializing proof”, alluding in blog posts to your years of experience, weaving into the text mention of your degrees, quoting articles you’ve written – and even citing awards you’ve won. In addition, people tend to be comfortable associating with professionals and business owners who give back to their community.

When you think about it, blogs are nothing more than flip-flop interviews!

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Blogging to Get Remembered

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Brag Better: Master the Art of Fearless Self-Promotion
“You can always get attention by being the loudest in the room,” admits Meredith Fineman in her book Brag Better, but being loud while lacking strategy will do more harm than good. There are ways to get remembered, Fineman teaches, by describing your personal brand in ways that earn respect and recognition. True showmanship, she says, means showcasing what you’ve done in a way that feels fun and true to you.

Better bragging better begins with making a list of facts about yourself and your successes, Fineman teaches. Learn to be loud, proud, and strategic by:

  • Using super power words
  • Avoiding invisibility
  • Avoiding verbal qualifiers
  • Considering your audience

Brant Pindivic, author of the book The 3-Minute Rule, speaks about ways to consider your audience: “To succeed, you must be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention with only the quality and flow of your information,” The audience must be able to:

  1. conceptualize your idea
  2. contextualize it (understand how it will benefit them)
  3. actualize it (engage with interest)

One tip that Pinvidic offers to sales people is particularly worth noting by blog content writers: “It’s not just who you pitch to, it’s who they have to pitch to, that matters.” How will readers rationalize their decision to buy when speaking to others?

Better bragging is about shining a light on the work you’ve done, having confidence in yourself and your voice, and speaking up, Fineman stresses. At Say It For You, there are three models of business blog posts that we’ve found are particularly helpful in getting readers to remember the content and its provider:

1. Helpful how-to hints
Find complementary businesses or practices, asking those business owners or practitioners for tips they can offer for you to pass along to your readers. The best tips and hints, I added, are related to some a topic currently trending in the news and practical.

2. Personal stories
Research done by questioning Stanford University graduates showed that shows that graduates were more likely to remember commencement speakers who told stories. In one experiment, students were asked to give one-minute speeches that contained three statistics and one story. Only 5 percent of the listeners remembered a single statistic, while 63 percent remembered the stories.

3. Fascinating tidbits of information
When business owners or practitioners present little-known facts about their own business or profession, those tend to be remembered. If you notice a “factoid” circulating about your industry, a common misunderstanding by the public about the way things really work in your field, a little-known tidbit can reveal the truth behind the myth.

Learn to do better bragging in your blog!

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For Finding…Teaching…Leading….Following…Blogging to Praise

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This fall’s issue of Employee Benefit News had the most wonderful section featuring the 13 winners of Excellence in Benefit Awards. Honorees were praised:

  • for finding unexpected resources…
  • for shining a spotlight on top talent…
  • for putting people over profit…
  • for leading and advising with empathy…
  • for teaching, not preaching…
  • for thinking beyond the benefits…
  • for following the facts….

“Highlighting your employees’ achievements is the key to success”, J2, the Montreal-based procurement management company reminds visitors to its website. But small businesses might feel they can’t afford proper employee recognition,  HR & employee engagement company Gethppy.com realizes, offering suggestions for shout-outs, offers of professional development opportunities and non-cash awards..

At Say it For You, we encourage our blogging clients to use their blog as an employee recognition tool. Highlighting employee accomplishments in a blog brings a two-way benefits: When readers learn about an employee’s enthusiasm and how that person put in extra time and effort in serving customers, that tends to cement the customer’s own relationship with the company or practice. As featured employees proudly share those write-ups with friends and family, the blog becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

When you blog, we remind business owners and professional practitioners, you verbalize the positive aspects of your business or practice in a way that people can understand. You put your recent accomplishments down in words. You review the benefits of your products and services and keep them fresh in your mind. In other words, you are constantly providing yourself with training about how to talk effectively about your business.

While you may encourage your own employees to read the blog, not every employee will not be interested in contributing content. In fact, it’s not unusual for some employees see blogging as just one more task making their work load heavier. Everyone likes to be appreciated and thanked, though, and the blog is the perfect place to do just that.

Do you have a team member who should be praised by you to your readers?:

…for finding unexpected resources?
…for finding new and better ways to do things?
…for thinking beyond the basics?
…for leading and advising with empathy?

Think about featuring your team members in your blog!

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Comparative Marketing for Blogs

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“As long as the value of one product or service is being communicated through its comparison to another product or service, it qualifies as comparative advertising,” Conor Bond writes in Wordstream. The goal, as with all advertising, is to communicate value, but in the case of comparative advertising, that value is conveyed not only from quality, but from the disparity in quality between one product or service and another. The other company or provider serves as an anchor, Bond explains, something concrete to use as a reference point.

Bond offers examples of comparative advertising, including:

  • Mac portraying its own users as immune to the viruses that commonly attack PCs
  • Verizon portraying its own customers enjoying online games and YouTube videos on their phones while ATT&T customers suffer lack of access
  • Wendy’s tweeting about MacDonald’s beef patties still being frozen
  • Popeye’s “dinging” chick-fil-A for being closed on Sundays

Two companies that choose to compare themselves against an amalgam of others rather than a specific rival, Bond notes, are Dove (treats your skin with care, unlike the others who treat it harshly), and Allstate using Mayhem to show that they outdo competitors in preparing customers to deal with unpredictable events.

Can comparative marketing work for blogs? At Say It For You, we teach, negatives against competitors are a basic no-no. It’s almost axiomatic that, in writing for business, we want to clarify the ways we stand out from the competition.  In getting the point across that readers should want to choose this business or this practice, or these products and services over those offered by the competition, staying positive is still important. In fact, sometimes knowing what not to include in your business blog writing makes you a better blog content writer.

The “Golden Rule” advice Advisor Today gives to financial planning practitioners applies here: “say only those kinds of things about specific competitors that we’d want them saying about us!” The high road in blog marketing strategy and tactics development is what Bing Crosby used to croon, “Accentuate the positive…latch on to the affirmative.”

One format I’ve found useful is the “Some……but we….”

  • “Some stylists are in the practice of ……, but at Shirley’s Salon, we believe …….. is best.”
  • Some housecleaning companies require you to provide your own products, but at ABC, we supply our cleaning staff with green products.”

    In other words, accentuate the positive. Comparative blog marketing means explaining why you do things the way you do, letting readers draw their own conclusions.

 

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