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Don’t Blog Only From a Front Row Seat

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Financial professionals often have a “front row seat”, getting to see up close the how clients transition into retirement, Robert Laura writes in Financial Advisor Magazine. “We get to see how they accumulated their savings, and what their plans are for life after work.” Problem is, Laura points out, like people sitting too close to a high stage in a theatre, many advisors have a partially obstructed view, missing scenes playing out in the background. Just as a good play transports you into another world and into other lives, Laura tells advisors, you must be willing to look at more than what is on “center stage” and notice the backdrops.

“Buyers are 48% more likely to consider products and services that address their specific business and personal issues,” uplandsoftware.com stresses. In practice, the authors point out, most companies don’t dive deeply enough into the concerns and needs of their target customers. Instead, most marketing is based on a “front row” view, using demographics such as age, role, and location. The result is marketing materials that simply don’t resonate with the target audience. Hootsuite summarizes the marketing challenge blog content writers face in an almost brutally “in-your-face” way: “You can’t speak directly to your best potential customers if you’re trying to speak to their kids and parents and spouses and colleagues at the same time.” In other words, you need to go narrow and deep rather than using a broad brush.

I’m fond of thinking of ghost blogging as an art, but, truth be told, there’s quite a bit of science to it as well. Since your blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than your business 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.  Everything about your blog, we stress at Say It For You, should be tailor-made for your target customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it. In short, you’re giving up your “front row seat” and mingling with the audience members in the “cheap seat”, offering cues that you understand the situations and challenges they face.

Don’t blog only from a front row seat!

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Asking Discomfiting Questions in Your Blog

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I have to say the questions “Would you recognize your primary care physician if you saw her on the street?” and “Could you pick your dentist out of a lineup?” got my attention a whole lot faster than any trite reminder of the importance of medical and dental checkups. In fact, AARP Magazine writer Kimberly Lankford eschewed polite nudging in favor of in-your-face retirement planning questions – “Would you like your neighborhood if you couldn’t drive” “When was the last time you tired yourself out?:”

Blog readers tend to be curious creatures and, as a longtime 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 a marketing blog. Popular magazine editors appear to agree as well, because current issues are full of tests, games, and quizzes.

Kimberly Lankford’s questions to AARP readers, though, fall into a whole ‘nuther category, provoking not curiosity but introspection. “Picture your grandparents living in your home – would you worry about them getting around safely?” Often in blog content writing, it’s effective to present what I call “startling statistics” to incentivize readers to take action. “Every 11 seconds, an older adult is treated in an emergency room for a fall,” Age Safe America tells us. While statistics such as these can certainly serve as Calls to Action in blog posts, the AARP Magazine approach uses discomfiting questions to drive readers to action.

We’ve all read (heck, for 21 consecutive years, I wrote) articles that focus on the financial aspects of retirement. “Retirement planning should include determining time horizons, estimating expenses, calculating required after-tax returns, assessing risk tolerance, and doing estate planning,” cautions Investopedia.com.

The AARP article, in contrast, enters readers’ consciousness from an entirely different direction:
“OK. You’re retired. What will you be doing next Monday?” This very discomfiting question forces readers to look at themselves, not just their finances.

Are there any discomfiting questions you can pose to blog readers to forcing them to come to grips with the very need with which you’re in a position to help?

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Ampersands OK in Blog Titles, But Not in Content

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“Use and, not ampersands, in business writing, even for emails. It is more professional,” Mary Morel advises in onlinewritintraining.com. Ampersands are for titles, signage, and where they are part of an organization’s branding, she adds.

Historical trivia bit – The ampersand was once the 27th letter of the alphabet In the early 18th century. Roman scribes, writing the Latin word “et” (meaning “and”) would link the E and the T. creating the shape of the ampersand. Centuries later, children reciting their ABCs found it confusing to say X,Y,Z, and”, so instead they would say “and, per se, ‘and'”, clarifying that the
ampersand was a separate letter.

The ampersand “adheres to a modern ethos of speed and brevity,” grammarbook.com explains. The ampersand helps save space, and fits in with other letters’ heights. “Still,” the authors conclude, “the more sparing you are with ampersands in formal writing, the better,”

Ampersand usage is a style detail many people don’t think important enough to merit attention, the probizwriters.com blog observes. “After all, if most people don’t know the rules, who will notice if you screw it up, right? Unfortunately, it’s little details like proper ampersand use that can make your writing look or feel clunky or dumb, even to readers who don’t know exactly why.”

Worst of all, speaker Todd Hunt believes, is inconsistent use, mixing “and” and “&” in the same writing piece.

As a blog content writing trainer, I think the most compelling reason to avoid ampersands in blog content was explained by Rebekah Wolf in medium.com: Copy devoid of characters is easier to skim and even easier to understand. As readers scan your blog post, their eyes are likely to be drawn to the character instead of to the most important words.

Of course, blog content writing should be more informal in tone than academic pieces, as we stress at Say It For You. Blogs are meant to be more conversational, more personal, and tend to be most effective using an “I-you”, author-to-reader tone. There’s an invisible line, however. Could the ampersand represent one of those subtle dividing points between casual and careless? Hmmm….

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Blog Titles to Tell “The Truth”

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Late last year, journalists at National Geographic Magazine teamed up with AARP to explore “how Americans perceive aging as we emerge from the COVID pandemic”. There were a number of great articles in the AARP Bulletin issue, but what was so interesting to me as a blog content writer was the way the word “truth” kept appearing in some of the titles: “The New Truth About Aging”,”The New Truth About Voting Laws.”

“Your blog headline is the first impression a reader will have with your content. It can be their reason for clicking or their reason for brushing your post aside.,” observes the createmytherapist website.com. “A catchy headline could cause someone to pause, pique their interest and make them hungry for more of the content they’ll find in your blog post. It’s also one of the most important factors for your search engine optimization (SEO)”.

For me as a blog content writer, Truth-Abouts make for compelling titles. There’s a hint of mystery, a promise an expose, perhaps – as a reader, I feel as if I am going to be given the “real scoop” There’s something enticing about a title promising to “bare the truth”, especially when it concerns a topic on which we didn’t expect there to be any secrets to speak of.

At Say It For You, we use “Truth-About’ blog posts with three basic purposes in mind:

1. To de-mystify a subject.
2. To myth-bust, addressing misunderstandings about a product or service
3. To offer actionable steps readers can take

Helping readers sort truth from myth is one important use for business blogs.  In the natural order of business, many misunderstandings about a product or service present themselves, and shining the light of day on misinformation shines light on your own expertise in your field.

Even when there is no final answer, blog content writers can summarize the different schools of thought and recap the research that is being done in the field. That in itself can go a long way towards making your blog a “go-to” place for readers seeking information relating to your industry or profession.

Blog titles “to tell the truth” can be a very useful content writing idea!

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Blogging for Business with Sympathy and Service: 4 “Amens”

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“Instead of selfish mass marketing, effective marketing now relies on sympathy and service,” Seth Godin posits in the book This is Marketing. What marketing is, the author explains. “the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.” “Getting discovered”, “getting found”, and “getting the word out” are no longer the first things to consider, but come last. As marketers, Godin is firm, it’s our job to watch people, figure out what they dream of, than create a transaction that can deliver that feeling.

In planning how to market your product or service, Godin suggests, start by filling in the blanks in this sentence: “My _________ will be exactly the right choice for people who believe that_______ and who want to feel_________.”

Four Say It For You “Amens”:

  1. Belief and trust, we have found at Say It For You, are in large part a function of familiarity 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.
  2. In blog content writing, ask yourself: Which psychological fulfillment does your brand support most? Exactly as Godin is expressing, blog readers will self select and become buyers only to the extent your content has focused on creating experiences that align with their values. Business blogs should never be rated “E” (intended for everyone).
  3. As content writers, we’ve also come to understand over the years that face-to-screen is the closest we will come to the prospective buyers of our clients’ products and services. Even when it comes to B2B marketing, we know that behind every decision, there is always a person, a being with feelings they have and feelings they want to have.
  4. Through the pandemic we became familiar with the phrase “social distancing”, which is the precise opposite of what we must try to do in blog marketing, which is to create connections with our audience and make them feel supported and in turn receptive to our message. As writers, we must present the business or practice as very personal rather than transactional.

In blog marketing, aim for sympathy and service!

 

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