Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

 

“An important driver of customer loyalty is how little effort the customer has to expend to do business with you,” Dixon, Toman, and Delisi point out in the Effortless Experience. Identify the customers’ biggest hassles and look for ways to be their hero by making that piece of the process easier for them, the authors advise.

There are ways to be Easy To Do Business With, says Ted Stahl, and each of these can be implemented through blog marketing:

• Be proactive. Stay in touch with customers on a regular basis, Stahl emphasizes.
  At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of corporate blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “show up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. You might say the first job of a blog content writer is to help a business or a professional practice “get its frequency on”, so that they keep “running into” their readers.
• Simplify your packages. We live in a culture of information saturation. Consumers today are highly distracted, which is why your blog posts need to include very focused, well-written calls to action. Often I remind practitioners and business owners getting ready to launch a marketing blog that the only people who are going to notice their blog are the ones already interested in that topic. The Call to Action is simply giving those readers a simple way to act on the information you’ve provided, I explain.
• Say YES to any reasonable request for personalization. I like to remind both the blog content writers at Say It For You and the clients who hire us that the goal of a business blog is to bring in customers “of the right kind”, customers who have a need for and who will appreciate the services, products, and expertise being showcased in the blog. Anecdotes and testimonials are each ways of using your blog to show how personalized your service can be.
• Answer the phone on the first ring. “You’d think website visitors would be more than willing to click through to your Contact page to find your phone number, but the truth is, many times they’re not,” the Bright Orange Thread blog points out. Websites – and blog sites – that make it difficult for online searchers to navigate make it easy for those searchers to “bounce away”.  If the content makes the reader want to call your company, is the phone number in plain sight? If the reader wants to submit a question or comment, or request further information, how easy is that to do?

Your blog is an excellent way to show you are here and Easy-To-Do-Business-With!

 

“This year, consider closing the gap between your actions and objectives,” writes Chip Munn in financialplanning.com. Harking back to Abe Lincoln (who reportedly said that if he had six hours to chop down a tree, he’d spend five of those hours sharpening his axe), Munn believes it’s time for financial advisors to follow that advice in their practices.

As a “financial planning emerita” I find several of Munn’s practical suggestions relevant for our work as blog marketers:

Document your processes
New opportunities present themselves when they’re in front of you on paper, Nunn observes.

The secret weapon for us blog content writers takes the form of an “idea folder”. That folder could be an actual folder in which newspaper and magazine clippings are collected, a little notebook you carry around, or take the form of a digital file on a phone or tablet.  We “load up” with content for future posts and stay current in the “now” by reading, bookmarking, clipping – and even just noticing – new trends and information relating to each of our clients’ business fields.

Embrace technology
There are exciting graphic design tools and email platforms that have improved the speed and ease of client-facing interactions, the author adds.

The blog platform (in the case of this Say It For You blog, WordPress®) takes care of formatting the content in the form of text and images, and provides a framework for getting it onto a website. The blogging platform also makes it easier for a search engine to categorize the blog entries. Content writers do well to take full advantage of the capabilities of each client’s chosen platform.

Focus on your ideal client
How are you making yourself visible to your ideal clients in the community? What are you delivering tangibly to clients that demonstrates your value? asks Nunn.

If what freelance blog writers do is help business owners build their brand, then the process of deciding what to include in the corporate blog becomes one of the writer helping the owner with self-discovery and of discovery of their ideal client profile.

Leverage your cooperation with people
Build collaboration with other professionals and with your own team, the author counsels.

To be effective content writers, we must engage with not only the business and practice owners who hire us, but with their employees and customers. In fact, in order for our content to appeal to a “better kind of customer” (one who buys for the right reasons and remains loyal,), we can incorporate “learning questions” in the blog posts, relying on readers’ ability to arrive at intelligent answers once we’ve provided intelligent questions and options through the blog content.

Engage your unique wisdom and abilities
Delegate or outsource activities that drain you and focus on those that give you energy and excitement, Nunn advises.

With blog marketing becoming such an indispensable customer acquisition tool, ghost blogging becomes an outsourcing solution for busy business owners who have long-long business goals but who are short-short on time.

Financial planning or blog content writing – old Abe was onto something, I agree. Sharpening our content writing “axe” is advice we try to follow at Say It For You!