Hurt and Rescue in Blogging for Business

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“When developing a business interest you have to assume a problem that you can promise to solve,” author D. Forbes Ley was advising sales professionals thirty years ago.  This week my Say It For You blog posts are devoted to some of the gems in Ley’s book “The Best Seller”. While SEO blog marketing wasn’t even a gleam in the eye when that book came out, it’s amazing how relevant the ideas are for blog content writers today.

Once buyers have developed an emotional interest in your product, they will reveal that with “buying signals”, Ley explained.  But, he continues, “when the prospects are still undecided because of lack of Want, you have to remind them of their hurt and rescue them.” Ley calls that the “Hurt and Rescue” selling tactic.

In corporate blog writing for business, a much softer approach is called for than the sort of face-to-face selling Forbes Ley was describing. Still, it occurs to me, reading that chapter of his book, that SEO marketing blogs will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers, and in the order presented here:

  • It’s clear you (the business owner or professional practitioner) understand online searchers’ concerns and needs. That means calling to readers’ minds the costs, the risks, and the problems that drove them to seek information about what you know and what you know how to do.  In other words, the blog content puts the “hurt” front and center.  
     
  • You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs. That’s the “rescue”, the solutions your expertise and experience will bring to bear.

What D. Forbes Ley was advocating thirty years ago wasn’t the “hard-sell” or “scare tactic” approach (which wouldn’t have been welcomed by prospects then any more than they would today).

As a business blogging trainer, I think the lesson here to content writers is to identify ways in which something potential customers value could be in jeopardy.  We then assure searchers they’re not the only ones to find themselves in this predicament and show them we’ve solved these precise problems for customers and clients many times before.

Call it the “Hurt and Rescue” technique for blogging for business!
 

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In Blog Marketing, Emotion Never Goes Out of Style

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“The salesperson can no longer ‘wing it’ in a sales interview; you will run out of time reciting boring facts while missing the golden opportunity to get involved with the Prospect and to get the Prospect emotionally involved with your product.”

Amazing.  Author D. Forbes Ley was issuing that piece of sales advice exactly thirty years ago! Yet, can you think of anything more relevant to blog content marketing today???  As a corporate blogging trainer, I know I can’t.

“When interesting and informative are no longer assets, bloggers have to come up with something else: emotional triggers,” observes Mike Alton on socialmediatoday.com. Blog content writing might be high-quality and informative and still not “make it out of the pit of anonymity,” he adds, for the simple fact that it doesn’t engage with readers.” Ín the end it’s not only information that attracts readers, but also emotions,” Alton concludes.

Face-to-face with a prospect, Marty Martin explains in the Journal of Financial Planning, the seller must first be a listener, uncovering both facts and emotions. That step must precede guiding clients to decisions.

In blogging for business, where face-to-screen is the closest blog content writers come to their prospects, what can ignite the kind of personal connection that gets the Prospect emotionally involved?

“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 in Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business.  The authors recommend using blogs to tell a story. “Engage readers of your blog with fascinating story-like entries.”

One question bound to come up in any corporate blogging training session is this: Can emotional blog marketing be effective in B2 situations?

“Don’t be fooled by the misconception that B2B means presenting products and services to a company rather than to a real person,” says the k-ecommerce blogger. “A company is never faceless. Behind every decision there is always a person involved, and that person has feelings.”

Emotional marketing was “in” thirty years ago when the first edition of “D. Forbes Ley’s “The Best Seller” hit the shelves.  Today, I remind Indianapolis freelance blog writers, emotions remain the most powerful tool for moving people to action.
 

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Tamping Up in a Corporate or Professional Business Blog

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Negative developments are sooner-or-later things, I’ve found in six years of blog content writing for business owners and professional practitioners. But by being proactive and doing what David Meerman Scott calls “getting in front of a media crisis”, I encourage those owners and professionals to keep in control. In fact, as I explain to new Say It For You clients one very important function of your blog is correcting readers’ false perceptions and inaccurate press statements about your company, your practice, or your industry in general.

“The world sees what the search engines say about you,” says removeyourname.com, a reputation management service. Ethical forms of reputation management, says Wikipedia, includes responding to customer complaints and asking sites to take down incorrect information”.

As a blogging trainer, I had reason to think about the power of negative press while reading this month’s issue of Indianapolis Monthly Magazine, which resurrects some very negative – and 40-year old – press about Indiana legislator Marilyn Schultz charging the then all-male member Columbia Club with gender discrimination.

That Indianapolis Monthly Magazine article is an extreme case, I think, because the news is so very old, and because Columbia Club has since come so far in welcoming and promoting women. But sooner or later, with such oceans of content being posted online every second, from every possible source, every practitioner, owner, and organization leader will face the challenge of responding to negative content.

It’s ironic, in a way.  One goal of SEO marketing blogs is to move a company, a practice, or an organization UP, meaning in the direction of the top of Page One of Google. But, when there’s been some negative press, the goal becomes to “tamp DOWN” those negative search results with more positive content,  in hopes searchers will come upon that newer content first.

How do you exercise journalistic control through business blogging? It’s a matter of timing. Even the best-designed websites are rarely flexible enough to allow day-to-day, even hour-by-hour updating.

Business blogging help can turn out to help with customer relations. When customers’ complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” or the “remediation measure” more weight.

 With blog posts, businesses have the ability to put out the news about themselves – now, and with their own “spin” on it!
 

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Variety is the Spice of Sentence Length in Blogging for Business

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Fashion designers think about it; blog content writers should, too.  Varying lengths, that is.

One rule that is of business blogging help in particular is keeping sentences short. Short sentences have power, and, particularly in titles, can more easily be shared on social media sites.

While Brandon Royal, author of The Little Red Writing Book agrees, he reminds us that not every sentence needs to be kept short.  Instead, Royal advises writers to weave in short sentences with longer ones. Every so often, he suggests, a “naked” (extremely short) sentence can add a dynamic touch.

Ever on the alert for examples of excellent business writing, I found a gem in a recent USA Today issue. In “Stocks soar, so do Treasury prices; what gives?” reporter Adam Shell hits the bulls-eye in length-varying.

In fact, in my next corporate blogging training session, I plan to use Shell’s first paragraph as a rather extreme demonstration of the power of varying sentence length in business blog posts. The entire paragraph consists of one 48-word sentence followed by a six-worder.

“Not that Wall Street price moves ever make total sense, but what was odd about Monday’s rally, which powered the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to another record high, was the fact that the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to its lower level of the year. “That means bond prices rallied, too,”

That entire USA Today article, I couldn’t help noticing, happens to be 148 words long, only half the ideal length for the typical SEO marketing blog. Its three paragraphs are 54, 35, and  59 words long, respectively,  effectively offsetting the long and short of it.

The third paragraph does even better, interspersing “naked sentences” with longer statements:

  1. What gives? (2 words)
  2. At one point Monday, the yield on the 10-year note fell to 1.65%, eclipsing Friday's prior low of 1.66%.(20 words)
  3. It closed at 1.67%. (4 words)
  4. At the start of 2013, the yield was 1.76%, and seven weeks ago, it hit a high for the year of 2.06%. (22 words)
  5. The lowest closing yield on record was 1.4% on July 24, 2012. (12 words)


In fashion design, and in writing blogs for business, varying lengths engage interest!
 

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Let Business Blog Readers Self-Test

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Blog readers tend to be curious creatures.  What’s more, that curiosity factor is highest when readers are learning about themselves.  As a longtime Indianapolis blog content writer, I’ve found that “self-tests” tend to engage readers and help them relate in a more personal way to the information presented in an SEO marketing blog. Popular magazine editors appear to agree as well, because current issues are full of tests, games, and quizzes.

Salvatore Didato’s book, “Who Are You? Test Your Personality” offers no fewer than forty quizzes to “reveal the real you”.  It’s not just the variety of quizzes that I found so helpful about this book; it’s the way each is presented that can serve as a model for business blog writing.

“How Daring Are You?” is the header for Didato’s Quiz #1, but rather than diving directly into the series of questions, the author whets his readers’ appetites with an introduction, citing a study done at the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry showing that 1/2 to 2/3 of risk-taking propensity is probably inherited. Blog writers, too, can whet readers’ curiosity with a little-known statistic or fact at the beginning of a post.

Didato then continues with a ten-question true/false test containing statements such as “When shopping, I usually stick to known brands.” But, for business bloggers and business owners who are conveying information to online readers, what is most important is Didato’s commentary following that risk-propensity self-test.

“Studies of group dynamics confirm that a pattern called ‘risky shift’ occurs when members of a group bolster each other’s daring and shift to more risk taking than when they are alone.”
 
I once heard WIBC Radio”s Denny Smith make a comment that I considered very relevant for business blog content writing: People are looking to their advisors for more than just information, he said. They need perspective.  In providing information to searchers, remember that they need some guidance as to what they can do about those facts, and ways in which the information can make a difference to them.

As a corporate blogging trainer, then, I’d remind bloggers to be “tour guides”. The quiz, test, or survey, engages their curiosity.  The next step is “nudging” readers towards a point of view – or a course of action!
 

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