Making Your Blog a Real Resource: How to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates
Understand your buyer personas. Don’t let the term buyer persona throw you off. If you know your customers and the different way each segment uses your product you are half way there. For example, let’s say you own an online store where you sell hair products. Historical data can tell you how many of your customers are shopping for themselves and how many are buying wholesale for their salon. From there you can work to build content that resonates with each of these personas.
The most important part of leveraging buyer personas is thinking beyond your product. Do you know what challenges they face on a daily basis? Dig into your audience demographics across Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram to get a well-rounded image of your target audience.
Know where your audience is. As most marketers have learned you can’t simply build a blog and expect people to find your content. If you are not pushing it out across the right channels and tapping into the niche areas where your audience is engaged and active you are missing the mark. This seems simple enough but many businesses fail to capitalize on the existing conversations surrounding their offerings or products.
Places like message boards, Reddit and more just may be exactly where your audience lives. You don’t have to bend over backwards to try to reinvent the wheel here, take advantage of existing opportunities to introduce your brand to new users. Check out Hubspot’s post on how to get creative when promoting your content to new audiences for more ideas.
Get specific. Have you ever heard the saying, if you chase two rabbits, both will escape? The same applies to content. Own your niche. Give your readers something tangible and detailed that they can use in their daily lives. When you cast too wide of a net and keeps things vague or broad people lose interest.
There is a reason why this article titled, 25 Ways to Ask Your Kids ‘So How Was School Today?’ Without Asking Them ‘So How Was School Today?’ has been shared over 500k times. People like specific, they should be able to look at your article title and say, “this is for me” or “I know someone that could use this.” That is what motivates people to share.
Get smart about linking. Linking throughout your posts is a great way to build authority and create the best user experience possible. Not sure who or what you should be linking to? Find industry influencers by using tools like Cision, NinjaOutreach, and Content Marketer. If you wanted to find bloggers or influencers in the yoga space a quick search can tell you who has been successfully covering the topic. This allows you to quickly identify people who are creating high quality content that is getting the shares and engagement you are looking to bring to your blog. Better yet, these outlets and authors have built up a strong authority and trust with their readers, hence the name influencers.
When you link to someone don’t be afraid to reach out and share your post with them—if they like it they may even push it out on their social networks. There’s no shame in linking to other business or blogs either, your main goal should be to become the ultimate resource for your customer, provide the ultimate user experience and they will come back for more.
Before you publish any post you should ask yourself: is this truly helpful? If so, you are good to go. At the end of the day readers are looking for high quality resources and can easily see through the facade of a sales pitch disguised as a well meaning blog post. Be authentic and the rest will follow.
