How Strategic Blogging Creates Opportunity
Author: Lance Beaudry | Updated on October 19, 2021
So you are thinking about starting a blog? Maybe you are wondering why you aren’t getting any traffic or engagement from your blog. Perhaps you just have no idea where to start and can’t come up with great content to write. Great. Read on because we’re going to talk about how strategic blogging creates an…
Category: Search Engine Optimization | Tags: content marketing, customer personas
So you are thinking about starting a blog? Maybe you are wondering why you aren’t getting any traffic or engagement from your blog. Perhaps you just have no idea where to start and can’t come up with great content to write.
Great. Read on because we’re going to talk about how strategic blogging creates an opportunity for your business.
Know Your Customer
Before you begin writing a blog, you need to understand who your customer is. You’ve likely heard about creating a customer or buyer persona. These are crucial to create in order to understand the motivation of your audience. I’ll be the first to admit that I often overlook this and forget the reason why and sometimes even think it’s a waste of time.
It’s not.
Write down everything you know about your customer. This is another topic altogether, but it helps if your target customer is very niche. If your market is everyone, your market is no one. For an in-depth look at creating detailed personas, visit HubSpot’s article. Here are a few ideas for creating your customer persona:
- What is their job role/title?
- What does a typical day look like for them?
- What knowledge and tools do they use?
- What industry/industries does your target work in?
- What are their personal and/or professional goals?
- What publications or blogs do they read?
- What are their personal demographics? (education, age, sex, etc.)
- How do they prefer to be interacted with (email, text, in person, etc.)
After finding answers to these questions, keep asking “why?” in order to dive deeper down and uncover some patterns and problems that might start helping you understand and empathize with your customer better.
Bonus: Watch What Is Buyer Persona And Why Do You Need It For Your Website?
Answer This Question
This question is a big one that begs many other questions, but, if you start searching for the answer to this question, you’ll be on your way to developing a blog strategy that generates real results.
The one question we always ask to steer customers in the right direction is,
“How are you going to help your audience BEFORE they need your help?”
What does that mean? It means you need to find out what your customer is searching for or what questions they are asking before they need your service/product.
For example, for Avalanche Creative it may be writing an article about why you should choose WordPress over other platforms. Someone who is searching for an answer to this question isn’t ready to buy. They don’t need a WordPress developer yet because they haven’t even made up their mind yet about whether or not WordPress is the right platform. But, it is a significant signal. It’s a point on tbhe journey to buying decisions.
The User’s Journey
Put yourself in the shoes of the person from the example above:
- You need a website and have heard of WordPress.
- You go to Google and ask “why use WordPress?”
- You click one of the top search engine results (which with blood, sweat, and tears, we’ve ranked our article to show up for).
- You read it, find it helpful and start to view Avalanche Creative as a helpful resource and authority in WordPress.
- While on our site and while reading that same article you see a link to Base Camp – a great tool that helps you get started with WordPress for free.
- You are blown away with how great the tool is and download it for free.
We now have your contact information and now a new lead from our website.
Not every reader is going to convert into a new lead and new revenue. It’s a numbers game. The key is to help your potential customer early on.
Get Obsessed With Helping Your Customer
If you want to create opportunities for your business through content marketing and blogging you need to get obsessed with helping your potential customer and your current customer for that matter. Remember that your customer is human. They are on a journey. They have hopes, dreams, goals, and desires. You have something they need to unlock those. But, parting with their money or investing their time into realizing those hopes and dreams is tough work. They don’t want to be taken advantage of. They want help. When you help them you earn their trust and increase opportunities for reciprocity.
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