Although our business blogging services and your everyday standard personal blogging processes are essentially just different ways of using the same resource, there’s a vast difference between the two.
Business blogging should focus primarily on communicating with your audience on a commercial level to raise the awareness and interest in your brand, products and services. Personal blogging, however, can be nothing more than a platform upon which you voice your comments on any chosen topic.
And although there’s no need to take aspects of business blogging into personal blogging, there is a need, on occasion, for the reverse – bringing a personal touch to business blogging.
People don’t want to be spoken down to
The initial aim of a business blog should always be to raise the level of communication between the company and their customers. As blogs can be public platforms, they provide the same benefits of social media websites such as Twitter, in the fact that any one of the internet’s billions of users can view what you’re saying, but they give you the ability to talk about a certain topic – whether that’s your own products or services or industry news – in as much depth as you wish.
The risk that organisations face when utilising a business blog without any planning or development, however, is coming across as either too-friendly and laid back or having too formal or educational of a voice.
Customers want to hear what organisations have to say in a way that isn’t in a sales or marketing form and a blog provides the perfect opportunity to do just this. However, care needs to be taken that the right tone is chosen, because as much as customers want to hear what you have to say, they don’t want to feel as though they’re being talked to – they want to feel as though they’re engaging with you.
Personalisation is always favourable in business
It’s this engagement requirement where the importance of personalisation becomes apparent, as right throughout business, personalisation tactics are used to to make the customer feel welcomed and valued.
From store assistants who ask how your day has been and try to engage in conversation with you through to sales persons who aim to make you feel as comfortable as possible in your surroundings, often by approaching your meeting or discussion as though you were friends, it’s extremely important customers – both potential and present – don’t just feel as though they are another statistic.
The issue that many people find is they believe it’s considerably easier to do this in person than it is with the written word, especially when it comes to business blogging, a resource that is still essentially defining what to and not to do.
But providing business blog content that shows it isn’t simply being mass manufactured and actually provides value to the customer – value that’s wanted and of benefit – is easier than many first believe.
There’s no need to talk about your life story
The person producing the blog content doesn’t need to talk about what activities they did at the weekend or what they’re going to be having for dinner that day – that’s not what people are interested in.
Your customers want to hear about personal views on a topic. They want information that isn’t freely available on one of your products or services. There needs to be something that makes the customer feel they’re learning more about the company, but in a way that’s as if the writer is talking directly to them.
We’ve talked about the rules of business blogging previously and although there aren’t any set rules as such, there are numerous guidelines you should follow and adding a personal touch to some of your blog posts is just one of them.
Your customers want you to talk to them and they really do want to read what you have to say, now more than ever. A business blog provides the perfect platform upon which you can talk with your customers on a range of topics, but it’s imperative you do just that – talk with them and not at them.
There will be a huge difference in how your business blog is received if you provide a combination of informative, interesting and intriguing content – some from a personal perspective – than if you were to simply offer sales and marketing talk in a formal, educational voice.
You don’t need to write about your personal life, but you need to often write in a way where the readers feel they could be interested in it – find that ground and you’ll find an area that helps endlessly with your business blog’s development.
