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Some Simple Truths About Blog Marketing

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“Proverbs are brief, well-known sayings that share life advice or beliefs that are common knowledge”, preply.com explains. “Proverbs can also provide a shortcut for explaining or imparting information, adds grammarly.

In terms of offering advice to our business and practice owner clients about their content marketing “habits”, two particular proverbs come to mind:

1. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
After years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that consistency and frequency are rare phenomema. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate in posting content, with most efforts abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. The oh-so-important lesson here is that blog marketing is no sprint.  A long-term, drawn-out effort is required in order to “build equity” in keyword phrases, gather a following, and gain – and sustain – online rankings.

2. Out of sight, out of mind…
Adhering to a posting schedule is crucial. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience and improves a blog’s search engine ranking.
Sharing your blog posts on social media and through email helps keep you “top of mind”.

When marketing online – whether it’s a product, a service, or even a concept, several proverbs seem particularly apropos:

1. Birds of a feather flock together…
To be an effective marketing tool for your business, your blog must to be the result of a well-planned strategy aimed at a specific segment of the market.  Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people, so your content must focus on things you know about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions – and where they “flock” – what social media sites do they frequent? At which community events, rallies, and celebrations are they to be found?

2. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…
One of the goals of content marketing is to “humanize” a business, creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame the odds and went on to succeed. But what about negative comments that readers make about a business or practice? When those concerns or complaints are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” more weight. Go ahead and “let the client tell his story,” which then gives you the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from the situation.

The simple truth about blog marketing is that it brings owners and customers together through the sharing of wisdom.

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The 3-Step Approach to Helping Readers Solve a Problem

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“Precedents thinking”, involves innovating by combining old ideas, Stefanos Zenios and Ken Favaro write in the Harvard Business Review. In teaching Stanford University’s popular course on entrepreneurship, they suggest a three-step approach to problem-solving and innovation:

  1. Frame – through a series of interviews, define what challenges need to be tackled.
  2. Search – develop a deeper understanding of those challenges.
  3. Combine – Take pieces of past innovations and solutions, even those used in different industries, that may be pertinent to the elements of this challenge (a sort of old-wine-in-new-bottles approach).

This discussion brought to mind a 2017 fourdots.com blog post that made a case for textual content as a primary driver of online communication as compared with video:

  • Text gives you the option to stop exactly where you want to, wrapping your mind around a certain piece of information.
  • Text can be easily updated and upgraded.
  • B2B buyers consume informational pieces and case studies, looking for industry thought leadership.
  • Text stimulates the mind and is more focused.

In the process of creating content that helps readers solve problems, we use text to frame the challenge, demonstrating that our business owner or professional practitioner client has, indeed, developed a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the reader. In fact, it is only once these two steps have been accomplished that readers will be ready to appreciate – and hopefully implement – the course of action recommended by the “Subject matter Expert”.

“Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problems; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems,” is the concept behind Seth Godin’s marketing philosophy. That is why, he tells us content writers, never start with the solution, but with the problem you seek to solve.

Use the 3-step approach in helping readers solve a problem!

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Approaching “the Big Reveal” – from Front or Back?

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To create a compelling story line in a novel, one with maximum impact,  Writer’s Digest editor Tiffany Yates Martin explains, you need to understand when and how to reveal crucial information to readers. On the one hand, it’s important to give readers enough information to feel invested, but you have to keep back enough to keep them “hooked”.

There’s a case for having the information revealed sooner: readers need enough information to give them a reason to care. Vague hints at a “dark secret” can feel manipulative, Martin admits. What’s more, “sometimes you gain more narrative mileage by spilling the beans sooner, so readers see the … impact of the secret on the characters and story.”

Nathan Ellering of coschedule.com translates this very piece of advice for creators of content marketing articles. The pro tip he offers is this: “Write your blog title before you write your blog post. This practice will help you define the value proposition so you can connect it into the blog post, which guarantees your blog title will deliver on its promise.”

At Say It For You, one compromise I’ve discovered is often used by book authors is the “Huh?” and “Oh!” title. The “Huh” title startles and arouses curiosity; the “Oh!”subtitle clarifies what the focus of the book will be. For example, the book title Notes from Scrooge entices, while the subtitle Why Gift Giving is a Lousy way to Demonstrate Love – At Least According to Economist reveals the financial counseling nature of the book.

In content marketing, the “reveal” may take the form of a personal story that showcases the unique slant of the business owner or practitioner, even describing the biggest mistake made in starting that business or practice and what was learned from that mistake.  Precisely because it is so very human to act inconsistently, revealing seemingly out-of-character aspects of the people involved in the business or practice is a way to foster empathy and engagement.

Still, content marketing cannot succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter and deal with online readers’ very short attention span.  “You’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it,” Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Made to Stick.

 

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Bringing Yourself to the Page

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” For better or worse, in today’s world, everyone is a brand, and you need to develop yours and get comfortable marketing it,” Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald point out in the Harvard Business Review special spring issue. The question to ask yourself is what can you bring to the table of your industry out of your own personal experience. Two examples the authors offer:

  • You studied psychology, and have insights into human behavior.
  • You’re a UX designer who understands how to create more-accessible products.

Whatever your special talent, know-how, or experience, you can bring that to bear as an employee or executive to add value, is the point.

For us as content marketers, in essence “ghost-writing” newsletters, web page content, and blog posts for our business owner and professional practitioner clients, the concept of “bringing self to the page” has a double meaning. Yes, as Whitney Hill advises in a Writer’s Digest piece, “mining” areas of our own lives helps us connect with the right others. But since our purpose is to focus readers’ attention, not on ourselves, but on our content marketing clients, we use our own experience and wisdom to help readers “interview” those owners and practitioners in light of their own needs.

“Some articles have greater impact and reader engagement if written from personal experience, The Writer’s College explains. Writing an article from personal experience can avoid sounding generic, especially if you bring personal experiences to life with vivid sensory details, “showing” rather than just telling. Still it’s important to reflect on the impact and growth that resulted from the experiences you’re describing.

In using content marketing to translate our clients’ corporate messages into human, people-to-people terms, I prefer first and second person writing over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message. I compare the interaction between content writers and online readers to behavioral job interviews, where the concept is to focus, not on facts, but on discovering the “person behind the resume”.

In bringing our clients to the page, we know that “how-we-did-it” stories make for very effective marketing content for both business owners and professional practitioners. True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice, not to mention showcasing the special empathy those providers have for their clients and customers.

Through messaging, ghost writers, providers, and customers are all “brought to the page”!

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Saying Less, Getting More

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From the time an entrepreneur is introduced to the time one of the sharks says “I’m out” (on the TV show “Shark Tank”), it is almost always three minutes, writes Brant Pinvidic in The 3 Minute Rule. If you can’t distill a sales presentation down to three minutes or less, the listeners will begin to make their decision without all the pertinent information, he cautions.

Ironically, what we’ve learned at Say It For You, saying less actually translates into more work and more prior thought in creating content that has a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of a business or practice. At the same time, each article or post should have three examples or details supporting the main idea.

Short is not easy, USA Today founder Al Neuharth liked to say. “It takes longer to keep things short.”  Yet being short and to the point is the most important thing to keep in mind, he wrote. For content marketers, I offer advice that’s a compromise – make blog posts as long as they need to be to get the point across, but not a single sentence longer. At the same time, our content needs to be personal and conversational rather than terse.

The number “three” in the 3-minute rule is significant in another sense.  Since we tend to process information using patterns, threesomes (think “stop, look, and listen” or “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, or “I came, I saw, I conquered”) not only make titles more memorable, but are a good model for organizing ideas within an article.

Among writing mistakes, K.M. Weiland admits, one of the most common is simply over-explaining. We distrust our ability to explain things well enough the first time around, she says, so we stick in more content just to make sure readers get the point. Don’t, is Weiland’s advice.

Of course, we freelance content writers have to overcome the challenge of the short attention span of online searchers (if we say more, we literally stand to “get less” across!) At the same time, in our efforts to make our marketing content personal, we need to be short AND sweet!

Over the years of creating content for a variety of clients, I’ve arrived at a 3-part standard of sorts for considering ourselves “done” composing a post:

  • We’ve covered one aspect of a topic in some depth.
  • We’ve offered value in terms of advice or information.
  • We’ve offered a visual to complement or symbolize the main point.
  • We’ve verified our research and facts and properly attributed quoted content to its author.

Whether you’re pitching a project on Shark Tank or composing marketing content, saying less can mean getting more!

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