Blogs are a great way to continually add new content to your site, which search engines reward with higher placement. But before you write any blog posts, make sure you first identify your audience so you can speak to what they’re interested in.
You can do this by building a customer profile: a list of basic information about your business’ ideal consumer. Once you create this customer profile, you can better understand your potential clients and craft better advertisements, social media posts, and more.
So where do you go to learn about your audience?
- Google Analytics. This is where you go to find info about the people visiting your site, how often they’re visiting, and what brought them to your website in the first place. If you have demographic tracking turned on, you can also see info about age, gender and interests.
- Facebook Insights. Facebook has lots of information about the people who follow and engage with your page. Go to the Insights tab and click on People to see stats for gender, age and location.
Need help tracking down this information? We can work with your team to identify what’s special about your audience. Give us a call to get started.
Now that you know what a customer profile is and how you can gather information, you can start creating your customer profile by compiling the following information:
- Demographics: Gender, Age, Occupation, Income.
- Psychographics: Hobbies, Style, Humor. (This can be further broken down into affinity categories, such as music lovers, technophiles, gamers, filmgoers, etc.)
Ask yourself: Do you see any trends? Are there any types of consumers that make up a large majority of your audience? Is there a particular age group or gender that seems to be especially engaged with your brand?
Next, take that information and run with it. Do you own a bakery? Target foodies who can afford to treat themselves. Do you own a pet shop? Market towards cat and dog lovers who will go the extra mile to care for their pet. In all cases, market on websites that your target audience frequents. The options are endless.
When we write our own blogs, we have a few resources that we always fall back on to come up with ideas our customers may be interested in.
Current changes in the industry/partner company advancements
A few months ago, Appspace announced a new integration with home automation company Creston. Because we work with Appspace and have a background in automation control, it was the perfect topic to write about.
Social Media
Chances are that you have connected with people in your industry. If you’re looking for blog post ideas, see what they’re posting about. For example, we’ve looked at Reddit threads to see what topics are big on a given day, then write about that.
FAQs
Perhaps the biggest source of blog posts is your audience. Make a list of the questions you’re asked most and you’ve got yourself blog posts to spare. These types of blogs are especially helpful to have on hand during future conversations. Instead of rattling off an answer, point them to a well-crafted blog post addressing their concerns. One recent example for Romega: Several customers had asked us about implementing a chat system on their website, so we took some time to research and put together an article with a handful of options.
Basically, listen to your customers. They can help you as often as you help them!
