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What Woodpeckers Know About Blogging for Business

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To hardworking, motivated people, diversification feels like the right thing do – enter a new market, apply for a job in a different area, start a new sport, observes Seth Godin in The Dip. “And yet,” the author continues, “the real success comes to those who obsess.” A woodpecker, he says, can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or – he can tap 20,000 times on the same tree and get dinner!

Translating woodpecking into blogging terms, Neil Patel admits that blogging isn’t for the faint at heart. One of the reasons that’s true is that “one thing Google isn’t shy about is that it rewards websites that publish regular, high-quality content that provides real value to users.”

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. Pity, because blogs are startlingly less costly than business print ads, “winning” with content, not cost, and with frequency, not size.

Not to strain a simile, healthcare professionals stress the importance of “regularity” for maintaining digestive health, exhorting us to shun sugar, processed food, alcohol and caffeine in favor of fiber. Harvard Health Letter advocates exercise, emphasizing that is must be regular.

“There’s always been a lot of debate about content quality vs. quantity and frequency in content marketing practitioner circles,” Brock Stechman writes in DivvyHQ. However, he (significantly) points out. It will be difficult to get traction with an inconsistent or slow publication schedule, and frequent, consistent publication is vital for success.

Research on several psychological phenomena supports the importance of frequency in advertising and marketing, Mark Zimmer of Zimmer Marketing explains:

  1. The mere-exposure effect – people show preference for that with which they are familiar.
  2. The frequency illusion – each time the customer is exposed to the message there ia sense of omnipresence.
  3. Information-gap theory – reader feels there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know.

How often should you blog? Blogtyrant.com admits the only correct answer is “It depends” on a number of factors, including your schedule, your topic, and your blog post length. You want your blog to be successful for years to come, but without burning yourself out.

The lesson woodpeckers offer to blog content marketers is consistent tapping!

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Blogging Benefits for Small Business Owners

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Are there any benefits of blogging for small business owners? Sure thing, says Lyfe Marketing. In fact, “Many companies now practice a strategy where consumers come to them for information rather than them pushing sales via outbound strategies to spread awareness about their products”. Importantly, blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%, Lyfe points out, naming no fewer than 11 specific benefits of blogging as experienced first hand by business owners, in each case naming a specific well-known company that uses blogging to its advantage:

  1. Trust: Show that you are an expert in your industry (Airbnb)
  2. Value- add (Etsy Marketplace)
  3. Higher ranking: Search Engine Optimization (Allstate and State Farm®)
  4. Building email lists (beauty blogs)
  5. Cultivate interest through demand generation (Apple)
  6. Lead conversion (Slack)
  7. Visibility (Tesla)
  8. Influencer marketing (Home Depot)
  9. Backlinks – other web pages link to your website (New York Times)
  10. Feedback (Trip Advisor)
  11. Stay ahead of competition (American Express)

“Publishing a business blog is an important part of any marketing strategy,” Marc Prosser, founder of Fit Small Business, writes in SCORE, “but many businesses launch one, not realizing that maintaining it is just as critical.” Prosser adds several items to Lyfe’s list of blogging benefits:

  • Informing customers about the good work you do (85% of customers like companies that give back to the community)
  • Promoting a positive employer brand so employees want to work there
  • Helping business partners grow

As a longtime blog content writer and corporate blogging trainer, I often remind business owners of a very simple explanation by Corey Eridon of Hubspot of the reason blogging works: “Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website.  It’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published…”.

As Shane McGeorge writes in CBO. “If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy,”

 

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Think Like a Buyer in Your Blog

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We’ve heard it before, but as blog content writers, we need to hear it again and again. It’s not about us or our clients – it’s about the buyers…

“When you’re selling a business, think like a buyer”, advised Keith Rand. At a recent meeting of our Circle Business Network group, Rand, who along with his son, specializes in making business transfers happen, quoted from two books: Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus and Think Like a Man. The common message, Rand explained, is this: achieving success in business means understanding – and focusing the conversation on – not what you have to offer, but what the other party is seeking. 

Financial advisor David Nienaber, CPA, CFP®  tells business owners to consider three things “as you plan for your next chapter”, including  identifying a professional team to effect the transfer, establishing tax consequences and  future cash flow, and judging the ramifications of a sale for family members.

 While Keith Rand would agree that sellers must carefully weigh all those factors prior to entering into a sale, his point is that during the negotiations themselves, the focus needs to be not on why the seller has decided to sell, but on what on what’s going on inside the buyer’s head as he or she pictures owning and running the business going forward. 

In fact, a “selling” mindset can actually hurt your marketing strategy, Liz O’Neill of Precision Marketing Group agrees. Many entrepreneurs and small business owners are stuck in the seling mindset, so caught up in their brand or industry, they forget that clients are indifferent to all that.

Your thinking is centered around who you are and what you do.  Meanwhile, the buyer starts with a problem that needs solving. In other words, O’Neill explains, when crafting  content for your web pages, “you need to divorce yourself from in-house terms, and begin to speak broadly,” not about precise offerings and skills you have.

In blogging for business, as business coach and Say It For You guest blogger Andrew Valley suggests, “Don’t tell them what you do.  Tell them what you do for them.” In fact, Valley says, “most people are interested in what you do only if it fits with what they need or want.”

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Personalizing Blog Content – on Both Ends

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We need to update the definition of the word “personalize”, Stu Heinecke insists in his book Get the Meeting. Why? To differentiate between the two forms “wide” and “deep”. Wide personalization, Heinecke explains, applies readily available data across an audience, while deep personalization applies individualized research findings to produce unique outreach elements, one by one.

Can blogging do both?

Personalizing on the audience end:
At Say It For You, I teach that everything about your blog should be tailor-made for that customer – the words you use, how technical you get, how sophisticated your approach, the title of each blog entry – all of it. And since we content writers are hired by clients to tell their story online to their target audiences, we need to do intensive research, as well as take guidance from the business owner’s or practitioner’s experience and expertise.

Now, since blogging is part of inbound marketing, it cannot involve researching each individual’s hobbies and preferences, creating and shipping unique gifts in order to “get the meeting”.

On the other hand, as Mo the Blog Coach explains, having an abstract audience in mind when creating content is ineffective, causing you to ramble on, trying to help ALL the people. Instead, she advises, “humanize your reader, singling them down to one specific person experiencing one specific problem.

Personalizing on the blog marketer’s end with I-you language:
In blog marketing, I stress first person writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the person or the team standing ready to serve customers.

It was apparent the editors of Flea Market Home & Living magazine had latched onto this exact secret. Each page featured a designer – or homeowner – statement beginning in first person:

  • “I make things out of what most folks consider garbage and get an inordinate amount of pleasure from it.”
  • “I try not to follow any rules. I really try not to copy anyone and I try to avoid trends.”
  • “I believe your sense of color is like a muscle that needs to e exercised.”
  • “I feel good supporting the local Goodwill. Plus, with the money I save, I feel better about the occasional splurge.”

In blog marketing, customers might be asked for statements like these – sharing stories of unique ways they used your product or service, or describing a problem you helped them solve. On marketers’ end, “I” and “we” statements give readers the feeling that the providers of the services and products are speaking directly to them. In fact, in business blogging, one goal should be to present the business or practice as very personal rather than merely transactional, reminding readers that there are real life humans behind the content on the website.

Blog content with the greatest chance of success is personalized on both ends!

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Add the Fred Factor to Your Business Blog

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Within ten minutes of his house are two giant hardware stores that are known for their low prices , Mark Sanborn relates in his book The Fred Factor, but he never goes to either one. Instead, Sanborn goes to a smaller store about ten minutes away. There, when you walk in the door, knowledgeable helpful staff members greet you and take you to the exact spot where you can find what you need. And, Sanborn adds, they ask enough questions to find out if what you asked for is what you need for the job. All organizations have access to the same information, training, compensation systems, and processes. So why do some succeed and others flop, Sanborn asks? The secret is passionate employees.

How can that “Fred Factor” be made to come across a computer screen, I wondered. With so many potential customers meeting you online these days, rather than in person, how can you replicate the feeling of being greeted by “knowledgeable and helpful staff members”? First-time blog site visitors can, indeed, become customers IF, Neil Patel explains, “you listen to them and give them a good visitor experience.” The goal – moving visitors upwards through the “trust pyramid”, from awareness to understanding, then belief, and finally to action.

The process begins, Patel says, with defining your ideal reader. See that customer as one person, not as groups of people, then develop a unique selling proposition around that very person. Just a Sanborn was saying about his favorite hardware store, success is all about solving problems and making customers happy. What valuable gift can you give to your first-time blog visitors in order to excite and retain them. Put yourself in their shoes and feel their pain, Patel says.

Sanborn was impressed with the fact that the hardware associates were right there at the door to welcome him and help him navigate to precisely the right shelf to find what he needed. In precisely the same way, now that visitors have found their way to your blog, your immediate challenge is to put them at ease by assuring them they’ve come to the right place and convey that they are valued.

Translating a face-to-face shopping experience into a digital visit is the challenge we blog content writers take on. Saying you offer superior customer service is never enough – you have to specifically illustrate ways in which your company’s customer service exceeds the norm. Stories of all kinds help personalize a business blog. Even if a professional writer is composing the content, true-story material increases engagement by readers with the business or practice. Case studies are particularly effective in creating interest, because they are relatable and “real”.

You might not think of simplifying your website navigation as another way to personalize your service, but it absolutely is. Both the content of your blog posts and the navigation paths on the blog site had better be easy, calling for fewer keystrokes and less confusion. Just as the hardware salesperson asked questions before taking Sanborn to the right section of the store, the website can help “steer” visitors to the right click.

Think of ways to add a “Fred Factor” to your website and blog.

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