Put Your Customers First: Writing for the Small Business Website
It’s natural to create website content focused entirely on your own business, organizational, or personal interests. However, successful marketing of your product or service requires getting past your products and services and into the minds of your customers. Read on for some tips on how to reach beyond yourself and create content that is relevant to your customers.
Research Your Potential Customers’ Interests
Check Out the Answer Services:
Your potential customers are looking for you. In fact, it’s likely that they are already on the Internet asking questions related to your product or service. Services like LinkedIn Answers, Google Answers (now defunct, but good for research) and Yahoo! Answers are effective ways to discover what your potential customers are curious about. Start with your content idea and search the answer base to see what questions have been asked and what answers offered. Perhaps you’ll identify a gap you can fill with an answer via that service, a web page on your own site, a video, or a blog post. There is no better way to understand what people are thinking than by reviewing the questions they ask.
Use the Alert Services:
Google Alerts and Twitter tools like TweetDeck allow you to set up notifications for phrases that interest you. If you think a certain subject may be of interest, set up alerts for phrases related to your topic of interest. Google and Twitter will notify you as new information on those topics is published. (Thanks to Paul Boag for his excellent interview of Mel Kirk for expanding my understanding of how to use alerts for marketing.)
Browse Groups:
Troll Google and Yahoo! Groups to find people who have already identified themselves as being interested in your topic of choice. Don’t forget to also check out Facebook’s fast growing groups as well.
Read Blogs and Forums:
If your potential customers are a well-defined professional group, it’s likely that they have easy-to-find gathering places on the Web. Search them out and watch what your customers discuss on forums and blogs. Also read the articles that are produced by the professional organizations that are the nucleus of your customers’ professional world.
If your customers are not grouped by profession, it’s likely that they share a hobby, or other interest. Using the same tactics as above, target the interest groups that you believe best mesh with your business offering and search out the blogs, forums, and content websites that are most authoritative.
Read and participate in discussion to learn about what interests your potential customers.
Survey Your Readers:
You can also use polls to discover what topics are of interest to your current website visitors. This is less effective than searching the answer services I have mentioned above because it doesn’t reach beyond your current visitors. However, you can play with surveys at little or no cost using these free tools:
Enable Content Ratings:
Let your current website visitors rate your pages and blog posts. Their ratings will tell you what interests them. Based on those interests, you can plan content. There are usually free rating tools available for content management systems like Drupal and WordPress.
Just Ask:
Want to know what your customers are interested in hearing from you? Call. Email. Visit. And ask. You’ll be surprised at what you learn!
With your writing topics in hand, you can approach the task of creating relevant and valuable content with confidence.
What tools do you use to find your customers’ interests? Please comment!
Most of the time I find myself guessing and assuming on topics and I learned to ask my readers after reading an article on customer development. Thank you for this post.
Oh, even with these techniques, I still guess at what people will find interesting. And, usually I’m surprised by what resonates with readers.
Another technique I’ve found helpful is to create an outline of all the information I think my clients should know, then use that to come up with post ideas.
The way forward with any small business is firstly research the potential customers base and then determine what is the best way to promote their products or service. This can be achieved two ways firstly the small business could employ in-house SEO which is fine if its cost affective, the other option is to employ a professional SEO company to determine and implement an effective strategy backed up by considerable resource and accountability.
[...] Put Your Customers First: Writing for the Small Business Web Site [...]
Thanks for this post. I agree with Dape on this one, I always start by researching what/where the potential customers are, and then working out from there what the best way to promote that business to them is.
I currently use HootSuite which allows you to monitor phrases in Twitter. I like the idea of getting involved with (or peeking at) Yahoo and Google Groups.
I used HootSuite for a while and liked it as well, but I’m addicted to desktop apps.