Blogging What You Are Not

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“I photograph weddings, but I am not a wedding photographer.,” asserts Marty Moran, owner of Whitehot Headshot. “I photograph headshots, but I am not in the headshot business,” he adds. “I am a relationship builder, strengthening my tribe as I help others strengthen theirs. Give them quality and support, and they will make return visits,” Moran believes.

My networking colleague Ron Mannon often needs to explain that his company, Combustion & Systems, Inc., an industry leader in powder coating systems, does not actually do powder coating or paint finishing. Instead, they provide the equipment and training so that their customers can do their own finishing rather than farming out that part of the manufacturing process.

At Say It For You, we create SEO-conscious content, but do not focus on the science of Search Engine Optimization, believing that blogging is about much more than back-links and “authority”. What do you want to say to your customers today? What will get them excited enough to choose you over the competition? How will you keep them coming back for more information in the future?

In the Harvard Business Review, Madelaine Rauch and Sarah Stanske write about “the power of defining what your company isn’t”. There are times when having an “anti-identity” can be useful in communicating with customers, employees, and investors,” they explain. “We suspect,” the authors say, that companies might experiment with an anti-identity approach, analyzing who they really are and what that implies about what they are not. “No business – particularly a small one – can be all things to all people. The more narrowly you can define your target market, the better,” the staff of Entrepreneur Media, Inc. say.

Of the top 10 mistakes new business owners make, Gene Marks of the Hartford says, #1 is trying to do things you’re not good at. Translating that very sage advice into the field of blog content creation, that means defining in your blog not only the successes and strengths of the business or practice, but defining precisely which products and services you provide – and which you don’t. After all, Since exceeding customer expectations is such a worthy goal, clarifying those expectations and aligning them with reality is a key part of the marketing process. “It is vital,” smartkarrot.com advises, “to put parameters upfront, so that you can honor them time and again.”

Blogging, in short, clarifies what you are, but it is equally important to clarify what you are not!

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Blog to Generate Feelings of Familiarity and Liking

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An experimental psychologist in the US asked a group of people to view various Chinese characters that were displayed on a screen. The volunteers were asked to return a few days later to look at a further batch. Some of the characters they viewed this time around were those they’d been shown the week before; others were new to them. Asked which ones they recognized from the week before, the subjects had absolutely no idea.

In a second experiment using a different group of volunteers, participants were not asked which characters they recognized from the week before. Instead, they were asked which images they liked best. The “mind-boggling fact’, relates John Cleese in his book Creativity, is that the ones the participants said they liked best were those show to them the week before! In the unconscious mind, familiarity generated a feeling of liking. 

Cleese wasn’t talking about blog marketing, but there’s a very important connection here. Precisely because blogs are not one-time articles, but conveyers of messages over long periods of time, they serve as unique tools for building a sense of familiarity (and ultimately trust) in readers. As Hubspot’s Corey Wainwright puts it, “If you consistently create valuable content or articles for your target audience, it’ll establish you as an industry leader or authority in their eyes”

 

A second point Cleese stressed is that “the language of the unconscious is not verbal. Instead, it shows you images. There’s no question that visuals are one of the three “legs” of the business blog “stool”, along with information and perspective or “slant”. Social marketing maven Jeff Bullas lists at least two rather startling statistics to demonstrate the reason images and photos need to be part of any business’ marketing tactics:

  • Articles with images get 94% more total views.
  • 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results.

Just as marketing professor Demetra Adam explained, increasing the number of “cues” increases prospects’ perception of their own knowledge, making it easier for them to buy (see our post of Feb. 22). Combining verbal and visual “cues” in a blog post increases that feeling of familiarity and “liking”.

Blog to generate familiarity!

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Blogs That Go WHAC

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Write less,” advises Seth Godin in the preface to his book The Dip. Now Brant Pindvidic, in his book The 3-Minute Rule, tells us to “say less to get more from any pitch or presentation”.

At Say It For You, I teach the principle of “reading around”, emphasizing the point that business bloggers are going to need to spend at least as much time reading as writing. Even after almost a decade and a half creating blog content for business owners and practitioners, I feel the need to keep up on what others are saying on the topic, what’s in the news, and what problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to what my clients offer. But now, both these business authors are making the case for less, not more, when it comes to sales pitches, speeches, and blog posts.

It seems this “reading around” habit of mine has presented me with a dilemma: Godin’s and Pinvidic’s advice to write and say less seems to fly in the face of the latest trend towards long-form blog posts with a word count numbering in the thousands.

Brant Pinvidic’s advice is based on the science of approach motivation. “Every time you make a pitch, presentation, or proposal to try to influence anyone to do anything, your audience’s first impression will be fully formed in less than three minutes”. And it’s not that we’re all dumbed-down, he says, but that people today focus more intensely and efficiently, he explains. The WHAC outline helps organize the key information you need to impart – and dictates the order in which you present that information:

W – What is it? (What is your offer?)
H – How does it work?) work? (Why are the elements of your offer and why are they valuable or
Important?)
A– Are you sure? (This is a fact or figure that backs up your information and establishes
potential.)
C – Can you do it? (Your ability to execute and deliver.

In the first two stages, the W and the H, the audience will conceptualize. In the A stage, they will contextualize, judging whether your offer is true real, and right. In the C stage, the audience will be asking whether this could actually happen in the way being described.

Transferring this model to the arena of blog marketing, I’d suggest that the WHAC sequence could be employed over a series of blog posts rather than using it all in one. One concept I emphasize in corporate blogging training sessions is that blog posts can stay smaller and lighter in scale than the more permanent content on the corporate website or the content in white papers. What helps the separate posts fit together into an ongoing business blog marketing strategy are the blog “leitmotifs” or themes.

Whether Godin’s “Write less” advice is suited for us blog content writers remains a matter of debate. On the other hand, “Read more” continues to be a requirement for imparting bog posts with WHAC!

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Blog Content Appeals to Unconscious and Conscious Awareness

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Decades ago, Sigmund Freud argued that there are meanings, highly significant to humans, but which are obscured from immediate awareness. The discovery of those unconscious meanings attached to products and services allows advertisers to design appeals to tap those motivations, the authors of Persuasion in Advertising explain.

The concept of “selling to the unconscious” as Joel Weinberger writes in Brandingmag.com, is no longer “new news”.  In fact, in purchasing products and services, unconscious processing is as least as important in human decision-making, Weinberger stresses. We blog content writers should find Weinberger’s analysis of the difference between the way consumers choose products compared to the way they choose services to be especially relevant to our work. If a purchase is likely to be a thought-out decision that is not repeated often, he teaches, messaging should focus on conscious values; if a purchase is something that is frequent, or just happens, messaging should focus on unconscious values.

“Conscious thought has but a minority stake in the human decision making process, “ beyondreason.com emphasizes. Traditional marketing tends to neglect the sub-conscious, the authors say, but that is not where many decisions are made. Most marketing practices, they add, “polish the pros, muffle the cons, and sometimes inject some emotions.” In the end, they caution, “science-based marketing evolution cannot be avoided”.

Tangible products are often thought to be easier to market, observes fiftyfiveandfive.com, They can be shown, demonstrated, touched, and displayed.  Services, on the other hand, are intangible, and it can be harder to show value. Besides, unlike products, once services have been consumed, they cannot be resold or reused.

Arke disagrees, pointing out that both service and product-based organizations compete on the quality of both products and services in terms of the customer experience. On the other hand, Arke points out, when people are involved, there is room for error and inconsistency.

At Say It For You, where we create content to market both products and services, we know that our main goal is to raise prospects’ awareness of solutions. Since, in practical terms, we are not aiming for an immediate sale, we blog content writers keep on telling the business’ or the practice’s story in its infinite variations over long periods of time, knowing that, to a certain extent, the readers who end up as clients and customers have self-selected rather than having been “sold”.

In fact, when you’re composing business blog content, I teach at Say It For You, imagine readers asking themselves (perhaps on a subconscious level) – “How will I use the product (or service)?” “How will I feel?”
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Business Blogging May Not Take a Village, But it Does Take a Team

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teamwork
Even after playing together for more than fifty years (I learned from Steve & Jack’s Home News), the Rolling Stones musicians still understand the value of practicing together, committing to two months of rehearsal before every tour. Why? Practicing together helps them reconnect with each other’s rhythm and understand each member’s distinctive roles.

Running a business blog takes commitment and teamwork as well. In fact, as we Say It For You blog content writers embark on our 13th year, one thing continues to become clear: Whenever things do not work out as planned, it almost always has to do with lack of coordination among the team members:

  • the blog writer
  • the webmaster
  • the business owner or practitioner
  • the staff of the client’s business or practice

As blog content writers, we are interpreters. Effective blog posts must go from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic.

What that means is that owners and professional practitioners have got to be involved in the process of producing content, even after they’ve engaged our services; they can’t “go to sleep” and cede control of the creative process to us. The webmaster has to work together with the blog writer to provide the optimization and analysis that make the content “work”. The front-line employees who deal with the customers daily must be involved.

Hiring professional bloggers is not a “wake me up when it’s over” proposition – just as is true of the Rolling Stones, reconnecting with each other’s knowledge and rhythm is what makes the material come to life. Not only should there be periodic team meetings to discuss content, it is not a good idea for me and my team to take on writing assignments without insisting the business also invest in properly designed landing pages and website optimization. When blog writing is not coordinated with email and social media the results are simply not likely to be what the business owner expects.

Business blogging may not take a village, but it certainly does take a team!

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