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Letting Them Know You Hear Them

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“As you listen to people, let them know that you hear them, value them, and understand them,” Ron Willingham writes in Integrity Selling for the 21st Century. You can offer feedback by nodding approval at key points, giving verbal responses, and through your body language, the author adds.

All well and good for in-person selling, but what about blog marketing? After all, content writers can’t “nod approval” at key points or use body language to cement connection with online searchers. Yet, “the buying process is in the hands of the customer, and marketers must create targeted, personalized experiences for people,” as marketingevolution.com stresses.

Even in face-to-face selling situations, it may be too easy to assume you know the customer’s needs and then move on to offer them solutions or recommendations, Willingham cautions. The pros must not only be willing to talk to you about a solution, but have a sense of urgency about seeking a solution. Of course, the very fact that searchers found their way to your page indicates their interest in the subject of your blog, but now the content writing challenge is to create those “targeted and personalized experiences”.

At our Say It For You content marketing company, we absolutely agree. 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”. The content must speak to “our shared experience”. I tell newbie blog writers: “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.” Since we, as ghostwriters, have been hired by clients to tell their story online to their target audiences, we need to do intensive research, taking guidance from the client’s experience and expertise dealing with actual customers.

Online visitors to your blog need to find an experience along with information.  Word tidbits, unique points of view, special how-to tips, links to unusual resources, and humorous touches – all these things make your blog post special. Stories – testimonials, real-life successes and failures, help translate corporate messages into people-to-people terms. Metaphorically, at least, the stories in your blog posts can represent nods of approval and understanding.

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Who Should Definitely Read This Blog?

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Every month my Mensa monthly newsletter Mind has a book review section, and I love the way that review is presented. First, there’s a page-long description of what the book is about. But then, there are three smaller sections:

  1. Has this book changed the way you think or your attitude towards life?
  2. Who should definitely read this book? Why?
  3. Provide a short characteristic section, an awesome sentence, or an inspiring quote.

Question #2 is one that we blog content writers need to ask ourselves each time we work on a post on behalf of a client – Who should definitely be reading this?? That’s because, just as the only people who will be receiving the Mensa newsletter are those already qualified to be members, visitors to our blogsite “self-select” in terms of choosing to click on the link and read our content.After all, while I’m fond of thinking of ghost blogging as an art, there’s quite a bit of science to it as well.  A blog can’t be all things to all people, any more than any business or professional practice 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.
Years ago, I heard humor speaker Ron Culberson at a National Speakers Association meeting tell an anecdote that neatly sums up the need for audience targeting:

A woman attending a conference says, “This is the most boring conference ever. I’m going to skip the keynote address that’s coming up next and go to the beach.” Overhearing her, a man asks, “Do you know who I am? I’m the division president and I’M the keynote speaker!” The woman responds “And do you know who I am?” “No,” responds the man. The woman gets up and leaves…..

One of the very first principles of blog marketing is targeting.  Not only must the content you include in your business blog (or, in the case of Say It For You clients, the business blog content created by your freelance blog writer) offer valuable and up-to-date information, you must make clear to readers that the information has been assembled specifically for them:

  • You understand their concerns and needs .
  • You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

If readers find themselves asking “Don’t you know who we are?” those searchers are going to do what that woman conference attendee did – get up and leave.

A tantalizing title, well-researched content, opinion, story – all important elements to include in your well-thought-out blog post. But, before hitting the “Publish” key, ask yourself, “Who should definitely read this blog and why?”

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Blogging a Surround Sound Effect

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The Guy Raz book, How I Built This is all about starting and building a successful venture, with insights and inspiration from the world’s top entrepreneurs. In one of my favorite chapters, Raz talks about creating what he calls a “surround sound effect”.

In actual surround sound, one or more channels are added to the side or behind the listeners to make it seem as if the sound is coming at that listener from all directions. Translated into marketing, Raz explains, the secret is to give the impression that you are “everywhere”, when in reality you’re getting your name out in the handful of places where your core customers spend their time.

To market successfully, Business News explains, “your customer can’t be everyone.” Instead, you need a targeted marketing strategy, the authors stress, to succeed. You must define your niche and target those specific customers.

In fact, Spider Graham writes in bizjournals.com, “the whole goal of all marketing is to get the right message to the right person at the right time”. Of course, Graham adds, we must make sure to do this at the best price possible. If you try to be everything to everyone, your message becomes less impactful, he emphasizes.

Learning about your target customers includes gathering intelligence about:

  • their gender
  • their average age
  • their marital status
  • their educational level
  • their employment
  • their outlook on life
  • where they get their news

OK, OK. But how can marketers help entrepreneurs achieve that “surround sound” effect while still carefully targeting their customers? For our content writers at Say It For You, the challenge is using blogs to inform, educate, and persuade. Where does the “surround sound” come from?

Just as your target market can’t be “everyone”, a blog isn’t –and cannot be – an all-purpose, Swiss-army-knife solution for all your marketing needs. In fact, blogging is just one piece of the general strategy you work on with your team (which might well include a blog copy writer, but which also might include the web designer, the business manager, the employees, loyal fans, even, sometimes, a franchisor).

All the pieces used to promote your business or practice must mesh – social media, traditional advertising, event planning, word of mouth marketing, community involvement. Together all those pieces create the “surround sound effect”.

 

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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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Blogging to Make Them Want to See Things the Way You Do

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Communicating with pictures and words is what Dan Roam’s little book for speakers, Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations is all about. The purpose, the author says, of creating and delivering a report pitch, or story, is t make it s captivating that our audience wants to see things the way we do.

That’s a very hard thing for speakers to accomplish, Roam admits. (Blog content writers don’t have the advantage of facing the audience in person, using eye contact and gestures, which makes the task even more challenging!).

Dan Roam’s 3 Rules of Show and Tell can help, though, even if video clips are not part of the blog:

  • When we tell the truth in a presentation, we connect with our audience and we have self-confidence.
  • When we tell a story, complex concepts become clear, and we include everyone.
  • When we tell a story with pictures, we banish boredom and people see what we mean.

There are actually three kinds of truth, Roam points out, and as presenters, we need to ask ourselves: for this topic, for this audience, and for myself, which truth should I tell? I particularly like that observation, because at Say It For You, we emphasize the “power of one”, with each blog post having a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. Roam suggests presenters ask themselves the following question: “If my presentation could change them in just one way, what would that change be?”

There are really only four ways to move an audience, Roam adds:

  1. changing their information, adding new data to what they already know
  2. changing their knowledge or ability
  3. changing their actions
  4. changing their beliefs, inspiring them to understand something new about themselves or about the world

Which one of those four goals we choose determines the structure of our storyline in the content of the speech – or blog post.

Truth, story, and pictures – If we get those things right, Dan Roam assures fearful speakers, everything that follows will be a breeze. “When we trust our ideas and are confident, we will help our audience change.”

Change is what it’s all about, Roam says of presentations, and that’s certainly what it’s all about in blogging for business!

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