Business Blogs Create Positive Impact

 Blogging Is A Business Essential

A blog is an essential tool for every business professional. This drip marketing resource will help you to increase your audience and stay in touch with customers, prospects and partners by contributing tips, answering questions and teaching.

Readers Benefit From Timely, Relevant, Concise Posts

If you write well and frequently share your expertise, readers will value you as a source of important information. They will share your content with their communities on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

 

Bloggers Benefit From A Unique, Respected Online Presence

You will establish yourself as an expert in your field and differentiate your company Vs. competitors who do not blog well.  Increase domain knowledge though research before each post and improve your ability to explain concepts.  Frequent quick-hitting posts earn higher readership than random website visits. Search engine friendly blogs generate online referrals.  Readers respond to your posts with new ideas to enhance your business. Comments to your posts expand your community.

Enhance your newsletters, websites, social networks and emails with a link to your blog.

Successful Marketers Are Great Performers

Captivate Buyers With Your Personal Performance

Memorable Experiences Differentiate Sellers Of Commodity Products And Services

Here's what I mean by personal performance

You present an aura of passion for what you do and a confidence that the customer is better off buying from you.  Your communication style establishes trust, honesty and dependability.  Your high emotional intelligence balances impulse control and assertiveness.  You blend style and class with minimal visible effort, while not trying to appear that way.  This is called sprezzatura.

Customers perceive you as both different and valuable.

Prior research reveals their needs for minimizing risk, avoiding aggravation, eliminating pain, obtaining pleasure, acquiring power or earning a profit.  You can weave this perspective into provocative questions that capture their attention.  Then you narrate a success story that resonates with their situation so that they can visualize the benefits. Being natural enables you to share insight about your products, your business and your industry and to easily address objections.

Invest in yourself and become the differentiator.  Give them a reason to want to interact with you.

After reading this blog post, do you agree that this is the profile that smart sales managers should be hiring?

“If a man is a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will say, Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."                                                                               Martin Luther King Jr.

Success Stories Create Emotional Attachment to Your Brand

Don't Let Selling Interfere With The Sale - Instead, Tell Me A Story

A portfolio of compelling success stories proves that your company is in the customer results business and that you're not just a vendor of products and services.

With each one narrowcasted for a target audience, and without sounding like an infomercial, a Success Story inspires people to act. Each story demonstrates how you've tackled challenges similar to theirs with solutions that produced desired results.  As a retention tool, success stories remind customers of what you did for them.

Brand your company as an array of customer stories that can be narrated by your employees and by external people who draw their own conclusions, insert themselves into your story, and retell it in their own words.

Top tier BizD professionals are natural "Story Sellers".  The middle tier, who fear the risk of tackling new customer challenges, will learn what your company has done for its customers and feel less threatened when looking for new customer problems to solve.

If you don't tell your stories, you are wasting an opportunity to differentiate your company.

If you don't have compelling stories to tell, you probably compete on features, price and delivery, which shouldn't give you a high degree of confidence in your business.

Stories should be available in hard copy and online to provide more details that support the narrative. Online versions should include keywords that enable self-service discovery by those looking for solutions.

Email marketing campaigns can direct a story to the appropriate audience if your CRM system or mail list includes the right account and profile information.

Sharing Blog Posts With Social Networks Optimizes Readership

I always share my blog posts with my social networks, but I was curious as to how social sharing impacted blog readership.  So, I did a test with two recent blog posts by not sharing them with my social networks.

As it turns out, open rates were 5 times higher for posts that I shared with my social networks [LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook].

This confirms my hypothesis and I will continue to "social share" my blog posts.

Quality Reviews Retain Customers and Earn Referrals

Quality Reviews Prove Your Commitment To Total Client Satisfaction

Don't fear what you might learn about your company. It will set the stage for growth.

After important projects or sales, a quality review debriefing between you and your client verifies that desired results were achieved and discovers gaps requiring resolution. It recognizes those that contributed valiantly.  It reveals your company's weaknesses that need to be addressed along with strengths that can be leveraged en route to being selected for the next opportunity. It gives the client confidence to refer you to others who have a similar challenge.

Business Relationships

There Will Always Be Someone Who Wants To Eat Your Lunch

The only way to create and then strengthen interpersonal business relationships is to help each contact achieve goals, minimize risk, enjoy what they're doing, eliminate pain, etc.

All the personal stuff is fluff [golf, football tickets, lunch, etc.] that will make a difference only if job #1 is accomplished.

First, get to know their company and industry before attempting to gain personal credibility with them. 

Then, make sure they know if you have a strong business relationship with others that they admire in their own organization.  It lessens their risk in partnering with you because they don't have to be the first.

Continually add value just to maintain your relationship because someone else that they've discovered on their own in this new world of self-service marketing has come along without your knowing it.

Lead Generation Through Online Press Releases

PR Generated Leads Rank Second To Referrals In Terms Of Close Rate

Online press releases fuel self-service searches for information about products and services that will lead people to your company before you know an opportunity exists.

Commit to Online PR if you want people to find all things newsworthy about your business.  They will read it, act upon it and share it.